Cult of the Lamb: Best Cult Doctrines and Unlock Order

By the time you’ve finished the tutorial, you obtain the ability to unlock Doctrines which significantly improve your quality of life while playing the game and can make it much easier for you to become the cultist your red hat always knew you could be!

The issue is that once you’ve chosen a Doctrine, you are locked into that Doctrine for the rest of the playthrough. This guide aims to lead you on the best Doctrine paths to make the experience as easy and simple as possible. I will first give the list with the order for those that just want the list and then I’ll explain my decisions afterward.

I hope everyone enjoys the guide and let me know if there are any issues or if you think that I should consider alternatives.

• Sustenance – Ritual Fast
• Sustenance – Cannibal Trait
• Sustenance – Ritual of the Ocean’s Bounty
• Law & Order – Murder Follower
• Law & Order – Wedding
• Law & Order – Belief in Absolution Trait
• Law & Order – Loyalty Enforcer
• Work & Worship – Faithful Trait
• Work & Worship – Inspire
• Afterlife – Belief in Sacrifice Trait
• Afterlife – Ritual of Resurrection
• Possessions – Bribe Follower
• Possessions – Belief in Materialism Trait
• Possessions – Alms for the Poor
• Possessions – Devotee Trait
• Work & Worship – Ritual of Enlightenment
• Work & Worship – Glory Through Toil Ritual
• Afterlife – The Good Die Young
• Afterlife – Return to the Earth
• Sustenance – Belief in Prohibition Trait

Below I will explain why I chose what I did in the order that I did. My focus was efficiency over all else but if you think I made a mistake somewhere, let me know.

First off you should focus on getting Ritual of Ocean’s Bounty as quickly as possible because it is a guaranteed source of easy food early on and it can be used to access one of the best sources of money in the game very early on, giving you gold for the rest of the game. To get there, we need 3 Doctrines in Sustenance.

This is chosen over Feasting Ritual(Use food for +25 Faith) because it allows you to flat out ignore hunger for 3 days. This isn’t super useful early on but when you get a lot of followers to feed, juggling feeding them every time they are hungry with everything else you need to do can be an inconvenience. So best to have the ability to knock out that inconvenience early on even if you shouldn’t use it until later.

This is chosen over Grass Eater Trait because it provides a little additional Faith and with the rest of this build you will likely stock up on quite a bit of meat from your followers making it so that you can make use of this Trait often.

A real game changer compared to Ritual of the Harvest. This Doctrine will give you 2 days of double fish and you will also get “Special Fish” almost every catch no matter the size. This is important because you unlock fishing pretty early in the game but the fish requested for the quest are rare and can take forever to find all 4. This trait makes catching them a breeze and, once you’ve finished the quest, you can buy fish from the Fisherman.

A little bit into the game, you unlock the Offering Chest which allows you to sell items to your God but if you sell the same item too much, the price goes down little by little and will only go up again as the days pass. If you purchase 3 Octopus, 3 Lobster and 3 Squid from the Fisherman, it will cost you 90 Gold. You can then sell these for a stable price of 19 Gold for 71 Gold profit every day so this gold adds up fast. And if you actually fish these out then you even save yourself the 90 Gold overhead cost each day. So not only does this Doctrine allow you to stockpile tons of food but it gives you tons of money to use for building.

So with food and money taken care of, the next thing you should focus on is getting the Loyalty Enforcer because it will quickly and passively level up the loyalty of your followers so that you can upgrade your combat ability very quickly.

This Doctrine is great for a variety of reasons. It lets you murder dissenters if you don’t have the opportunity to re-educate them, kill the Elder Followers so they aren’t taking up worker slots, and give you another source of food as well as bones for more Rituals. Just be sure not to have Followers awake during the time you Murder them or it can cause a bit of trouble. If you get in trouble, a hot meal with fresh ingredients can help them calm down. Compared to Ascend Follower Ritual this is clearly the better option.

Everyone loves weddings and you will be sacrificing and murdering enough followers without needing to add more dead bodies with the Ritualistic Fight Pit otherwise who will do the hard labor?

This is just free Faith since you can murder anyone who seems like a hassle to put in prison which makes the Belief in Original Sin Trait completely pointless.

The next big game changer. Tax Enforcer may add money to our pockets but you already have that and this Doctrine will improve the levels of all of your followers to more quickly improve your combat abilities. Just make sure to always have a Loyalty Enforcer and you’ll be upgrading your weapons quickly and easily. Later on, we’ll make this even more powerful by making sure we never actually lose our most loyal followers. I also recommend giving your Loyalty Enforcer a Skull Necklace to keep them around as long as possible as well as personally improving your Loyalty Enforcer’s loyalty whenever you remember to as they will be the only one not benefiting from this Doctrine.

Our next Doctrine to focus is Inspire which, while not a game changer, is helpful earlier on and not so helpful later on.

It takes forever to generate enough devotion to grab everything so this is better than the Industrious Trait until the very very late game so in some ways it’s preference but I think overall this is the superior trait given the time it will take to reach that point.

Great to use on the Loyalty Enforcer or any followers getting close to leveling. Intimidate requires far too much micro-management in the late game so this is the obvious choice.

The final game changing Doctrine is Ritual of Resurrection which will help keep your cult in top shape for the rest of the game.

This trait makes the Ritual of Sacrifice fun for everyone making it an absolute win except for the fact that you will lose a devoted follower, but that will be fixed with our next Doctrine. Belief in Afterlife Trait is mostly useless in this setup since almost every follower that dies will be by your hand in some way so you can manage it.

This will make it so you will never truly lose your loyal flock. You can constantly bring back your most loyal followers when their time comes and they will be resurrected in a young state. So no matter the cause of death, they will be a welcome addition to the Cult once again as a useful follower. Combined with the Loyalty Enforcer, your cult will grow endlessly stronger and more loyal with time.

Everything from here on is just extra honestly, though the Possessions Doctrines do have some good uses these are just an extra side that came with your meal that you might pick at but aren’t really going to eat.

Can be used for a quick loyalty boost if needed and Extort Tithes is useless with how much money you should have by now.

With the amount of sleeping quarters needed, this provides a passive faith boost until the late game whereas Belief in False Idols Trait is wasteful until the late game.

A great use for all that money you’ve got stashed away. It’s a cheap Ritual that increases faith and loyalty to help power you up just a little bit faster. At this point, you’ll likely make the money back in donations anyway. Ritual of Enrichment is good for money but you should have plenty to spare by now.

With all the benefits of doing a Sermon, you’ll likely do it everyday and adding even more faith on top of that will basically make your followers never doubt you.

Great for passive extra devotion. The Glory of Construction would be used so little that there isn’t a point to it.

A good boost to labor by keeping followers going all night. Combo this with Ritual Fast and some mushrooms and your cult will basically manage itself for 3 days. Holy Day cuts down on production too much so it’s only useful if you’re not taking care of your followers properly.

Elders are unproductive so either your follower dies while working for you or you can now murder and sacrifice them for even more profit than you were already getting. No need to Respect Your Elders

Easy fertilizer if you’re low. Otherwise you can get some meat from them. But Grieve the Fallen is wasteful

Great passive so long as you take care of your followers. Otherwise Substances Encouraged may be the better option but otherwise you’d probably only use the Brainwashing Ritual once or twice.