Necromancer Class: 600 Diamonds for Six Cultists, Provided Something Dies Near You

The Necromancer is the only class in 99 Nights in the Forest that buys you an army instead of a body. For 600 Diamonds you start with a single item — the Cultist Staff — and nothing else. Everything the class is famous for is built in play, out of corpses.

That makes it the most conditional class in the game. Most classes have a perk you can feel in the first minute. The Necromancer has a perk that does nothing until cultists start dying next to you, and the guidebooks all know it: this is the one 600-Diamond class where the honest review is not about the numbers, it is about where you will be standing when the bodies pile up.

Last verified: 2026-10-02.

Necromancer Class at a Glance

Cost600 DiamondsStarting items1× Cultist StaffTypeArmy summoner / body interceptionLevel-up requirement5,000 damage with pets or summons + resurrect 100 cultists, then 15,000 (published two ways) + resurrect 200 cultistsAdded inClasses MK III, 11 October 2025, alongside Undead and BeastmasterLiving cap6 summons, from Level 1WeaknessNothing happens until enemies die within reachBest atLong runs, holding a lane, solo Stronghold clearsWeakest atThe opening nights, and any stretch where you are not killing cultists

The class arrived with the same patch as Undead and Beastmaster, and that trio is the cleanest way to read this tier: one class pays you for being revived, one for owning animals, one for owning the dead. Only the third one needs a corpse supply chain.

Perks by Level

LevelPerkRequirement to reach it1****Collect souls from dead cultists, spend them through the staff to resurrect cultists, and keep up to 6 summonsUnlocked on purchase2Resurrected cultists deal greater damageDamage with pets or summons: 5,000; resurrect cultists: 100; night vision: unchanged3Your night vision improves the more cultists you controlDamage with pets or summons: 15,000 (see the dispute below); resurrect cultists: 200

Two things about that table are easy to misread.

Level 3 is not a combat perk. It is a vision perk, and it is the only one in the class that rewards keeping the army alive rather than growing it. Six cultists is already the cap, so Level 3 is asking you to maintain, not to expand.

Both later levels need two separate things at once, and they are not the same thing. One counter measures damage you or your animals dealt; the other counts resurrections. A player can grind damage for hours and still be at Level 1.

The Loop: Kill Something, Then Spend Souls

The staff does not summon from nothing.

The published loop is: kill cultists during raids or at enemy sites such as the Cultist Stronghold, gather the souls they drop, then use the staff to raise a body. Each resurrection costs three cultist souls, and you may keep six living summons at once. What a raised cultist actually does in combat — including the detail that a resurrected Crossbow Cultist swings its weapon in melee and does not fire — is documented on the Cultist page, so this page does not repeat it.

Two honest caveats inside that loop:

How the soul is collected is described two ways. The perk text says you collect souls from dead cultists, which reads like a passive drop. One guide describes the active version instead: walk to the body and use the staff on it to consume the soul. We cannot settle it, and it matters, because a click-per-body loop changes how much attention the class eats mid-fight.

The staff itself has no published damage figure. Not one source gives the Cultist Staff a number, so treat it as a tool rather than a weapon: its value is the resurrection and whatever it does between resurrections is undocumented.

How to Level It Up: Two Counters, One of Them a Body Counter

The damage counter is the friendly one. Five thousand is reachable with any weapon you already carry.

The resurrection counter is the wall. Two hundred resurrections for Level 3, one hundred for Level 2, and each resurrection costs three souls. That multiplies out to 600 souls if every number published about this class is taken at face value — three souls times two hundred turns.

Is that figure real? It depends on something no source states: whether a cultist you raise can be raised again after it dies. If bodies are one-shot, Level 3 is a very long grind measured in thousands of cultist kills. If a raised cultist that falls can simply be re-raised, the same 600-soul arithmetic collapses into something you hit in a couple of Stronghold runs. Nobody publishes the answer, so we are not going to pick one. What we can say is that the difference between those two readings is the difference between a Level 3 you reach on night 20 and one you never reach, which is why this class is described as top-tier by everyone and as rough by everyone.

