Morbid: The Seven Acolytes – A Complete Guide to Sanity

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes has a Sanity meter, which lets you slowly descend into madness if you so choose. The thing is, besides some brief tutorial text (that you won’t even see until after you’ve defeated the first Acolyte), the game doesn’t really explain how it works. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself.

Well, you would’ve had to figure it out for yourself. But then I wrote this handy Sanity guide for Morbid: The Seven Acolytes.

How do you see what your Sanity level is?

First off, your Sanity is represented by the purple bar beneath the brain icon (the brain icon is your XP bar).

The purple part shows how full the bar is (the black part is the empty part). I thought this was worth pointing out, because the bar drains upward instead of downward, which is the opposite of how these things normally work. Considering it’s a sanity bar, I actually think putting it upside-down was clever.

As a side note, I also think it’s a really neat visual touch that this bar is wired to the brain in the UI, which is a visual cue that the purple bar is somehow linked to your brain. It’s a lovely detail that shows the level of care and creativity that went into this game.

What does Sanity do?

According to the game’s text, Sanity impacts your damage input and output, as well as XP gain.

Initially, I figured Sanity is good, therefore your damage output and XP gain would be higher when the gauge is full. It turns out, I was wrong. After running some experiments and jotting down some numbers, I came to find out that your damage output and XP gain actually increase as your sanity drains. Low sanity also causes you to take less damage.

Now, as an example of the experiments I ran, for context, I filled my Sanity meter to about 3/4 full and wrote down how much damage enemies would do to me. A Ground Spore’s Flesh Plant would deal 8 damage, and a Servant of Moer basic knife attack would deal 12. Then, I consumed a Limb, which drains sanity to zero, and goaded the same enemies into attacking me. With almost no sanity, the Flesh Plant dealt 5 damage, and the Servant of Moer’s knife attack dealt 9 damage.

I ran similar experiment for damage output and XP gain (though I had to eyeball the damage output one, because you can’t see exact health numbers of your enemies — just the size of the health bar). I’ll spare you the full details.

Suffice it to say there’s an inverse relationship here, where the lower your Sanity meter, the higher your damage output, damage resistance, and XP gain.

So shouldn’t you want to always have low sanity then? Well, no. Low sanity does come with some drawbacks. When your sanity drops below 24 or so, there is a vein effect that reduces visibility, as shown below.

Even worse, you might have to fight Spectres of the enemies you kill, which offsets a lot of the benefit of having a higher damage output. A Spectre is a dark figure with a purple outline that’s basically a copy of the enemy you killed.

I should point out that you won’t get XP for killing an enemy until after you’ve killed its spectre as well (this is only true of enemies that have a spectre). So you can see how that XP gain would be mitigated by the fact that you have to kill an enemy twice to claim any XP at all in some cases.

Now, I haven’t experimented with this as thoroughly as I did with damage and XP numbers, but it really does seem like the lower your sanity is, the more likely an enemy is to release a spectre upon death (and you shouldn’t see spectres at all if your Sanity is above 24).

How do you raise or lower your Sanity?

If your Sanity gets below the 24ish level (when the visual effect starts showing up), it will slowly regenerate over time until it’s full enough that the visual effect and spectres will stop appearing. It won’t continue to regenerate after this point.

Additionally, Sanity seems to deteriorate if it’s too high, down to about 75.

Meditating at a shrine also appears to have some effect on rebalancing your sanity (though, again, not above 24 or below 75).

Some enemies have attacks that cause your sanity to drain. The Sinner of Calia, for example, sends tentacles up through the ground, and touching one of them will cause your sanity to decrease. The Sperm of Gahar will emit a glowy purple circle of energy, and touching that will cause a Sanity decrease as well. These are just two examples of many.

Perhaps most importantly, there are several consumable items that affect Sanity. Here’s a complete list:

Calming Capsule – Regenerates Sanity upon use. It seems to add about 15 to your current sanity level (though the exact number seems to be impacted by your current Sanity level).

Lazarus Flower – Regenerates Health and Sanity, and cures any ailments. This is a slow regeneration. Consuming the flower will give you 30 seconds of Sanity regeneration, which should be enough to completely fill a normal-sized Sanity bar.

Medicine Pellets – Regenerate Sanity, and take less Sanity Damage for a short time. Like the Lazarus Flower, this is regeneration over time, though it only lasts 10 seconds.

Limb – Use to deal more melee damage for a short period of time, and lose all Sanity.

Beast Sedatives – Use to restore Sanity over a short period of time, while slightly draining Stamina. Lasts for 30 seconds and increases Sanity by about 75 (though the exact number seems to be impacted by your current Sanity level).

Wartbug’s Steroids – Use to regenerate Health over a short period of time, while slightly draining Sanity. Lasts for 30 seconds and drains about 35 Sanity (though the exact number seems to be impacted by your current Sanity level).

Flesh Plant Petal – Use to gain more attack speed for a short period of time, and lose Sanity. Lasts for 30 seconds and drains about 25 Sanity (though the exact number seems to be impacted by your current Sanity level).

Loony Shroom – Applies a Sanity drain effect to your weapon. The effect lasts 45 seconds.

Conclusion

As you can see by now, you can use Sanity in some interesting ways. Deliberately draining your Sanity during a tough boss fight, for example, will make you hit harder and take less damage.

Now you know everything you need to know about the Sanity feature in Morbid: The Seven Acolytes. Play around with it a bit and come up with your own strategies!