Cultist Simulator – Quick Guide to Rites

A quick guide to Rite’s, what they do, how to use them, and what to avoid.

Other Cultist Simulator Guides:

• Getting Started.
• Expeditions.
• Dreams of a Glory.
• How to Make Money & Earn Promotions.

Introduction

All credit goes to Hououin Kyouma!

Here in this guide i will give you a quick breakdown on Rites. Rites are a useful tool for you to use, as they allow you to return decrepitude to health, turn reason to passion and vise versa, and best and most dangerously of all, you are able to summon powerful minions with stats greater than any follower you could find.

Please keep in mind that this is just a guide to help you understand the mechanics of Rites, as I won’t be covering the specific recipes needed to summon each kind of creature.

Getting Rites

Before any Rite can be attempted, you need to get it first. From my experience, the only place to get rites is reading books. You can get about 2 different rites from the bookstore books before it closes, the rest will have to come from expeditions or, if you’re lucky, the auction house.

During the course of the game, i ran into 10 different rites, each one requiring different sacrifices to use. (More on mechanics of rites later).

Expeditions are difficult in the early game as you lack a lot of the skills needed to succeed, plus you run the risk of losing the few followers you have, so use caution if you want to attempt them before you have disciples.

Once you have a rite, you need to drag the rite to the work area in order to use it. This will pull up the rite page in the work box. I’d recommend pausing your game here, as it takes a while to see what you are even able to summon when you first start out.

Performing Rites: Risk and Reward

So you now have a rite, now comes the fun part. So each rite has 3 slots for you to place various resources in, from you lore knowledge, to followers, to the trinkets you’ve collected so far. Each rite has different slots, so you may not be able to use all of your resources at hand. (Ex. some rites allow you to sacrifce followers in the ritual, while others want you to give up one of your tools.) All rites only allow you to use one type of each card, so you can’t use three tools or two lore knowledge cards with a minion. There are always 4 slots, but the desire slot will never be used except for the game-winning rite at the end of the game, at least as far as i’ve found.

Now as for the various rites you can carry out, there are a few important things to remember.

1. Every summon rite I found in my playthrough required knock, the purple key, to perform. The amount needed varies, but you will need it if you wish to summon a minion. Incantations (Lore knowledge cards) are used in nearly every rite, so try and get a knock lore card quickly. If you are having trouble upgrading the knock card, remember that you can upgrade knock with any other lore card of the same level, with the exception of mysterious lore cards (The pink ones). 
2. You can use rites to turn decrepitude into health, but it will also produce fascination and notoriety (i suppose people notice when the limb starts springing down the road). 
3. Rites can turn reason into passion and vise-versa. I never personally used this in my playthrough, but I imagine there will likely be some fascination produced, will check and write back later. 
4. All minions will last 180 seconds. After that time, they will vanish. There are a few minions that can teach you a rare language, but requires a base language for them to teach it to you (I believe latin and greek are the bases used.) Also, when summoning a minion, it is possible for them to attempt to break free, if this happens, you can use reasoning to cancel the summon (you still lose the resource that was in the consume slot) or passion to attempt to regain control. I believe this gives you a 50% chance to regain control, but I am unsure. If they escape, they will attack one of the characters on the board, anyone with a mortal symbol. When they attack, they have a chance to either drive their target mad, or eat them. I had about 6 or so minions escape during my game, but none of them ever succeeded at killing. (Either bugged or just really low odds.) 
5. Finally and most importantly, keep an eye on the rite card when you use it, each one has one slot that consumes the object placed there, that can be a follower, tool, resource, even knowledge. Keep that in mind when you wish to summon. 

Conclusion

Rites are a very powerful part of the game, but they take awhile to gather the required resources. Expeditions and dreaming of the Way will give you a steady flow of resources, and upgrading your lore knowledge will give you a large amoung of options.