Cave Abodes

A Cave Abode (洞府) is a pocket of ground a cultivator claims as their own. Inside it, meditation goes further, outsiders are pushed back, and a Spirit Spring (灵泉) slowly gathers Qi for you whether or not you are logged in - as long as you keep feeding the place. It is the mod's answer to "what do I do with the hours I am not playing".

The whole system is gated behind Dwellings-Enabled (default true).

Claiming an Abode

/cultivation abode claim claims the chunk you are standing in as the heart of your abode.

• The abode covers 1 chunk in every direction (Dwelling-Radius-Chunks), a 3x3 pocket of chunks.
• One abode per cultivator. Claiming again simply moves it, and moving keeps your banked spring and paid upkeep - relocating a home should not cost you what you stored in it.
• You cannot claim ground already covered by another abode or by a sect hall's spring, including your own sect's - a hall already gathers there, and stacking a personal spring on it would double-dip the same chunk.
• You cannot claim ground warded against you by someone else's Mountain-Guarding Formation.
• Any Spirit Vein tier will do, but the vein under your claim decides how fast the spring fills.
• v0.11.2 You cannot claim ground that a rare structure stands on, or that your abode would cover: A rare structure stands on this ground; it belongs to no one. The whole 3x3 footprint is checked.

/cultivation abode abandon gives the claim up outright - and the banked spring is lost with it. Run on its own it does not abandon anything: it tells you how much Qi the spring is currently holding, so you can go and collect it first. Only /cultivation abode abandon confirm actually walks away.

While an abode is sustained (its upkeep is paid), it changes meditation on its ground:

Outsiders also cannot inscribe Formations on a sustained abode's ground. A lapsed abode is just an empty cave until its owner feeds it again - no multipliers, no ward.

v0.7.0 Your claimed abode is marked on Hytale's own world map, so finding your way home no longer means remembering coordinates. The pin is yours alone - other players' maps do not show it.

The Spirit Spring

Nothing about the spring ticks. Its contents are worked out from wall-clock elapsed time whenever anyone touches the abode, which is exactly why offline accrual works at all: you can be logged out for a week with the chunk unloaded, and the spring still holds precisely what it should.

• Base rate: 60 Qi per real-world hour (Spring-Qi-Per-Hour).
• x1.5 on a rich Spirit Vein (Spring-Rich-Vein-Multiplier), x2.5 on a dragon vein (Spring-Dragon-Vein-Multiplier).
• Pool cap: 500 + 250 per realm you have reached (Spring-Pool-Base-Cap / Spring-Pool-Cap-Per-Realm). A full spring wastes most of what it would gather past the cap - see Spring grace, next. Your realm is re-read onto the abode whenever you visit it, since an offline owner's realm cannot be read.
• The spring only fills for hours your upkeep actually covered. Feeding a neglected abode does not retroactively fill it.
• Spring grace. A full spring does not waste everything. A quarter of the time it would have wasted (Spring-Grace-Fill-Fraction, 0.25) is banked instead as grace, up to 8 hours' worth (Spring-Grace-Max-Hours), and is spent automatically the next time the pool has room - the next abode command of any kind, a plain collect included. It is a small softening of the cliff for a cultivator who sometimes misses a day, never parity with one who shows up daily, and it only ever comes from hours your upkeep covered.

/cultivation abode collect (alias drink) drinks the spring dry and banks the whole pool into your own Qi. You must be standing inside the abode - the spring is a place, not an allowance.

Upkeep and Spirit Stones

An abode has to be fed. /cultivation abode deposit (alias offer), run standing inside it, offers up the entire stack in your hand; each item is worth the hours listed for it in Upkeep-Item-Hours.

Anything not on that list is refused as tribute, so a server owner can add their own currency simply by naming it in the config.

Spirit Stones are the intended currency - a crystallized shard of ambient Qi. v0.11.2 They now come in four grades, and only the Low grade counts as tribute or coin. Two sources:

• 4% chance on slaying a creature (SpiritStone-Kill-Drop-Chance), rolled independently of the cultivation-core roll, so one kill can yield both.
• 35% chance for surviving a tribulation strike (SpiritStone-Tribulation-Drop-Chance) - the heavens' lightning crystallizes the Qi it scatters. See Tribulations.

Burning a Divine Core on rent is meant to sting; the cores are accepted at a deliberately worse rate than stones.

The upkeep timeline:

• A newly claimed abode starts with 0 free hours (Upkeep-Initial-Free-Hours) - its spring stays dry until you first feed it. That is deliberate: any grant here is handed out again on every new claim, so a generous value would let players abandon and re-claim to dwell for free.
• No abode may bank more than 720 hours at once (Upkeep-Max-Banked-Hours). A deposit that would exceed the ceiling is capped; a deposit into an already-full abode is refused outright rather than swallowing your stack for nothing.
• When upkeep runs out the spring stops gathering immediately and the abode's multipliers and ward switch off.
• After a further 168 hours of grace (Upkeep-Grace-Hours) a personal claim is released entirely and everything banked in it is lost.

Set Upkeep-Enabled to false to make abodes permanent and free.

