Dream Trial

v0.9.1

The Dream Trial (幻境劫) is a trial you walk into on purpose, at one place in the world: the Hollow Mirror (空镜), a still, mirror-flat pool under an unnatural sky. You stand before it and a reflection that is not quite you rises to meet your gaze. Hold your composure for ninety seconds and you win Qi. Break, and you pay a penalty.

It uses the same machinery as the Heart-Devil Trial - a composure pool that only ever drains, an apparition and a debuff on each pulse - but it asks a different question. The Heart-Devil Trial punishes a Dao dragged to an extreme. The Hollow Mirror does the opposite: it preys on how unresolved you still are. A cultivator settled hard into one path and one element faces a reflection that holds steady; one torn on both counts sees a hundred versions of who they might become.

Entering

Stand near the Hollow Mirror and run /cultivation dreamtrial. You are refused if:

• the Dream Trial is switched off, or the site has not been built;
• you are meditating, or already inside this trial, an Inner Demon duel or a Marrow-Cleansing Rite - which also rules out every seated ritual;
• your realm is below Foundation Establishment (DreamTrial-Min-Entry-Realm, 2);
• you are too far from the Mirror: you must be in its world and within DreamTrial-Radius-Chunks (2) chunks of its anchor chunk, which is a square about 160 blocks across;
• you are still cooling down. The cooldown (DreamTrial-Cooldown-Seconds, 1800 - thirty minutes) follows every ending, win, loss or walkout.

On entry the pool goes still, the sky closes in over you, and the trial begins.

The Trial

The trial runs for 90 seconds (DreamTrial-Duration-Seconds), with a pulse every 6 seconds (DreamTrial-Pulse-Interval-Seconds) - fifteen pulses. On each pulse the reflection manifests in a ring of light around you, a line of torment crosses your screen, you are slowed for 1.5 seconds, and your composure drains from a pool of 100. While it runs, the HUD's state chip reads The Hollow Mirror - see Reading Your HUD.

The sky over you is changed for you alone, through a weather override that fades in over three seconds and is cleared the instant the trial ends, however it ends. Nobody else's sky changes.

You must stay at the site. Walking out of the Mirror's radius during the trial ends it as a failure.

Pressure

How hard each pulse hits depends on your pressure, a number from 0 to 1 for how unresolved your Dao is. It averages two measures, weighted equally by default:

• Moral irresolution. How close your Yin-Yang balance sits to a torn fifty-fifty. Exactly balanced is 1; fully Yin or fully Yang is 0.
• Elemental irresolution. How close your chosen element's affinity sits to your strongest rival element's. Neck and neck is 1; one element far ahead is near 0. With no chosen element it reads as 1.

If you have no Dao to speak of yet, or the Yin-Yang track is not open to you, the Mirror finds you as unresolved as anyone can be: pressure 1. See Dao and Spiritual Root.

Each pulse drains DreamTrial-Composure-Drain-Per-Pulse (22) times (0.35 plus your pressure). Even a perfectly settled cultivator feels something, so the pool is never entirely safe.

Composure never refills. The numbers are the shipped defaults.

The Waking Bell Charm

Your defense is the Waking Bell Charm (醒梦铃符), an Epic charm you consume to bank Waking Bell charges: one charge per charm (WakingBellCharm-Charges), up to three stored at a time (WakingBellCharm-Max-Stored-Charges). Each charge cancels one pulse's composure drain - the reflection still appears and you are still slowed, but the pool is untouched. Charges you bank are shown in the HUD effect strip (Waking Bell Charm) and persist until used.

A Clear-Mind Pill does not help here: the Dream Trial draws on Waking Bell charges only.

Be realistic about the table above. With three charges stored, only a cultivator whose Dao is almost entirely settled can finish the trial on those alone; anyone else must consume another charm after each charge is spent, and nothing in the trial stops you from doing so.

v0.11.1 The charm is craftable at the Workbench, on its Tinkering tab: 2 Silver Ingots, 3 Spirit Stones and 2 Mistcap Herbs, 3 seconds, no recipe to learn first. The mod adds no loot-table or shop source, so a server that wants charms handed out another way - a gift, a quest reward, a shop of its own - still has to do that itself. (In 0.11.0 the charm had no recipe at all.)

Outcomes

You hold. At 90 seconds with composure above zero, the title The Mirror Stills appears and you are paid DreamTrial-Success-Qi-Reward (600) Qi, through the usual pipeline so your multipliers apply. Unlike the Inner Demon duel, the reward is a flat figure.

You break. Composure hits zero, you walk out of the Mirror's radius, you die, or you log out on your own. Exactly one penalty, chosen by DreamTrial-Failure-Mode, lands, and the sky is restored:

Every ending starts the cooldown. v0.11.2 A death inside the trial is not also charged by the Death Penalty. Logging out on your own counts as walking away: the penalty and cooldown are settled at your next login. A server stop, a crash or a staff kick costs you nothing. If the server owner switches the Dream Trial off while you are inside, it ends without penalty and your sky is restored.

For Server Owners

Every value on this page lives in mods/Siren_Cultivation/Cultivation/DreamTrialConfig.json; see also the Dream Trial Config section of the Cultivation config page.

Setting up the site. Build the Mirror wherever suits your terrain - the mod only needs to know where it is. v0.11.1 Stand at the site and run /cultivation admin dreamtrial here: it writes DreamTrial-World (the world you are in) and DreamTrial-Chunk-X and DreamTrial-Chunk-Z (the chunk you are standing in) and saves the file. It never touches a block, so building the site stays your job. Run /cultivation admin dreamtrial on its own to see where the Mirror is anchored (and a note if DreamTrial-Enabled is off), and /cultivation admin dreamtrial clear to un-anchor it, after which the trial answers "not built" again. Editing the file by hand still works: the three values are the world's name and the chunk coordinates of the anchor (a chunk is 32 blocks, so these are block coordinates divided by 32, rounded down). DreamTrial-World is blank by default, so a fresh server refuses every attempt as "not yet built" until an admin has placed the Mirror once. DreamTrial-Atmosphere-Weather-Id can point at any weather asset in any pack to reskin the trial's sky.

Related: Tribulations, Inner Demon Rival Duel, Qi Deviation, Dao, Commands.