v0.4.0 — Techniques, Spirit Beasts & the Devil's Path · Cultivation

Cultivation stops being something you only grow and becomes something you wield. Learn nine cultivation arts from manuals scattered across the world, ride a flying sword through the clouds, bind a spirit beast to your soul, carve out a cave abode with its own spirit spring, temper your blade in tribulation lightning, and walk the Devil Path or the Righteous Path to its end.

Beta disclaimer

This mod is still in beta. Existing worlds and player progress carry over — no player-data reset needed — but note that almost every config value has been reset to its new default for this update, so if you had the mod retuned for your server you'll want to re-apply your changes.

NEW — Cultivation Techniques (功法)

Nine active arts, each with its own unlock realm, Qi cost, and cooldown — performed with /cultivation technique, or bound to a reusable technique scroll you hold and use.
Sword Flying — take to the sky and soar freely for as long as your Qi holds out, faster the higher your realm. Run dry mid-flight and you fall. A rideable flying sword comes with it: summon the blade and ride it through the clouds.
One Step, a Thousand Li — fold the distance before you and cross it in a single step, farther with every realm and stage. It reads the terrain as it goes, so it never drops you into a wall, off a cliff, or into the void.
Seven more combat and utility arts: Sword Qi Slash (sweeping arc), Nine Heavens Thunder Palm (heavy AoE lightning), Iron Body (damage reduction), Cloud Step (burst of speed), Healing Pulse, Qi Barrier (absorbs damage), and Qi Infusion (empowered strikes). Every one of them scales with your realm and routes through your Dao's element and counters.
Every technique is fully config-driven — realm, cost, cooldown, element, damage type, and its own numbers — and other mods can register their own arts through the public API.

NEW — Cultivation Manuals (秘籍)

Arts and insights are no longer simply handed to you — they're written in manuals you have to find. Read one and its technique settles into your memory permanently.
Manuals fall from surviving a Heavenly Tribulation, from the remains of slain cultivator NPCs, and from the robes of players you cut down.
Five skill manuals — Iron Sinew, the Hidden Edge, the Clear Spring, the Unmoving Mountain, and the Windchaser's Stride — unlock the first node of a skill-tree branch outright, no skill points spent.
Whether a technique requires its manual is a per-technique config toggle, so servers can keep the old always-known behavior if they prefer.

NEW — Spirit Beasts (灵兽)

Wound a creature badly, then use a Beast Taming Talisman on it to bind its spirit — or crack open a Spirit Beast Egg and let what sleeps inside bond to you. 24 tameable species, each with its own elemental nature.
Your beast cultivates alongside you, with its own realm and stages, capped at your own realm — advance yourself and it can follow. Feed it cultivation cores, pills, or spirit stones to speed it along.
Three kinds, each lending you something while it stands at your side: a Guardian fights with you and grants bonus damage, a Warden cuts the damage you take, a Spirit-Gatherer deepens your meditation Qi.
Dao resonance: a beast whose nature matches your element yields far more readily to the talisman — and everything it lends you afterwards runs deeper.
Summon, dismiss, feed, and inspect it with /cultivation beast. Release it and everything it cultivated goes with it.

NEW — Cave Abodes (洞府) & Spirit Stones

Claim a Cave Abode anywhere in the world with /cultivation abode claim. Inside it you meditate faster and outsiders meditate slower, and nobody else can inscribe a formation on your ground.
Every abode holds a Spirit Spring that gathers Qi every real-world hour whether you are online or not — richer on a rich or dragon vein, with a pool cap that grows with your realm. Come home and drink it.
Abodes need upkeep: offer Spirit Stones, pills, or cultivation cores to sustain the claim. Let it lapse and the spring stops; leave it long enough and the ground is released. (Upkeep is one config toggle away from off.)
The new Spirit Stone — the coin of cultivators — crystallizes from slain creatures and from tribulation lightning.
Sect halls have their own shared spring, tended by the whole sect and never lost to lapsed upkeep.

NEW — Formations (阵法)

Inscribe chunk-anchored spirit arrays with formation flags, controlled by your sect if you're in one and by you alone if you aren't. Use the flag again on the same ground to disperse it.
Spirit-Gathering Array (聚灵阵) — amplifies meditation Qi regen for you and your sect across its radius.
Mountain-Guarding Array (护山大阵) — chokes the Qi regen of outsiders who meditate on your ground, and bars them from inscribing formations or claiming abodes there.
Immortal-Binding Array (困仙阵) — roots and wounds any intruder who trespasses within its bounds.

NEW — The Devil Path, Duels & Sect Wars

Lean deep enough into Yin or Yang and your deeds formally set your feet upon a path. A Devil (魔道) strikes harder against the righteous and harvests the dispersing Qi of every player they slay; a Righteous (正道) cultivator both hits and endures better against devils. Your path follows your balance, so it shifts as you do.
Qi-wager duels: challenge another cultivator with /cultivation duel, stake banked Qi on the outcome, and settle it by blade — or yield. Duels work even on worlds with PvP switched off.
Sect vein wars: a sect leader can lay siege to a rival sect's hall with /sect war. Hold their hall chunk long enough and the hall — and its Spirit Vein — becomes yours. Defenders standing on the chunk stall the capture. Sieges have a window, a post-war cooldown, and won't start against a sect with nobody online.

Raise a weapon to the heavens with /cultivation refine and temper it in tribulation lightning. Success grants it a Dao element and a refinement tier (I through IX) carrying bonus damage — your strikes now carry that element into the counter cycle.
Tempering is a real gamble: it costs banked Qi, it takes time under the lightning, and it can fail. Deep tiers risk knocking the blade back down a tier, stripping its element entirely, or shattering it into spirit dust.
The Heart-Devil Trial is a new tribulation variant for cultivators who have leaned deeply into Yin or Yang — instead of lightning, your own inner demons rise to bar your path. Hold your composure (道心) through the ritual, now shown on the HUD, or your composure shatters into Qi Deviation and scatters your banked Qi.
The new Clear-Mind Pill banks a stillness that carries you unharmed through one pulse of the trial.

Weather, Interface & Fixes

The weather now resonates with your Dao. Meditate under weather matching your element and the Qi pours into you; any active weather gives a smaller ambient boost. Which weather maps to which element is fully configurable.
Your path (Devil / Righteous / the Mortal Road) now shows in the Dao menu alongside your element and balance.
All item tooltips — Life-Bound Treasures, refinement tiers, manuals, talismans — now flow through one composer, so a refined Life-Bound weapon reads cleanly instead of fighting over its own name.
Fixed duel damage being swallowed on worlds with PvP disabled — duels resolve properly everywhere now.
Sect sieges now persist across restarts, and /sect war status reports the siege you're in (or the cooldown you're under).
Closed two Cave Abode upkeep exploits, including abandoning and re-claiming to dwell for free.
Six new config files (techniques, manuals, refinement, beasts, dwellings, duels/wars) — every number in all of it is editable, live, from the in-game admin editor.
Almost every config value across the mod has been reset to a new default for this release, and the config files are now sorted into Cultivation, Arts, and Society folders. Server owners with custom tuning will need to re-apply it.
All new content is localized in English and Simplified Chinese with proper Xianxia terminology. Portuguese, Russian, and Ukrainian remain from earlier versions and will catch up in a later pass.

Technique costs, beast bonuses, refinement odds, abode upkeep, and war pacing are all brand-new numbers — feedback from real multiplayer play shapes the next pass!