v0.11.2 — Retainers, Pressure, and a Price for Death

Your sect can now hire cultivators. Retainers follow you into battle, grow with you, go on expeditions and stand guard on your sect's grounds. Strong cultivators can read the aura of anyone they look at and press down on everyone weaker with the weight of their realm. Dying now costs you Qi, you decide when your breakthroughs happen, and cultivators can strike straight into an enemy's sea of consciousness with the new soul arts.

Sect land slowly grows into richer veins, even a Dragon vein. Spirit Stones come in four grades, five rare places appear in new terrain, a Technique Menu lists every art you know, and duels can be fought to the death or not. A Void Rift server crash and several other bugs are fixed.

Retainers (门客): Cultivators Who Serve You

• Hire a retainer. Once your sect has a hall, open the new Retinue page (or /sect retainer) to see the day's recruits: three cultivators a day, one more for each Guest Court your sect has built (up to six). Each has a name, an archetype (Swordsman, Elemental Adept or Iron Body), an element, a talent grade (Common to Heavenly) and a realm below your own. They wear robes and topknots, not monster skins.
• Spirit Stones and wages. Hiring costs Spirit Stones by realm and talent, and the fee includes three days of wages. After that each retainer draws a daily wage from a purse you top up. Leave the purse empty and they turn discontent (no growth, no new posts or expeditions); three unpaid days and they leave for good.
• Up to three retainers, unlocked at Qi Condensation, Foundation Establishment and Golden Core Formation. One follows you at a time, beside your spirit beast.
• They fight with you. A following retainer strikes whatever attacks you and joins your fights. Swordsmen cast Qi Slash, Elemental Adepts the Burst of their element, and both learn the other art at Nascent Soul. Iron Bodies carry no arts but take far more punishment and pull your attackers onto themselves. They never hurt players where PvP is off, in protected land or in a duel.
• They grow. Retainers gain experience from their kills, a share of the Qi you gather while they are near you, expeditions, seclusion and your instruction, and they climb through stages and realms up to your own.
• Expeditions. Send a retainer on the same expeditions spirit beasts take, one at a time, separate from your beast's.
• Defeat costs them. A defeated retainer recovers after about ten minutes (longer at higher realms) and loses a quarter of its progress toward the next stage. It never drops a stage, and whoever beat it gets no reward. Dismissing a wounded retainer does not heal it.
• Post them on your sect's grounds.
  • Hall Guard (护殿) stands at the hall and fights siege attackers, beast tides and rogues. Each standing guard slows a siege by 6%, inside the existing 50% limit, but a guard never counts as a defender being present. One guard, plus one for every two sect levels, up to four.
  • Scripture Scribe (抄经) works in a Scripture Hall, so the sect library progresses 50% faster per scribe (two at most; funding still caps it).
  • Seclusion (闭关) meditates in a sect building and grows there, faster in buildings with a better meditation bonus.
  • Vein Tender (守脉) tends a sect vein tap for 20% more stones within its daily limit, and raids on the tap take 25% longer.
• A post only holds while your sect holds that land. Leaving the sect, being kicked, a disband or losing the hall ends it, and your retainers come back to you.
• Recruit a beaten rogue. When you strike down a Rogue Cultivator, it may yield instead of dying. You then have a minute to take it in for half the usual fee (/sect retainer recruit or the Retinue page). Strike it again (after a moment, so a swing already on its way does not count) to finish it for its usual loot instead.
• Commands: /sect retainer opens the page; hire, recruit, summon, dismiss, post, unpost, expedition, recall, pay, instruct, rename, release and info work as subcommands. There is a Codex entry too.

Aura Sight and Pressure (威压)

