Techniques

Techniques are the active arts a cultivator performs - the things you do rather than the stats you accumulate. They sit on top of the Dao system, cost banked Qi, run on real-time cooldowns, and unlock by realm. Since 0.7.2 each one also carries its own mastery rung, so how strong an art is depends on how much you have used it, not only on how far you have climbed.

Performing One

There are two triggers, and they behave identically:

Run /cultivation technique with no argument to list every enabled art with its unlock realm, its Qi cost, and whether you can currently use it.

The Technique Menu

v0.11.2 Every art you know, on one page. Open it with the Techniques button on the menu bar that runs along the top of every Cultivation page, or with /cultivation techniques (permission cultivation). Note the plural: /cultivation technique with no s is the chat command that performs an art or lists them in chat.

The page is a list on the left and the highlighted art on the right. The list is grouped by family, in this order:

A count above the list reads Known N of M. M is every art switched on for the server, whether or not "Show unlearned arts" is ticked.

The right-hand side opens with what the art does, then a Details block:

Notes under the block cover an art that needs a free hand, a gathered art's minimum and maximum hold time, and Sword Flying being a toggle. The page only reads: you bind keys on the Keybinds page and perform arts with the hotkeys or the command.

Borrowed arts. An art your sect teaches from a hall it holds, and that you have not learned yourself, is listed in jade with a note that it goes away if the hall is lost. A legend under the list appears only when you have one. Once you learn the same art for real, it turns into an ordinary entry.

Show unlearned arts. A checkbox under the list. Off, the menu shows only what you know. On, it also shows every art you do not know, dimmed, with its base cost and cooldown and a line on how to come by it: that the art can only be made by fusion, comes from the Twin Spirit Pact, a campaign chapter, becoming Transcendent, the Grand Dao Capstone or your Merit, that a borrowed bloodline can reach it only through a manual, or, for everything else, whether you have grown into it (a manual, meditation or your next breakthrough can open it) or not yet. An art the server has switched off with Enabled appears under the same checkbox, marked disabled, and is hidden otherwise. The checkbox starts off each time you open the menu.

With nothing learned the right-hand side explains the four doors instead of staying blank, and when Techniques-Enabled is off it says so.

The Gates

An activation is checked in this order, and the first failure is what you are told:

On success the Qi is deducted, the cooldown is stamped, and the effect runs. Cooldowns are per-technique and measured in real time, so they keep running while you're doing something else.

Unlocking an Art

Every art carries a Requires-Unlock flag, and since 0.7.4 it is true for every built-in by default. Meeting an art's realm makes you able to hold it; coming by it is a separate event. There are five routes, and an art learned by any of them is learned for good.

Fifteen arts are not on any of these routes, because each has a single door of its own that nothing else can open: the four fused arts must be made, the two Twin Spirit Pact arts are comprehended by a married, beast-bonded pair, the three signature arts are won by a milestone, and the six Merit arts are granted when your Merit crosses a threshold.

Not knowing an art outranks every other refusal — you are told you have never learned it, not that your realm is too low. /cultivation technique divides its listing into what you hold, what is within reach, and what is still beyond you, and the keybind menu only offers arts you actually know, so no key is ever bound to something that cannot fire.

This flag is about whether you may use the art at all. It is separate from mastery, which always wants manuals: a second copy of a manual you can already read is still studied into that art's mastery, so manuals matter for every art you own however you came by it.

Who an Art Hits

v0.11.1 Before this version every area art, beast art and thrown talisman looked for targets in a list that never held a player, so none of them could touch another cultivator, however the server was set up. They now can, but only where Cultivation's own PvP rules already allow a hit, and never on your side.

Hit rules for a player target. A player is hit by an area art only if all of these hold:

• The PvP rules allow it: the world has PvP on, or the target is your duel opponent, or the two of you are on opposed sides of an open Path War window. An art never makes a hit the engine would have refused.
• They are not on your side: your party, your sect and your allied sects are always spared. The one exception is a duel opponent, who agreed to be hit, so two sect mates sparring can use their arts on each other.
• The world is not shielding them: a dead player, spawn protection, an invulnerability effect, Creative mode, an intangible player, a cultivator fleeing as a soul, a world with incoming player damage switched off, and anyone standing inside the Heavenly Realm's gate sanctuary are all left alone. A sanctuary protects whoever stands in it, but not a caster standing in it against someone outside.
• Duels are closed to bystanders: while you duel, your arts touch only your opponent, and nobody else's arts touch a duelist, the same rule a Dao Domain follows.