→ Our reading of the counter wording: the requirement is written as damage with pets or summons, and that slash is the only evidence we have. Tamed animals are a different system from this class, so any Necromancer who also runs pets should be able to bank the damage counter with a wolf or a bear while doing something else. We are flagging this as our reading of the text rather than a published fact, and in practice it means the damage half is not the bottleneck for anyone who tames at all.

The Army Cap Is a Killing Problem, Not a Level Problem

Six summons sounds like a small army. It is actually a flow rate limit: your slots refill only as fast as cultists die within reach of you, and nothing in the class increases that rate. Three consequences follow, and they are the whole class:

The Necromancer is a place class, not a build class. Power comes from standing where things are dying. Raid nights, the Stronghold, and open-world cultist clusters all feed you; a quiet stretch of forest does not.

A fast team can deny you the class. This is the part most guides skip. If your squad clears the Stronghold in thirty seconds and moves on, you arrived too late to collect anything. The Necromancer in a coordinated group is weaker than the Necromancer solo, because the army you are buying is made of other people's kills — and you have to be standing in them.

Which corpses work is an open question. One guide points players at the Stronghold for souls. Our own Cultist page records that Stronghold cultists do not leave usable corpses for the Volcano altar. Those are two different systems and one of them may not translate, but the possibility that Stronghold bodies cannot be raised is not addressed by any source we can find. Ask in your own run before you plan a route around it.

One outlier worth knowing about: a single source states you can raise the Cultist King after defeating it, and that you can do it repeatedly, so that a developed Necromancer can field several Kings at once. It is one source, it is implausible-sounding enough to be wrong, and it is exactly the kind of claim that turns a class into a myth. We record it as a claim, not a mechanic.

Necromancer vs the Rest of the 600-Diamond Tier

NecromancerCyborgBig Game HunterVampireAlien ScientistCost600600600600Starting kit1 Cultist StaffAlien Armour + Laser CannonRifle + 12 ammoVampire Cloak + ScytheAlien Shotgun + Dissolve Ray + RaygunWhat it needs from youCorpsesNothing at allPelts and animal killsMelee kills for lifestealThe alien raid lineLevel 1 feels likeWeak — one toolStrong — two weapons and armourStrong — a rifleScoured — lifesteal from swing oneVery strong — three weaponsWhen it peaksMid to late, if you stay near killsImmediateLong runs, slowlyMid game, if you can keep swingingImmediateMain riskThe killing stopsEverything you can shoot, everything at onceWolves, pelts, patienceRuns out of corpses… and armour

The summary: Cyborg and Alien Scientist are the immediate power buys; Necromancer is the late-game buy. If you are buying a first expensive class, the two weapon classes will feel like an upgrade on night one. The Necromancer will feel like a downgrade until night five.

Is It Worth 600 Diamonds?

Yes if your nights are long and your kills are close. Every tier list we checked puts this class in S, and every one of them gives the same reason in the same order: it is weak for the first couple of nights, then it snowballs. If that curve matches how you play, 600 Diamonds buys the strongest late game in the 100-to-600 band.

Yes if you play solo. The summons intercept everything, which is the single most valuable thing in a run where nobody is going to pull you out of a bad night. One guide goes further and claims the class can solo the Cultist Stronghold outright.

No if your team clears faster than you can collect. This is the specific failure mode the class has and no other class does. Being in a group makes it worse, not better, because the corpses are someone else's job too.

No if you want immediate value at this price. For the same 600 Diamonds you could buy a weapon class that starts firing. The Necromancer starts with one tool, and the rest is a tax on how often things die near you.

No if you are learning the game. Six slots of summons is a lot of interface for a player who is still working out what a night raid does.

The five tier lists that put it at S — BloxBoom, The Click, earnaldo, Game Geek Fusion and Dino Kid Wiki — are unusually unanimous for a class at this price. Compare that with the Undead, which splits A to C, or the Berserker, which splits S to C. The argument about this class is not is it good. It is does your run last long enough for it to matter.

Tips That Change How It Feels

Position inside the kill zone. Do not stand where the fight ends; stand where it happens, one step back. Your army refreshes at the corpses, so your account of the class is really your positioning.

Raise before you need them. Six slots fill slowly early, and an empty rank at the wrong moment is a death. Spend souls the night you collect them.