• Aura Sight (/cultivation sight, the settings page, or a keybind): look at a cultivator and read their aura. Weaker than you, you see their exact realm and stage. Same realm, you see the realm. One realm above, you only feel that they are stronger. Two realms or more above, you cannot perceive them at all, and they look like a mortal. It reads players, retainers and ranked creatures (Rogue Cultivators, spirit beasts, event bosses, the Void Rift Warden), and walls block it.
• Concealing. Turn your aura off (/cultivation aura) and you read as a mortal to anyone who is not at least a realm above you.
• The visible realm auras follow the same rules for every onlooker: a cultivator far above you gives off no aura you can see, and a stronger one shows a dark, unfathomable haze instead of their realm's color.
• Pressure (/cultivation pressure, from Qi Condensation): release your aura as weight. Holding it costs 0.25% of your stage's Qi every second, and it reaches 6 blocks plus 3 per realm (up to 32). Everything weaker nearby is pressed in four tiers by the gap between you: Uneasy (slowed), Oppressed (slower, weaker blows, no sprinting), Crushed (crawling, no jumping, no techniques) and Kneeling (cannot move, attack or cast). Kneeling takes three realms, or a mortal under a Foundation Establishment cultivator. Pressure weakens toward its edge, and a target releasing pressure of their own holds out better.
• Pressure Burst (/cultivation pressure burst, 30-second cooldown, 5% of your stage's Qi): a shout that throws everything weaker back and staggers it, longer the bigger the gap.
• Who is spared. Pressure works anywhere and on players too, but never on your party, your sect or allied sects, nor on anyone in Creative, invulnerable or under spawn protection, and bosses are never pressed. Releasing forces your aura into the open, and it ends when you sit down to meditate or start a ritual, run out of Qi, die or leave the world.
• All three can be bound to a key on the Technique Keybinds page, and each has its Codex entry.

Death Has a Price

• The ladder. Every death now scatters part of your Qi: 20% of your current stage's full Qi requirement for the first death, 40% for the second, then 60%, 80% and finally all of it, counting the deaths of the last 30 minutes. Each death stops counting 30 minutes after it happened, logging out or not.
• Dropping a stage. If a death takes more Qi than you have, you drop one stage and the rest is taken from the stage below. You never drop out of your realm: at its first stage your Qi just empties.
• After every death you are told what you lost, how many recent deaths are counting against you, when the oldest one fades and what the next death would cost.
• Not charged. Deaths in a tribulation once its lightning has struck you, during Ascension, Reincarnation, an Inner Demon or a Dream Trial, in sanctioned duels, Dao duels and tournaments, and inside the Trial Pagoda, the Depths, a Sea of Consciousness or a dungeon boss instance. Creative mode and admin bypass are never charged.
• The PvP cap. Other player kills outside a duel do count, but the same player can only cost you two deaths every 30 minutes. Past that, dying to them again is free, so nobody can farm a rival down a stage at their spawn.

Suppress Your Breakthrough

• A new setting, Start breakthroughs automatically at full Qi, on the /cultivation settings page. Turn it off and a full-Qi meditation simply waits instead of starting the ritual, so you can hold your cultivation where it is, prepare, or pick your moment.
• /cultivation breakthrough starts your pending breakthrough or stage advancement on demand (it sits you down if you are standing), with every usual requirement: vein strength, Heart-Devil, tribulation. /cultivation autobreakthrough flips the setting from chat.

Soul Arts: A Blade for the Sea of Consciousness

• Soul Piercing Needle (Foundation Establishment and up): a needle of soul light flies along your line of sight, faster the higher your realm, and strikes the first foe it reaches in their sea of consciousness. The damage ignores armor and grows with every realm you stand above your target. It dazes the target and briefly silences a player's techniques, and you gain a short burst of speed. A target one realm above you takes much less, and one two realms above shrugs it off almost entirely. Walls stop it.
• Divine Sense Assault (Nascent Soul and up): your divine sense crashes outward in a short, wide cone. Everyone caught takes armor-ignoring damage, and every foe of a lower realm is staggered on the spot; equals and superiors take half and stand firm.
• Both follow the usual PvP rules: your party, sect and allies are spared, and so are duels, sanctuaries and protected creatures. Learn them from the Manual of the Soul Needle and the Manual of the Roaring Sense, which drop like other manuals, or through enlightenment.

Sect Land That Grows Richer

• Every chunk your sect holds slowly gathers Qi from the sect itself: up to +35% vein density from your sect's level and members. Meditation and breakthroughs on sect ground feel it; a Vein-Tapping Array keeps the yield of the vein it was planted on.
• Dragon veins. A sect hall on a Rich vein, held for three days by a sect of level 5 with at least three members, ascends into a Dragon vein, and the whole server hears of it. A Dragon vein under your hall then deepens through three grades, one every two days.
• This is all the sect's own doing and never changes the world: lose or move the hall and the land returns to what it was. /sect vein shows your hall ground's natural and current vein, its enrichment, and how close it is to ascending.
• Claim anywhere. A sect hall no longer needs a Rich vein. Any land works; a hall on plain ground just gets no vein bonus. No hall can be raised on an open Secret Realm.
• Spawn stays free. No sect may raise a hall or claim territory within 3 chunks of a world's spawn, and admins can close any other land to sects too, such as a town or an event arena. Sect land already standing there is left as it is.

