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Mechanics Update 1

Let's start at the end, as The Moth might. Most LPs tend to start from completely fresh save files, but we're not doing that here, we're coming in fresh off my recent loss to start a new run.



Here we pick a legacy for our budding new cultist. This affects essentially three things: your job, your starting attributes, and what I'll call your "prologue", which I'll explain in a moment. We have three choices, influenced by how my last game ended. On the left is "Bright Young Thing", a socialite from a wealthy family (this was my previous playthrough as Lydia), in the centre is Aspirant, the "default" start you'd begin with on a fresh save, and Physician, which is what we're playing as.



This is how the game looks. A table, some cards, and a square block. Each card is a thing you can manipulate, whether it's an attribute like "Reason" or a job like "A Position at the Institute" or any other number of possible cards. The square block is an action, something we can place cards into to create effects. Everyone starts with Work.



Here, I am placing my job card into the Work action to perform my job.



When you place a card into an action, the text for the action can change based on the context. Here is the only other thing starting from an existing save changes, the game will occasionally refer back to the previous run's character in a subsequent one. If this was a fresh start there'd be some slightly more generic text here about an unnamed patient.



And this is the core gameplay mechanic, actions are timers. When we start work, the timer counts down to produce an effect. The game is sometimes described as spinning plates for this reason, as the complexity ramps up you'll have more and more actions all ticking away as you try to manage things. However, because you can always pause, there's no real time pressure except that which you create by your own mistimings.

This is a very quick timer because we're going through the prologue right now, most timers are 30-60 seconds (though you can fast forward).



For our efforts at work we receive back our job card and a few new cards. We get some Funds, a Health card, and some additonal Reason cards.

Cultist Simulator has four basic attributes, Health, Passion, Reason and Funds, which you can see down the bottom. They have various uses which we'll cover over time.

You can also see a new action, obscured behind the work panel. This is Study.



This is how the prologue works for each legacy. There are five primary actions: Work, Study, Speak, Explore and Dream. The prologue is a mostly linear section at the start which establishes how your character got into the culting business in the first place, and gradually unlocks the five actions over time in a varying order. This mechanic of spawning new actions from existing actions is also relevant for the special case of Time.



Time is a bit different from the other actions. It takes no input from the player, but each minute that passes it will suck one funds card into itself (note the magnet symbol on its slot). As you can imagine, if we want to win we don't want to run out of funds. Fortunately, as a Physician our job gives two funds for every minute we work it, so we should have the funds to avoid that. Generally, assume for now that if we're not doing something specific with Work, we're using it on our job to generate funds.

Time will also periodically spawn Seasons, which are secondary actions that can suck up other cards on the table, usually to create bad effects. You don't want to have (or alternatively, be missing) certain cards when those seasons pop up.



Skipping ahead a little, we unlocked Morland's shop, one of the fixed locations, and Explore, the action for locations. Most locations in the game are usable only once for exploration, Morland's is an exception. We can buy books at Morland's, which we can then study for Lore.

In order to buy a book, we have to pay funds. The little flame under the funds slot indicates that the card will be consumed by the action.



We bought this book...



...and then took it for study...



...which produces lore and erudition. I'll explain erudition in a future update, but here's the basics of lore. Lore comes in types and magnitudes. In the narrative update we've seen Winter, Lantern and Knock, three of the nine types. Our three bits of lore are all of the second magnitude, which is the lowest. It goes up in twos to the fourteenth magnitude. We'll learn more about Lore and how it works when the time is right.



Meanwhile, by sacrificing a reason card to give into our dreams, we gained our first passion card, a few other scraps of lore, and our temptation.



This is our win condition. We need to upgrade it, somehow (the game deliberately does not explain exactly how). We can convert it to a different win condition if we want, but we'll stick with what the game has given for now.



We've unlocked all the basic actions now, so that effectively conlcudes the prologue and the game proper begins. We've already met someone, so we can found a cult together. We'll explain about people once we've met more than one.



Part of doing that is selecting founding principles. We can slot in any piece of lore we have to establish a cult dedicated to that lore. Each of the nine lore types has its own cult. Five of the lore types have a victory condition associated with them. This doesn't mean you can't win the game with only those cults of course, but it's a little bit harder to assemble the pieces needed for a win if you're playing "off-brand".

Next time, we're going to found the Mirror of Glory.