I like a lot some of the stuff that is in here, but I also dislike a lot that is here. To start off, Hhw do you go from this
Goals:
1: Incentivize developing familiarity with station mechanics. Many of the cult’s mechanics are tied to or related to station mechanics in one way or another.
2: Have accessible and understandable mechanics.
To making an even more complicated and detached antagonist than old cult?
If I understood Pylon Targeting correctly, if you want to target MetaStation's Bridge, you'd have to have a Pylon in the Library, one in the Warden's Office and one in Hydroponics? I have StrongDMM open rn and even then I have difficulty with this. The only way anyone can use this for any sort of long-range targetting is by looking in a "List of useful Pylon locations for targetting" page Wiki; a single tile off and you could hit the hallway or even worse, the wall.
Actually, now that I think about this a little more... this is hilariously broken with a spacesuit. Put a Pylon in Engineering's Solars, in Medbay's Solars and one in Cargo's Solars and bam. You're in the bridge, easily getting the spare captain's ID. Or even better, you can just teleport to his room so there's no threat of being detected, break his locker and obtain Captain-grade items. And the portal's 2-way, too! You can escape this way.
Wait, wait! There's more. If you're in one of the solars that are on the corner of the map (aka any of them in most maps), you can just make 3 pylons in a curve. If your math is right, you can literally target basically any room between the solar and the centerpoint of the map from a solar. This is rad as hell.
If Pylon targetting wasn't an integral part of the gameplay, I would have loved it. However, because it is, I really cannot say that I liked it.
Other than Pylon Targetting, we also have rune-making. Why. Just, why...
The point of an open crafting system is so you can customize stuff. With this system you have neither the convenience of a closed crafting system or the customization of the open one. Why are you able to fail them? Why do you have to go through that convoluted process?
You said it's OK because there's a menu that tells you how to do it, but why not just... put a button there that makes the rune? Cult is problematic in that it's too hard and complicated for begginers to get. Why not just have a "Start Rune" button there that will automatically make you start making it if you have everything needed, making it more akin to a Syndicate Uplink?
Furthermore, Soul Energy... why is this here? It's listed as "essential to the design goals", but it's only used for stuff that either already have a material cost or shouldn't have one - for example, the Gateway. Setting up Pylon Targetting is already insanely hard, having to get soul energy on top is too much, man. Why is the cult, by design, incentivized to murderbone? I imagine just rats and cockroaches won't do and that they'd eventually be forced to kill the crew to do more stuff.
I like the
idea of Pylon Targetting - making structures across the map to do an effect on the middle of the map, or making them around a room to make an ambush. However, the fact it's essential to the Cult gameplay and not a fun side option makes me really reluctant for the idea.
The cultmaking being unecessarely complicated and soul energy useless from a design standpoint are also big yikes from me. The rest is... fine, I suppose. Not much really bats my eye other than the deconstruction analysis reward, wich is weird but I can live with.
Outside of Goal 2 weirdness, there's also Goal 3. You said you "removed another conversion antag from the game", but... you kinda didn't? Why can the cult force someone's ghost into a construct? You kill them, get their soul, put in a construct. Conversion antag. Even more, this is probably one of the shittiest ways to exist; you can only SOMETIMES do something. With Split Personality at least your other half was a player and you could scream at them; here? Not so much.
This rework, ironically, needs A LOT of work. It's not unsalvageable, but it needs a lot of work.
Pylon Targetting, on top of not being so integral to the gameplay, should also have some quality of life components to it - interacting with a Pylon should show you where it's being targeted at currently, for example. Soul Energy is completely useless design-wise and should be cut. Constructs and soul shards should honestly just go; you can't have your cake and eat it too - choose if Cult is a conversion gamemode or not. If it isn't, constructs should go.
This rework isn't all bad, but it's very rough around the edges.