Creatures follow the older rules: your own spirit beasts and sword mount, quest givers, the traveling merchant and your own sect's guardian posts are never hit. A spirit beast belonging to someone else is hit only where its owner would be, and never when the owner is on your side. A hit a rule turns away counts for nothing, so a drain that heals you for a share of the damage only heals off the hits that landed.

Which arts. The rule covers Sword Qi Slash, Nine Heavens Thunder Palm, Voidscar Reclamation, Transcendent Reckoning, Grand Dao Convergence, every Dao art that strikes in an area (Blazing Lotus, Frozen Domain, Golden Edge, Gale Rend, Venom Mist, Thunderclap Descent, Mountain Press, Divine Descent) and the two drains Void Devour and Blood Devour, Corpse Miasma, the fused Thunderous Blade Requiem and Frost-Flame Cataclysm, Myriad Swords Return, Starfall Strike and the Piercing Sun Qi Beam, the three area fist arts, the Explosive talisman effect, and every offensive spirit beast art, which follows its owner's side and PvP rules. The engine's own damage filters still run on top of all this.

Rogues and bosses. A Rogue Cultivator now finds and marks the nearest eligible player within 24 blocks, which it could not do before, and its area arts reach players. A creature caster does not use the world's PvP setting, because that would make every rogue and dungeon boss harmless wherever PvP is off: it is held back only by the shields above and by the rogue's own refusals, and by a live duel. The molten-floor hazard of the dungeon boss now reaches the party members in the encounter.

Support arts that finally find someone. Several arts that look for players near you used to find none and always answered "no target": Immortal Radiance (it healed nobody), the Merit arts Guiding Lantern, Merciful Hand and Bestow Virtuous Qi (which look for the nearest lower-realm player), and the Aegis of Boundless Compassion. They now work as described. They skip dead players.

The Built-In Arts

55 arts ship with the mod. Thirty-seven can be come by through the routes above — eleven open to anyone (v0.11.2 the two soul arts among them), a gathered repair art, ten locked to a single Dao, six to a bloodline, two beast forms, one rite for married couples, three gathered and three fist arts. The other fifteen each have a single door of their own: four exist only as the results of fusion, two belong to the Twin Spirit Pact, three are signature arts and six are Merit arts. v0.11.2 The last three, Aura Sight, Pressure and Pressure Burst, need no learning at all: every cultivator has them, and they sit in the list so they can be bound to a key. Every number below is the shipped default and can be retuned per-technique in the config. Damage and healing figures are the Entry-rung values — mastery multiplies them.

The Dao Arts

Ten arts, one for every element, and each usable only by a cultivator who walks that Dao. Choosing an element is no longer only a question of which damage type your strikes convert to — it decides which art you get.

Eight of the ten are area bursts centered on you and carry their element's own damage type, so they take the Wu Xing counter bonuses for free. Two are not strikes at all: Wood mends and Water wards, which is rather the point of those elements.

The Bloodline Arts

Six arts, two for each of the three races, gated on a RequiredRace rather than an element. They are why a race choice is now about what you can do rather than only about your multipliers.

v0.11.1 Corpse Miasma now does what its row says. In 0.11.0 the effect asset it lays (Cultivation_CorpseMiasma_Wither) was missing from the jar, so the art spent its Qi, found nothing to apply and reported a miss.

Demon and Deity each get one art that hits and one that does something else. Blood Devour drinks what it wounds and Corpse Miasma is a plain poison; Divine Descent mends whether or not it connected and Immortal Radiance spends the whole art on other people. The Human pair is the quiet one: Boundless Potential is a long, cheap damage buff on the longest cooldown of the lot, and Hundred Trials Body turns every injury you have survived into a sturdier body — see how it looks on the HUD.