Use the summons as walls. A wall of resurrected cultists between you and a charging entity is the class's core trick, and it works better than the staff's own damage because it costs nothing to replace a body you already own.

The Level-3 night vision is scouting, not combat. It is a tool for reading a map you would otherwise pan blind through, not a damage perk.

Grind the damage counter with a pet if you run one. Per the counter wording above, tamed animal damage appears to count — see the taming guide for how that system works.

One King is worth a slot, if the single source is right. Six ordinary cultists are more predictable.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• S tier on every list we checked — five independent 2026 rankings, no dissent
• The only class whose power scales with enemies dying, which is a permanent, renewable supply
• Six summons both deal damage and intercept, so it is a genuine solo class
• Level 3's night vision scales with your own army, which no other class does
• Strongest late-game ceiling of any class under 600 Diamonds

Cons

• One starting item for 600 Diamonds — the worst opening kit in the expensive tier
• Nothing fires until cultists die within reach, which can be most of a run
• A coordinated team can make it weaker, because your army is built on their kills
• Both level requirements are long, and the second is the longest body counter in the class
• The Level 3 damage threshold is published two ways and we cannot resolve it
• Raised cultists swing in melee regardless of what they were carrying
• The staff's damage is published by nobody

Where Sources Disagree

The Level 3 damage requirement is published two ways, two sources each. Two sources give 15,000 damage with pets or summons; two give 5,000. The 5,000 reading has the smell of a copy error, because it would leave Level 2 and Level 3 sharing an identical damage threshold, and thresholds do not usually repeat. That is a suspicion, not a finding. We are leaving the number as it is published rather than picking the version that looks tidier.

When it arrived is still unsettled. The wiki patch notes and rblxguide put Classes MK III on 11 October 2025; two other guides say 10 November 2025. That is the same split our Undead page records for the same patch, so the two pages inherit the same problem rather than inventing different ones.

How souls reach you is described two ways — passive collect versus clicking the body with the staff. One source, one mechanic.

Whether raised cultists keep their weapons. Two lines of evidence say they swing in melee regardless; one source we excluded claims Crossbow cultists still shoot after being raised. We follow the first reading and flag the second.

Whether a re-killed summon can be re-raised. Nothing publishes it, and it is the single number that decides whether Level 3 takes a few nights or never. Our 600-soul arithmetic above is our multiplication of published figures, not a sourced claim.

What the staff is called. Most sources say Cultist Staff; one guide calls it the Necromancer's Staff. Same item, and it is another instance of the two-names problem, like Kunai versus Throwing Knives and Lava Mammoth versus Hellephant.

One source we excluded is inventing mechanics. A page that fits our exclusion criteria claims Level 2 grants summons a 30% attack-speed boost, that summons keep 50–70% of the original mob's health, that souls vanish after 10–15 seconds, and that summon health is tied to a stat called Magic. None of those numbers appears in any other source we checked, and that page has been excluded for publishing fabricated class details before. Read the two items above as our own reading of sources, not as received fact.

FAQ

How many cultists can I have at once? Six, starting at Level 1. Nothing raises the cap.

How much does a resurrection cost? Three cultist souls, per our Cultist page.

Does the staff do damage? No figure is published anywhere. Treat it as a tool.

Can I raise the Cultist King? One source says yes, and says you can raise him repeatedly. It is a single source, and it is flagged here rather than used.

Do tamed pets count toward the level requirement? The requirement is written as damage with pets or summons, so on the wording alone the answer is yes. That is our reading, not a published statement.

Can I raise the same cultist twice? Undocumented. It is the question that decides whether Level 3 is reasonable or not, and no source answers it.

Why does every tier list call it S-tier when every guide says the start is rough? Because the lists rank the class at its peak and the guides describe the first night. Both are right, and the space between them is what this class actually is.

Is it good in a full team? Only if your team leaves corpses behind. The one way this class gets worse with friends is that friends also kill the cultists.

Related Pages

• All Classes — the 600-Diamond tier in price order
• The Cultist — the types you can raise, and what a raised cultist can actually do
• The Cultist King — the boss one source says you can raise
• Cultist Stronghold — the place cultists die in volume
• Undead Class — the sibling class from the same patch, and the same date dispute
• Best Class — where the Necromancer sits against Cyborg and Big Game Hunter