v0.4.1 — Karma, Sect Governance & the Modding API

The heavens start keeping accounts. Every cultivator you cut down writes karma onto a ledger your next tribulation collects — in harder bolts, and more of them. Sects grow a real chain of command, with elders, join policies, and an art carved into the hall for every disciple to wield. And under the hood, almost everything Cultivation does can now be watched, vetoed, or re-tuned by other mods.

NEW — Karma (业力) & Heavenly Retribution

• Slaying another cultivator now stains your ledger. Karma costs you nothing on the day — the heavens simply remember, and collect at your next tribulation.
• A karma-laden cultivator's tribulation is genuinely worse: every bolt bites deeper, and more bolts fall — compressed into the ritual's existing duration rather than lengthening it, so a heavy ledger isn't punished twice.
• Cutting down the same victim over and over is the fastest way to ruin yourself: a farmed kill yields no Qi at all and costs more karma than an honest one. The anti-farm rule is now a deterrent rather than merely a wall.
• Walking the Devil Path multiplies every karma charge — power taken by slaughter is written down heavier.
• Two ways to clear it: endure a tribulation strike and the lightning burns your ledger down fast, or keep your blade sheathed and let it fade on its own — which ticks in real time, whether you are logged in or not.
• Your karma reads in the Dao menu, and you are warned as it crosses into each new severity band rather than on every kill.
• Entirely optional and fully tunable: kill cost, farmed-kill cost, devil multiplier, decay rate, ceiling, how much extra tribulation damage and how many extra bolts it buys, and how much one survived strike burns off. Set Karma-Enabled to false to switch the whole ledger off.

NEW — Sect Governance

• Elders (长老). A sect leader can raise disciples to elder and demote them again. Elders may invite and remove plain members and approve newcomers — but only the leader may remove an elder, and nobody removes the leader.
• Join policies. Every sect chooses how outsiders get in: Invite (invitation only), By Request (applicants queue for a manager to approve or deny), or Open (walk straight in).
• Pending join requests are listed right in the sect menu, with approve and deny where the leadership can actually see them.
• Sects can now set a motto and rename themselves. A rename carries everything keyed to the old name with it — your formations, your hall's spirit spring, and any invites still pending — so nothing is stranded.
• Leaving a sect now properly strips your rank, so rejoining an open sect no longer quietly restores an elder's authority.
• The sect menu was rebuilt around all of it: roster with ranks, policy, motto, power score and pending requests in one place.

NEW — Hall Inscriptions (碑文)

• A sect leader can carve a technique manual into the sect hall with /sect inscribe, and every disciple in the sect can wield that art — without ever finding a manual of their own.
• The inscription lives in the hall, not in your members' memories. Lose the hall to a siege and the art passes from the whole sect at once, instantly, for everyone. Take a rival's hall and you take what is carved in it.
• Requires a claimed hall, consumes the manual, and replaces whatever was carved there before. Run /sect inscribe empty-handed to scour it away.
• Server owners who would rather sects did not share arts can switch it off with Sect-Inscription-Enabled.

Rankings That Survive a Restart

• The realm rankings behind /cultivation top, the Rankings page and sect power scores are now saved to disk instead of living only in memory.
• This fixes /sect top, which previously counted only members who had logged in since the last restart — so sects ranked by who happened to be online rather than by their actual roster, and the whole board reset every time the server came back up.
• (Your own progress was never at risk — it has always lived on your character. Only this cross-player index was volatile.)

Combat Fixes

• Cultivation's damage layers — Dao element conversion and the Wu Xing counters, Yin lifedrain, refinement bonuses, Life-Bound armor and XP, technique buffs and spirit beast bonuses — no longer apply to a hit that was already cancelled. Damage blocked by the world, by spawn protection, or by another mod now stays blocked instead of being quietly revived, converted, or credited.
• The duel system's ability to override a world's PvP setting now has its own toggle (Duel-Overrides-World-Pvp) — set it to false and a PvP-disabled world stays absolutely final, duel or no duel.

NEW — For Modders: the Full Event API

• Cultivation's public API grew from 7 events to roughly 135, covering every system in the mod: Qi and meditation, rituals, breakthroughs, tribulations, the Heart-Devil Trial, races, the skill tree, the Dao, karma, techniques, sword flight, manuals, refinement, pills, drops, spirit beasts, sects, wars, duels, formations and cave abodes.
• Almost everything is exposed twice: a cancellable event fired before the change, and a notification once it is committed.
• Those "before" events do not just say no — they hand you the numbers. An addon can halve a breakthrough's Qi cost, zero a technique's cooldown, soften a tribulation bolt, re-weigh a taming roll, re-price a dao switch, or make sect halls unstealable, all without touching a config file.
• Nothing changes for players, and existing addons keep working — the original seven events are untouched.

Karma is the big new dial on this release and it is deliberately gentle out of the box — if it feels too light or too cruel on your server, every number is live-editable from the in-game admin editor. Feedback welcome!