The Technique Menu

• A new Techniques button on the menu bar (or /cultivation techniques) lists every art you know, grouped by kind: what it does, its Qi cost and cooldown after your mastery, your mastery stage and progress, its keybind and whether it is ready right now. An art your sect lends you is marked as borrowed.
• Show unlearned adds the arts you do not know yet, dimmed, with how to come by each one.

Spirit Stones of Every Grade

• Four grades. Spirit Stones now come in four grades: Low (the stone you already have, still the coin of every shop), Mid, High and Supreme. Each holds more Qi: 30, 300, 3,000 and 30,000.
• Absorb a stone (right-click) for the Qi it holds. Mid stones need Foundation Establishment, High Nascent Soul, Supreme Void Refinement.
• Condense, refine, break. Condense your own Qi into a stone with /cultivation stone condense <grade> (it costs 1.5x the Qi the stone holds), refine a stone into the next grade with /cultivation stone refine, or break one into 4 of the grade below to spend it (/cultivation stone break; breaking scatters some of its Qi).
• Divert while you meditate. On the settings page (or /cultivation stone divert) choose to pour 25, 50 or 100% of your meditation Qi into a stone that forms when it is full, or into refining one you carry.
• A daily cap. Condensing is capped each day at 100 Low stones' worth (a Mid counts 4, a High 16, a Supreme 64), so Qi cannot be turned into unlimited coin.

Rare Places of the World

• Five rare structures now appear in newly explored terrain, each with its own blocks and its own secret. Admins can raise one in a world explored before this update with /cultivation admin structure place <type>.
• Spirit Stone Mine (about one per 30 km²): a timbered shaft cut into a hill, or a pit-head over a spiral shaft, with a glowing seam of Spirit Crystals around a jade Mine Heart. Mining a crystal gives Spirit Stones of the mine's grade (Low to Supreme) and draws on the mine's Qi reserve, which regains Qi slowly; crystals regrow faster the fuller it is. Mine it dry and the whole mine collapses. A sect can claim a mine at its heart with /sect mine claim: no protection, but the sect takes a share of every stone an outsider mines there and hears when they dig. /cultivation mine shows a mine's grade, reserve and claimant.
• Sword Tomb: a terraced mound bristling with hundreds of fallen swords below an inscribed stele. Pull a sword (Use) for forging materials, a few each day. One Spirit Sword in the field holds a sword spirit: draw it and defeat the spirit alone, then bond it at the stele as your Life-Bound weapon's spirit.
• Fallen Cultivator's Cave: a sealed cave abode. Offer Qi at the seal and the stone door slides open; on the dais the cultivator's remains leave you their legacy once (Spirit Stones, pills, a manual), and their lingering soul asks you one question of the Dao.
• Tribulation Crater: a scorched bowl of lightning glass. A tribulation fought inside it strikes 10% softer, and its Thunder Residue gives Heavenly Thunder Essence, which regrows in thunderstorms (it fuses sand into Lightning Glass and Fulgurite at the Builder's Workbench).
• Ancient Pill Furnace Ruins: a ruined pavilion around a giant verdigris-crusted bronze ding. Refine pills beside it (no cauldron needed) for +15 quality; the spirit herbs in its courtyard regrow, up to 12 a day.
• No sect hall, territory or Cave Abode can be claimed over a rare structure: they belong to no one.

Duels to the Death, or Not

• /cultivation duel <player> lethal|nonlethal [wager]: a non-lethal duel ends when the loser would die; they are spared at 25% health and the duel counts as a yield. Lethal stays the default, so duels work as before unless the challenger picks otherwise.

Changed on Purpose

• The death penalty is on by default. Turn it off with Death-Penalty-Enabled, or soften the ladder with Death-Penalty-Loss-Percents.
• Tribulation modifiers are capped. Heavenly Dao, karma, Storm Omens and everything else that makes the heavens harsher together make a bolt at most 1.75x as strong as your realm's base bolt, where deep Heavenly Dao plus karma could reach over 5x before. Everything that makes it gentler together can soften it to half, no further. The same limits apply to the number of bolts.
• Sect halls on any land (Sect-Hall-Claim-Anywhere, on). A server that had raised Sect-Hall-Min-Vein-Tier above the default keeps its vein rule automatically.