Sect Hall Springs

With Sect-Hall-Spring-Enabled on (the default), a Sect's claimed hall grows a shared Spirit Spring of its own, on top of every member's personal abode:

• It gathers at 1.5x the personal rate (Sect-Spring-Rate-Multiplier) into a pool 2x as deep (Sect-Spring-Pool-Cap-Multiplier).
• Its pool cap scales with the highest realm among its members, read live, so a hall full of high-realm cultivators holds far more than one claimed on day one.
• Any member may collect it by standing in the hall and running /cultivation abode collect. First one there takes the lot, so it rewards showing up.
• It takes upkeep exactly like a personal abode, and any member standing in the hall can deposit tribute.
• It follows the hall: moving the hall moves the spring, and losing the hall in a siege hands the spring, and everything banked in it, to the victor. See Sect Wars.
• A neglected sect spring is never released the way a personal claim is - it belongs to the hall, so it merely stops gathering until fed.
• A hall claimed on top of somebody's existing abode does not grow a second spring over the same ground; the sect gets its spring on a later sweep, once whoever is dwelling there has moved on.

Closed-Door Seclusion

Seclusion (闭关) is what happens if you begin meditating inside your own abode - or your sect's hall - and then log out. You keep cultivating while you are away.

• You gather 25 Qi per real-world hour offline (Seclusion-Qi-Per-Hour), credited the moment you next log in.
• At most 24 hours of any single absence counts (Seclusion-Max-Hours).
• The abode's upkeep must be paid both when you leave and when you return.
• By default the Qi is drawn from the abode's Spirit Spring rather than conjured (Seclusion-Drains-Spring), so seclusion and /cultivation abode collect compete for one reserve and an abode can never pay twice for the same hours. A dry spring pays a retreat nothing. Turn it off to let seclusion generate Qi independently.
• Come back to an abode that is no longer yours or no longer fed - upkeep lapsed, the hall taken in a siege, the sect left - and the retreat is forfeit. The cave stopped sustaining you.

It is deliberately far slower than sitting there awake. Seclusion exists so a cultivator who cannot spend forty minutes meditating still advances, not as a better way to cultivate. Set Seclusion-Enabled to false to switch it off entirely.

Spirit Fields

New in 0.8.0: an abode can grow the herbs its owner refines into pills. One plot per abode.

/cultivation abode field plant [variety]
/cultivation abode field harvest

A plot yields on the same terms as the spring — every real-world hour whether you are online or not, only while the upkeep is sustained, and dropped if the abode ever lapses or is abandoned. It is the same self-healing rule the abode already applies to itself.

harvest banks whole herbs into your inventory, each stamped with a quality read from the vein tier at harvest time:

That quality number feeds directly into the Pill Cauldron's grade roll, which is the whole chain: an abode on a dragon vein under a formation is what a serious alchemist's operation looks like. Fields-Enabled is the master switch.

Herb Varieties

The plot isn't limited to the original Spirit Herb anymore. plant now takes an optional variety — leave it off and you get the plain Spirit Herb, exactly as before; name one of six elemental herbs and the plot grows that instead:

See Dao for what each element carries. Each variety favors a different pill at the Pill Cauldron — the choice belongs to your alchemy plans as much as to the plot itself, so see that page for exactly which pill each one is worth growing for. /cultivation abode field varieties lists every variety with its element and favored effect.

The base Spirit Herb stays exactly what it always was: no element, no matching bonus, the reliable default for a cultivator who just wants pills without picking a variety.

Ironleaf favors the Tribulation Ward Pill, Loamroot the Meridian-Mending Pill and Millennium Ginseng the Longevity Pill. These three also turn up growing wild in the world, and Millennium Ginseng is the rarest herb of all there; see Herb Varieties for where each appears. Everything below about favored pills and weather applies to all six.

Favored herbs in the cauldron. At the Pill Cauldron, each herb's quality is weighed into the ritual's average. A herb whose variety favors the pill being refined counts at Herb-Affinity-Matched-Multiplier (1.35); an elemental herb that favors some other pill counts at Herb-Affinity-Mismatched-Multiplier (0.9); the base Spirit Herb always counts at 1. The final average is still clamped to 1, so a handful of well-matched herbs cannot lift a ritual past what a perfect herb gives on its own.

Weather Resonance

An elemental variety draws extra growth from weather that shares its element. The plot's weather is sampled roughly once a minute (Field-Weather-Sample-Interval-Seconds, 60s), and a matching reading holds for Field-Weather-Sample-Ttl-Minutes (20 minutes) before fading back to neutral — so a plot doesn't snap back to baseline the instant the sky clears.

Read as: Sunpetal favors sunny, fire-adjacent weather; Mistcap favors rain; Bramblewort favors overcast, mild conditions. The base Spirit Herb never matches: under any elemental weather it still gets the smaller ×1.1, and under clear or unmapped skies nothing at all.

Commands

abode also answers to dwelling and cave.

Every value on this page lives in the society config - see Society Config for the full field reference, and Commands for every command in the mod. Abodes interlock with Sects, are warded against by Formations, and change hands during Sect Wars.