Cult VillageReport
English：Cult Village · Locations
A five-building farming village on the Stormgap Coast, and the only holding the Preacher Cult has. No shops, no beds, hostile on sight — and any squadmate who goes down here is tied to a prisoner pole. People come anyway, for the 15,000 cats on The Preacher's head and the Meitou Moon Cleaver in his hands.
The Cult Village is the Preacher Cult's base on the Stormgap Coast — and the only settlement the cult has anywhere in the world. The Preacher and every one of his followers live here.
From a distance it is about as ordinary as a farming village gets: five buildings, a wall around them, fields outside. It is only up close that you notice the iron poles at the edge of the fields, and the people tied to them.
What is actually here
| Building | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Bughouse | Faction HQ, where The Preacher is |
| Storm House | Housing |
| Small Shack ×3 | Housing |
| Broken watchtower | Broken |
Five buildings, and that is the lot. No shops, no bar, no bed to rent, no police. This is not a village you resupply at. It is a village you either take or walk around.
The farmers work outside the wall, so you will usually meet them before you see the village itself. Do not misread what they are, either — the cult has no such role as "innocent villager". Farmers carry Moon Cleavers like everyone else and take part in the sacrifices like everyone else. If the guards happen to be holding prisoners, they will explain the reasoning to you while they work: blood in the soil brings the harvest.
The thing to be careful about: the poles
Which means the more of your people go down, the faster the first ones to fall die. This is one of the few places in the game where being captured together is worse than being captured alone.
Tactically the implication is blunt: either the whole squad clears the fight, or nobody stays on the ground. Half the squad withdrawing while the other half lies in the dirt is the worst outcome this village can produce.
How hard is the fight
The good news is that the garrison is not tough. For a settlement holding a unique leader, this is one of the lower bars in the game.
| Enemy | Combat stats | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Farmer | 18 | The most numerous, carries a Moon Cleaver |
| Moon Guardian | 25 | The armed arm of the cult |
| The Preacher | 45 | The leader, carrying a Meitou Moon Cleaver |
Armour is Shoddy grade across the board, with only a 5% chance of upgrading to Standard. The Preacher is always a Hive Prince; everyone else can roll as a Greenlander, a Scorchlander, a Hive Soldier Drone or a Hive Prince.
One more detail in your favour: cult members carry no medical supplies at all. After a brawl there is nobody to stop their bleeding, so a decent share of them will cripple or die slowly even in a fight they won. Put the other way round: the ones you knock down mostly do not get back up.
What you can take away
The bounty: 15,000 cats
The Preacher is wanted simultaneously by all three great powers — the Holy Nation, the Shek Kingdom and the United Cities — for 15,000 Cats, charged with the disappearance of several hundred travellers in the region.
A cult leader who never leaves his village and fields no patrols at all, yet somehow appears on three separate wanted lists, tells you something in itself: he covered a lot of ground before he settled on this coast.
A Meitou Moon Cleaver
The blade in The Preacher's hands is the Meitou-grade Moon Cleaver — the top of the manufacturing ladder, and the only source of that weapon at that grade in the game.
The Moon Cleaver's edge curves the wrong way on purpose. Ordinary blades use their curvature to let the weapon slide across the target and lengthen the cut; the Moon Cleaver's reverse curve does the opposite, catching limbs and necks and driving the force inward. It carries +30% armour penetration and +20% damage against robots, at a cost of -2 defence. It is the strangest-looking weapon in the game, and the best one of its kind exists in exactly this village.
A completely worthless book
The Cult Village is one of only two places in the game where you can obtain a Half-Eaten Ancient Science Book. The other is the Tower of Goats in Sinkuun.
The neighbourhood
The Cult Village sits on the Stormgap Coast, the United Cities frontier. East of here is Reaver country and the forbidden southeast.
Roughly in order of how often you will run into them:
- Grass Pirates — far and away the most common thing out here (a Straw Lieutenant leading 6 to 13 pirates), and also the cult's only special relationship with anybody: the two sides leave each other alone
- Beak Things — in packs of 1 to 3
- Rebel Farmers, Bonedog packs, Scavengers, small Empire patrols, Bounty Hunters
- Caravans from the Traders Guild and the Slave Traders
The weather runs light rain, heavy rain, and light acid rain.
For actual resupply, the nearest normal settlements are Brink (a United Cities major town with a weapon shop, farm shop, bars and a police station) and the Farming Village. Eyesocket is a slave camp run by Slave Master Grande.
If the slavers take it
There is a completely different version of this village, gated behind three conditions holding at once:
| Condition |
|---|
| Tinfist killed or imprisoned |
| Longen alive and free |
| Slave Master Grande alive and free |
With all three met, the Cult Village passes to the Slave Traders and becomes a slave farm — the fields stay, the people working them are replaced by slaves, and the village opens two Slave Shops and a Slave Farm Shop.
Is it worth the trip?
As a supply stop, zero — there is nothing here, and it hits you.
As a raid with a defined payout, it is one of the better-value trips on the map: a 15,000-cat live capture, the game's only Meitou example of a weapon, and a famously bad joke of a book, defended by enemies with combat stats between 18 and 45. For a squad that has just cleared the early game and wants a first unique leader to test itself on, this is the most reasonable target on the southeastern coast.
The price is those poles. Before you walk in, be sure you can walk everyone back out.