For Server Owners

• New config file: Society/DeathPenaltyConfig, with Death-Penalty-Enabled, -Window-Minutes (30), -Loss-Percents (20,40,60,80,100), -Demote-Enabled, -Exempt-Tribulation, -Exempt-Duels, -Exempt-PvP (off), -Max-Strikes-Per-Killer (2; 0 = no cap), -Exempt-Instanced and -Min-Realm. It has its own section in the admin config menu.
• BreakthroughConfig: Tribulation-Harder-Max-Multiplier (1.75), Tribulation-Easier-Min-Multiplier (0.5), Breakthrough-Suppression-Allowed (on; off forces automatic breakthroughs for everyone) and Auto-Breakthrough-Default (on) for new players.
• SectConfig: Sect-Hall-Claim-Anywhere, Sect-Spawn-Protection-Radius-Chunks (3, counted as a square around the spawn chunk, so 7 x 7 chunks; 0 = off) and the Sect-Vein-* keys: enrichment per level and per member and its cap, ascension hours, minimum sect level and members, ascension density, the server announcement, grade hours and grade density.
• Manuals: the two soul manuals are added to your saved manual drop table once, on first boot.
• Test tools: /cultivation admin deathpenalty status|clear <player> and /cultivation admin sectvein status|ascend|reset <sect>, plus sectvein advance <hours> <sect> to fast-forward a vein's clocks.
• Protected land: /cultivation admin sectprotect add <name> [radius] closes the chunk you stand in, or a square that many chunks around it (up to 32), to sect halls and territory. remove <name> lifts it, list shows every area and the spawn radius, and check tells you whether sects may claim where you stand. Areas are saved with the sects in SectsData.json. Neither rule is lifted by admin bypass.
• New config files: Cultivation/SpiritStoneConfig (grade Qi, realm gates, the 150% condense cost, the 1-into-4 break ratio, the daily cap of 100), World/StructureConfig (per structure: on/off, chance, grid cell, minimum spacing, zones), and one file per structure for its own rules: World/SpiritMineConfig, World/SwordTombConfig, World/FallenCaveConfig, World/TribulationCraterConfig, World/PillFurnaceConfig. Each has its own section in the admin config menu. DuelConfig gains Duel-Default-Lethal.
• Structure tools: /cultivation admin structure types, place <type> [rotation], list, info, locate <type> and remove <here|site id>. Structures only generate in terrain generated after this update.
• Retainers: the new Society/RetainerConfig holds every value (fees, wages, slots, growth, defeat, posts, rogue yields), with its own admin section; Retainers-Enabled turns the whole feature off, and Retainer-Permanent-Death makes a defeat final. Retainer records live in Data/RetainersData.json. /cultivation admin retainer list|recover|clear <player> inspects, heals or removes one player's retainers. Rogue Cultivators and corrupted beasts now use their own attitude groups (copies of the vanilla ones) so they fight retainers.
• Aura Sight and Pressure: the new Arts/AuraPressureConfig holds every value (ranges, rank gaps, tiers, costs, the burst), with its own admin section. Pressure-Affects-Players is on and Pressure-Requires-Pvp off, so pressure works where PvP is off; turn Pressure-Requires-Pvp on to limit it to players the emitter could attack. Other mods' bosses are spared by Pressure-Npc-Immune-Min-Health (1500) and Pressure-Npc-Exempt-Roles (EL_ULC_Boss_*). /cultivation admin endpressure <player> ends one player's release.
• For addon makers: PreDeathPenaltyEvent (cancel or change the percent), DeathPenaltyAppliedEvent and SectVeinAscendedEvent, plus CultivationAPI.isDuelLethal. See API Events.

Fixed

• Server crash in Void Rifts. A rift whose anchor or Warden vanished (its chunk unloaded) could throw inside the world tick and take the whole server down. Both paths are fixed, and a fault in one rift now closes that rift instead of the server.
• Rogue Cultivators left behind by a restart. A rogue still roaming when the server stopped could come back as a plain mob in a rogue's robes: weaker than it should be, with no rewards and no encounter. Such leftovers are now cleared within seconds, and new rogues spawn as normal.
• Rogue Cultivator log spam. Every swing a Rogue Cultivator took wrote a "Missing replacement interactions" error to the server log. Their attacks are now set up completely.
• Sect Guardian particle buildup. The Guardian's ward glow never expired, so a new copy piled up every ten seconds until the area around a sect hall lagged. It now lasts exactly until the next pulse.