v0.5.0 — Another Road Up the Mountain

Cultivation had always had exactly one ladder: Qi, realms, stages. This release opens that ladder up, so another mod can replace it entirely — a different progression, a different vocabulary, its own balance settings — while sects, daos, techniques, spirit beasts, formations, abodes, duels, alchemy and the skill tree all keep working on top of it, untouched.

If you run Cultivation on its own, nothing about your server changes. Same realms, same Qi, same menus. This one is the foundation the next wave of add-ons stands on.

A different ladder, the same mountain

• A mod can now hand Cultivation a progression system of its own — its own levels, rank names and curve — and Cultivation stops reading realms, stages and Qi from its own records and reads that mod's numbers instead.
• Everything else carries on as normal. Sects, the Dao, techniques, spirit beasts, formations, cave abodes, duels, alchemy, weapon refinement and the skill tree keep working exactly as they do today.
• Every realm gate in the mod — a technique's unlock realm, a race's, a spirit beast species' minimum realm, refinement tiers, abode quality, the Dao unlock — asks the replacement system what realm you count as, so dozens of existing gates needed no rewriting to understand a brand-new progression.
• Rank-ups still run through the meditation ritual, in the same two flavours: the routine advancement, and the milestone breakthrough with its tribulation lightning — or the Heart-Devil Trial, if you have leaned far enough into Yin or Yang.
• The HUD, /cultivation, the stats menu and the rankings all follow along, showing the installed system's rank names and progress bar.
• Your original Cultivation progress is never overwritten while an add-on is running — it sits untouched underneath, so removing that add-on hands you straight back the realm you had.

New words for the same world

• A mod can now re-word Cultivation's entire vocabulary — chat messages, command output, the HUD, every menu, item names and tooltips — without changing a single behavior. A setting with soul masters and academies instead of cultivators and sects now reads as its own game rather than a re-skin.
• It is a proper hook rather than a language file, because a language file cannot do this: the engine merges every mod's language pack into one catalog on a first-come basis, and Cultivation's own pack always loads first, so an add-on trying to override wording that way is silently discarded.
• Re-wording is as complete or as partial as the add-on likes — anything it does not rename keeps Cultivation's own wording, and stays translated in every language Cultivation ships.

Add-on settings, in the menus you already use

• Mods built on Cultivation can now put their own balance numbers in Cultivation's admin menu. They appear as their own section buttons on the Config tab of /cultivation admin, beside the nine that arrived in 0.4.2, with the same rows, the same editing and the same single Save.
• The same settings also appear in a new Mod Settings block at the bottom of the ordinary settings menu — but only for admins. For everyone else the block is not merely hidden but absent, and the server re-checks the permission on save rather than trusting the menu.
• Change several numbers across several mods, then commit them all at once.

Under the hood

• The rankings and /cultivation top now sort on a single flattened level rather than realm-then-stage. For the built-in ladder that is the exact same order as before; it also means a replacement progression ranks correctly against itself, and that offline cultivators still show a proper rank name on the board.
• The realm an add-on says you count as is never written to your save file — deliberately, so that uninstalling one cannot leave a stale rank behind to poison your gates.
• Every message the mod shows a player now passes through one shared chokepoint, which is what makes re-wording possible at all. With no theme installed it is a single null check, so there is no cost to a server running Cultivation alone.
• New public API: setProgressionProvider, setTheme, registerAdminConfigSection, plus getGlobalLevel / getProgress / refreshProgression for reading a cultivator's standing under whichever system happens to be live. Every one is documented in full, threading rules included — see the API pages.