Borrowed bloodlines

A race lock is not always a wall. Five of the six bloodline arts above, and Demon Ape Body below, let a cultivator of another race borrow the art at a real price. Hundred Trials Body is the one true hard lock, and White Tiger Body asks for no bloodline at all.

A fizzle still spends the Qi and stamps the cooldown, but runs no effect and banks no mastery. Two arts depart from the table: Blood Devour fizzles 35% of the time, and Divine Descent costs ×2.5 Qi rather than ×2.

Nothing about it comes free. Enlightenment and a breakthrough will never hand an outsider one of these arts, and of the six that allow borrowing only Blood Devour, Divine Descent and Boundless Potential have a manual to learn from. Off-Race-Access-Enabled switches the whole path off, which makes every race-locked art a hard lock again. A server whose saved TechniqueConfig.json already carries its own entry for one of the older three arts keeps that entry as a hard lock until Off-Race-Allowed is added to it.

Beast Forms

Two arts do not strike at all: they change your shape. Each swaps your model for a beast's for a while, and carries stat riders of its own.

• No hands. While a form holds, you cannot break or place blocks or open a chest, door or workstation, and you are told why.
• An occupied body. If something else already holds your shape, another mod's transformation say, the form refuses and tells you so.
• Logging out drops the form; it does not follow you into your next session.
• Each can also carry a damage bonus or a damage reduction, DamageBonusPercent and DamageReductionPercent among the art's params. They ship at 0, so by default a form is only its stat riders.

The Dao Fusion Rite

Not to be confused with technique fusion. The Dao Fusion Rite (道法双融) is for two married cultivators who have each chosen a Dao element and stand near one another: your two elements blend into a matching Iron Body and Qi Infusion buff for both of you.

Either spouse may cast it, and one cast is enough — nobody has to answer. It works only while your spouse is online, in the same world, within Dao-Fusion-Radius-Blocks (8) of you and has also chosen a Dao element; otherwise the rite refuses to start. It needs the Marriage mod installed, because the bond is the marriage — the same one Partnered Cultivation uses, minus the sitting still. Dao-Fusion-Enabled in Society/PartnerConfig.json turns it off (see Society configs). Unlike the Twin Spirit Pact arts, it is comprehended like any other open art.

The Gathered Arts

Three great arts are not loosed the moment you call them, and neither are the fist ultimate Heaven-Shaking Fist and the Meridian-Opening Art. Use one and you begin gathering Qi; use it again to loose it. The longer you hold, the more it carries.

A charge meter on the HUD tracks it, and the gathering visibly tightens and rises in pitch as it deepens. Only one may be gathering at a time.

The Piercing Sun's beam

v0.11.1 The lance is now drawn as a real Update 7 Beam: a gold, textured line that starts just in front of and below your eyes and runs to where the lance ends, which is the first solid block in the way. It grows wider the deeper you gathered, and it lingers for about 0.45 seconds at a tap and up to about 0.8 seconds at a full gathering. The old trail of gold particles is still there, thinned to half as many because the beam now carries the line.

The beam is cosmetic. Range, damage, who is hit and the hit width are exactly what the table above says. If the game cannot spawn a beam (the Beam module or the Cultivation_QiBeam asset is missing), the art quietly falls back to the full-density particle trail it used before, so nothing is lost but the line. The Heaven-Splitting Arc seal draws beams the same way.

The Meridian-Opening Art

The Meridian-Opening Art (通脉术) is the gathered art that heals rather than harms. It is open to any cultivator from Foundation Establishment, with no element or race behind it, and it cures the one thing nothing else on this page can touch: a Meridian Injury.

A tap at the floor cures nothing, and an art released with nothing to mend still spends its Qi. It is deliberately exempt from the technique backfire: a cure should never inflict the thing it treats.

Overcharge

Hold a gathering past its ceiling and, if the art allows it, it does not loose on its own. The first Overcharge-Grace-Seconds (0.75) past the ceiling are a grace window, so a clean full-power release is still easy to land. After that the art begins to overcharge: its power climbs from the full-gathering figure toward a higher one, the Qi drain ramps up to ×3 by the end of the band (Overcharge-Qi-Drain-Multiplier-At-Max), and the effect swells and pulses faster so you can feel it. If the band runs out the art looses on its own at full depth.

