The game has changed a lot since I originally wrote it and it's just hitting full release. I'll update as I have time, but some of the things in here may have limited relevancy in the current version.

The faith store is overpowered presently. Note that a common problem is that disciples only receive contribution points if they are assigned via the agency. Use the agency!

The faith store can provide I believe all the currently available martial arts, Pearls and research points, and a lot more. Rushing the faith store in research is a great way to get your sect started quickly. The faith store is also the single best source of Qi Elixers to get new disciples.

In order to get faith points, you need to use the workshop to give them things to buy, but it's very cost efficient.

Quick agency how-to:
Select the building in question
Click the agency button
It will open the agency and highlight the entry in question.
Drag and drop that entry to the middle box.
Select repeat if you want it to continue repeatedly, you probably do.
If you select a specific disciple, it'll use that one. Good for ones with traits that improve the particular task, IE, the Farmer trait for farming spirit herbs.

When you eventually hit a point when you have more faith points than you can spend, get a full stack of Training Fruits and sell them all on the auction house for a cool million spirit stones.

The sect beast has three major uses:

It serves as a damage sponge in the middle and rightmost illusionary realms. It doesn't come up in the Trial tower. It doesn't attack, unless you give it abilities via the Faith store fruits, but they are all reactionary abilities as of July 2023, that only trigger when attacked.

Blessing, which gives random disciples potential, up to 20 per disciple. It prioritizes higher ranked disciples, so it'll most likely give your sect master maxed points first, then move on to your inner promoted disciples. It gives one point per six months.

Training, which gives the selected disciple 3 random attribute points, and provides any but STR, WIS and SKL. It can provide True Damage, which is useful.

The sect beast is limited by Stamina. There is a trick to this. If you utilize Stamina Fruits from the sect store, it will increase the sect beast's stamina pool. The sect beast regenerates stamina on a percentage basis. The more stamina you have, the quicker it recovers. Stamina fruits also level up the sect beast, but it doesn't really provide much value right now. It's worth it to do this, as otherwise you'll be waiting forever between trainings.

When you select the sect beast's icon, you can select auto stamina restore, which will have the sect beast perform any of the three actions above, recover its stamina, and then do it again. The sect beast is the single biggest method currently to long term power up a single disciple above others.

The sect store can be very useful. Don't spend spirit stones for favor until you have a ton; you burn through them when disciples use the auto-breakthrough function.

The sect store can provide very cost efficient resources, and often you can buy resources from the store just to fulfill another sect's request for more rewarded points than you spent. A single reputation point buys you 100 T1 resources (Wood, Stone, Crude Iron) and 20 T2 resources (Plank, Brick, Iron Ingot.) You can buy alchemy plants here, too. Don't bother with martial arts, Ancient Wisdom, or Arti-Essence. Use the faith store.

Long term, the special buildings are very useful, but they require T2 and T3 resources, which you won't have a good supply of until mid to late game.

I presently prefer the Dipper body the most, as it provides True Damage, which I favor the most of all the secondary stats. For one reason:
Once you level up the Faith store some, you will get access to the Heavenly Thunder martial art. The Chain ability is very strong in the illusion realm and dungeon modes. It has the single best stat scale in the game currently, between 750% of your TD stat to 1350% of the stat if fully leveled up. And it triggers off other abilities with a 1s cooldown, and it ignores DEF.

The Dipper body at character creation provides lots of True Damage. The Ferocious trait ability can be gotten from opposite sex disciples if you get their affinity up to 500.

UPDATE:
How things work in the trial tower now, is that you have access to all the martial arts you've equipped outside of the tower, and they run passively in the background. In the trial tower, you select abilities from the Formation you've chosen before you go in. Some can combine into ultimate abilities. While you're upgrading your skills, it will also feature upgrades to the martial arts you brought into the tower which you can select as needed.

My personal favorite is Ultimate Tower - Demon Tower + Azure Sword
Magical, Formation, Metal, Wood

It works with +Magical Projectile, which you can get from equipment, Form Eyes, and level up upgrades. Prioritize things that increase the area of effect and damage.

The three martial arts I use presently:
Cang-Lan book:
Provides tons of True Damage in the non-Trial Tower game modes, and great direct attack abilities.
Blade Flurry: Very important! Provides an 80% damage boost when things have the bleeding status effect. Huge. Also has the essential Unleashed ability. Similar to Chain, it triggers off other abilities and has a very short cooldown.
Heavenly Thunder: Chain


Trial Tower Build:
Heavy sword is OP. Damage area, multi summon, cooldown. Then damage.

Chain is no longer as useful in Trial Tower mode with the changes to breakthroughs increasing ATK significantly. Presently, the Heavy Sword falling sword technique is the best. Try to get the Exorcist Sword ability for your second, and use Yuan Gong with all of the +Lifesteal stacks so it lasts the whole duration of the ability cooldown.

Stack those on all three characters and you'll obliterate everything. For upgrades, +HP%, some +Magnetic, Magical Damage %, and Falling Sword %. Kite everything around and blast it to pieces. If you get surrounded, hit space bar and run away. Eventually, when your health is high enough and you have Yuan Gong maxed out, you can face-tank anything in the game. It's worth knowing that levelup abilities are multiplicative, not additive. If you have 1000 HP, and select two 25% HP bonuses, you get 1562HP, not 1500. HP % scales enough that you can get an absurd amount of HP if you stack enough, up to the tens of thousands.

Illusion Entrance Build:
Also the same. Equip the Cang Lan book lifesteal ability to keep your life up, favor short cooldown direct damage abilities. Equip Chain, as it deals true damage and removes the issue of DEF scaling on enemies in the harder level rooms.

Artifact Abilities:
The artifact abilities you get by default are the weakest ones. By using Arti-Essence III, which you get in the illusion realm and the Faith Store (the Faith Store is easiest,) you can research to get better abilities, like a 38% group heal. Go to the Artifact page, click the Assemble button at the bottom, and then select the research tab. The tutorial doesn't tell you about that right now, but it's effectively a second research function that doesn't take time, only Arti-Essence. It only helps for the illusion realm, not the Trial Tower.

Get tons of disciples and put them to work on getting you tons of resources, you can really never have enough. The eventual maximum number of disciples you can get is 135, and you can always get rid of disciples you don't like later.

Disciples with the same sex as the sect master can be given one of your traits at 500 affinity, including ones you've gotten from opposite sex disciples. Opposite sex disciples can give you one of their traits. There is a cap of 12 traits.

If you find a disciple you want to specifically make very powerful, it might be smart to turn off the Faith store for that disciple; they will make stupid decisions with how they buy things, and you need Contribution points to promote them to higher levels.

This is still very early access; a lot of this stuff will likely change. But for now, I hope it's helpful.

In no particular order:
Customizable columns to search and sort for disciples. Search by trait, by Body Type, particular statistic, etc

Inventory sort!! (Done, thanks devs!)

In all the combat modes, status effects need to be broken down by individual disciple, maybe above their portraits.

The trial tower features a DPS page when you hit ESC. Something similar when you are in the illusion realm and dungeon would be great.

Reference the Artifact research tab in the Tutorial.

In the Sect Position section, there is a requirement for "Clearances" but no explanation as to what that is. (I think this is gone now, but FYI, this was times taken through the illusion realm or trial tower.)

Glossary of terms? I have no idea what +Penetration is, for instance, in the Trial Tower.

Bugs
The Dipper body has an ability called Heavy Sword mastery that says it gives 3% lifesteal when using a flying sword. It doesn't seem to be working for either heavy swords or flying swords? Please edit for consistency.