Formations

A Formation (阵法) is a spirit array inscribed into the ground, anchored to one chunk and reaching out over the chunks around it. There are three kinds: one that feeds your own cultivation, one that starves everyone else's, and one that hurts anybody who walks in uninvited. They are how a Sect turns a claimed mountain into ground that actually defends itself.

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

The Three Arrays

Radius is square (Chebyshev), measured in chunks from the anchor - so radius 2 covers a 5x5 block of chunks, and radius 1 a 3x3.

By default a Spirit-Gathering Array only feeds its own controllers. Set QiGathering-Benefits-Everyone to true to make it a public good that helps any meditator in range.

A Mountain-Guarding Array does more than choke Qi: outsiders also cannot inscribe their own formations on warded ground, and cannot claim a Cave Abode there.

The Immortal-Binding Array's trap, every 3 seconds (Trapping-Interval-Seconds), does the following to every intruder standing inside it:

• Deals 4% of their max health (Trapping-Damage-Percent-Of-Max-Health) through the normal damage pipeline, so armor and the mod's own damage reductions apply.
• Applies the Root entity effect for 2.5 seconds (Trapping-Debuff-Effect / Trapping-Debuff-Duration-Seconds). Blank the effect id to skip the debuff and keep only the damage.
• Never kills. Trapping-Lethal is false by default, so a trap tick always leaves at least a sliver of health - the intruder has to flee its bounds, not respawn. Set it true to let a trap finish off a persistent trespasser.

Controllers walk through their own trap freely.

Who Controls a Formation

Control follows a single rule: your sect if you are in one, otherwise you personally.

• Placed by a sect member, the array is controlled by the sect, and every member of that sect is a beneficiary.
• Placed by a soloist, it is controlled by their UUID alone.

Membership is resolved live, so joining or leaving a sect immediately changes who benefits from - and who is an outsider to - that sect's arrays, without touching the stored formation. Two consequences worth knowing:

• Renaming a sect carries its formations with it (see Sects), so a sect never ends up warded and trapped by its own arrays.
• Disbanding a sect disperses every array it controlled. Left behind they would match no living sect, making everyone an outsider forever, with nobody able to remove them.

Placing and Removing

Each array has its own Formation Flag item. Use the flag while standing in the chunk you want as the anchor.

See Qi Gathering for where cultivation cores come from. None of the three flags drops on death.

The flag is a toggle. Using it on a chunk where you already control an array of that same type removes it instead of placing a second one. Otherwise:

• The flag is consumed only on a successful placement - a refusal costs you nothing.
• Placement is refused if another controller already holds an array of that type on that exact chunk.
• Placement is refused on ground warded against you, whether by someone else's Mountain-Guarding Array or by a sustained Cave Abode.
• v0.11.0 Placement is refused on another sect's hall or building chunks, and refused inside someone else's Cave Abode. A Trapping or Warding array is judged by its whole reach, not just its anchor: if the radius would cover a rival's sect ground or abode it is refused, since such an array would root, wound or choke people in their own home. A Spirit-Gathering array only ever helps, so its reach is not limited.
• Placement is refused once you are at your cap: 3 formations per controller (Max-Formations-Per-Controller). The cap is per controller, so a whole sect shares three between them.

A sect's leader or an elder may lift a foreign array anchored on the sect's own ground with the same flag, or break a foreign altar's eye standing on it. v0.11.0 This is for arrays laid before the refusal above existed, or before the sect claimed the chunk, which would otherwise be removable only by their owner.

/cultivation formations (aliases formation, arrays) lists every array you control - type, world, anchor chunk and radius, newest first - so you can walk back to one and disperse it.

v0.7.0 Arrays you or your sect control are also pinned on Hytale's own world map, colored by what the array does - green draws Qi, blue wards, red catches - so a map full of them reads without opening a single label. Only your arrays appear: a Trapping array's whole value is that the person walking into it did not know, and publishing every array to every map would quietly disable the mechanic.

Remote Disperse

The Formations dashboard page turns "walk back to one" into optional. Pick a row from the dashboard's list and arm it - tracked by the formation's own key rather than its position in the list, so a mid-session refresh can't accidentally arm the wrong row - and a second confirm step appears only for that armed row. Confirming disperses it immediately, with no trip back to the chunk it sits in.

It is not a new way of removing a formation, just a new place to trigger the old one: remote disperse routes through the exact same FormationManager removal path a manual on-site disperse always used, so who can disperse what is unchanged, and any add-on watching for a formation-removed event still sees it fire identically.

Overlap and Stacking

Only an exact-chunk duplicate of the same type is refused, so arrays on neighboring chunks overlap freely. To keep that from compounding, each type applies at most once however many arrays of that type cover the chunk you are standing on. Three Mountain-Guarding arrays laid side by side choke an outsider at 0.25x, not 0.25x cubed.

Different types do combine: an outsider meditating inside both a Spirit-Gathering array that benefits everyone and a Mountain-Guarding array gets 1.4 x 0.25.

A Cave Abode's own meditation multipliers are applied separately from this, on top.

Formations 2.0 — Spirit Arrays Join the Siege

v0.10.1 A defender's spirit arrays used to be bystanders to their own siege. They are now an official part of the defense:

• A Mountain-Guarding Array covering a besieged hall now slows the attacker's hold-clock accrual during a Sect War by a real percentage per tier, on top of everything it already does to outsider Qi regen.
• An Immortal-Binding Array keeps striking intruders exactly as it always has — The Three Arrays above are unchanged, only now counted as a deliberate part of the siege rather than a side effect nobody could counter.
• /sect war status and the Sect page report an active Warding slow and how many banners are standing on either side.
• v0.11.1 The Warding slow now shares its ceiling with a third source, the besieged sect's Array Domain, and /sect war status reports the array's share on its own line.

The attacker's counterplay

While a siege is actively contested, a member of the besieging sect may break the defender's altar blocks near the hall bare-handed — the same reach a formation's usual protection would otherwise refuse them. Two limits keep this narrow:

• A personal, sectless array nearby is never touched by this — it only applies to a defended hall under an active siege.
• Explosives still cannot demolish an altar, either way.

v0.11.0 This now works on a server with the default land protection. The defender's ground used to refuse the break before the siege rules were ever consulted, so the counterplay could not actually be used. During a live CONTEST siege the attackers may break exactly the defender's array eyes and anchor stones near the hall, and nothing else on the defender's ground opens. They may also strike the defender's Sect Guardians, which land protection used to shield as well.

The Siege Banner

Attackers get a structure of their own: the Siege Banner, plantable near a contested hall while it is under CONTEST.

• While it stands, it cancels the Warding slow outright and dampens the defender's Trapping arrays in its radius.
• v0.11.1 It also mutes the defender's Sect Array Domain in its radius, and removes the array's share of the slow if its reach covers the hall chunk.
• It carries no protection at all — any defender may tear it down with their bare hands.
• Every standing banner comes down automatically the moment its siege ends, win or lose.

Both default on — an existing WarConfig.json from before this version picks up both new keys, and both counterplay mechanics, the moment the server next boots. Set either to false to opt out.

Commands

Placement and removal have no command - they are done entirely with the flag items.

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. War-Formation-Assault-Enabled and War-Siege-Banner-Enabled are the exception, living in WarConfig.json beside the rest of the Sect Wars tuning they belong to. Formations interlock with Sects, defend a hall during Sect Wars, and share their warding rules with Cave Abodes.