It is not free. Releasing while overcharged rolls for a technique backfire — a Meridian Injury. The chance starts at 3% (Backfire-Chance-Full) and climbs toward 45% (Backfire-Chance-Overcharged-At-Max) at the very end of the band, and from three-quarters of the way through (Backfire-Overcharge-Double-Threshold) a backfire that lands draws a second injury as well. Practice softens the odds: an art you have not yet climbed carries up to twice the listed chance, a fully mastered one the listed figure. Release before the ceiling or inside the grace window and there is no overcharge risk at all.

Overcharge-Enabled in TechniqueConfig.json is the master switch, and an art only overcharges at all if its own rule declares an OverchargeMaxSeconds — every gathered art above does except the Merit Aegis of Boundless Compassion, and switching it off puts them all back to loosing on their own at the ceiling.

The Fist Arts

Three arts refuse while a weapon is in hand. They are the visible half of a third progression ladder, climbed by fighting bare-handed.

The unarmed ladder

Every blow you land with a free hand banks fist-art experience, and your bare hands hit harder for it.

• 100 levels, worth up to +220% unarmed damage at the top, plus a further +12% per realm you have broken into.
• XP is measured by the damage that actually got through — 0.5 per point dealt. Hitting something armored teaches less than hitting something soft, and a punch a shield ate whole teaches nothing.
• The bonus applies to your fists and to the three fist arts, and never to a weapon. It also never leaks onto your other techniques: a Sword Qi Slash thrown with empty hands is still a Sword Qi Slash.

By default anything that is not a weapon counts as a free hand, so a torch or a stack of stone still lets a fist art fly. Server owners who want it strict can set Unarmed-Requires-Empty-Hand, and the whole ladder is switched by Fist-Arts-Enabled.

All three scale on the fist ladder as well as your realm, so the levels you spent punching things are what make them worth throwing.

Soul Arts

v0.11.2 Two arts strike a target in the sea of consciousness (识海) rather than the body. Their blows use a soul damage type that ignores armor and damage resistances, and what decides almost everything is the realm gap: your realm minus the target's, counted in realms from Body Refinement (0) to Void Refinement (6). Neither art cares about your Dao or your race. Both are listed in the Technique Menu under the Fusion, Pact, Merit, Grand Dao, Transcendent, Soul group.

Whose realm is whose. A cultivator's own; a Rogue Cultivator's rolled realm; a domain-bearing boss's or calamity beast's domain realm; a Retainer's own; a spirit beast's, the realm of the bond its owner holds. Anything else, such as a plain mob or a quest giver, has no realm and is read as your own: a gap of 0.

Damage and Qi figures are the Entry-rung values: mastery multiplies the damage and discounts the cost and cooldown, as it does for every art.

Soul Piercing Needle

You aim by looking. The needle goes to the nearest eligible target within 1.25 blocks of your line of sight (a little more forgiving the farther away it is), out to 20 blocks + 2 per realm (24 at Foundation Establishment, 32 at Void Refinement), and only if nothing blocks the way. With nobody to hit you are told "No target in your line of sight" and the Qi and cooldown are refunded.

The needle then flies, at 36 blocks per second + 10 per realm, and never takes longer than 1.2 seconds to arrive. The damage lands on arrival, and the hit is checked again at that moment: a target who has since died, joined your party, stepped into a sanctuary or been shielded takes nothing.

Damage is (20 + 7 x your realm) x mastery x gap multiplier:

So a Golden Core cultivator (realm 3) hits a Body Refinement one for 41 x 1.45 = 59 at Entry rung, and a Foundation Establishment one (realm 2) hits the same target for 34 x 1.3 = 44. A mob with no realm of its own is a gap of 0, so it takes the base figure. The widest gap that exists is 6, so the multiplier tops out at 1.9 in practice.

The effects, applied only to a target who survives and did not resist:

A hit the engine's own filters turned away (a protected creature, an invulnerable target) applies nothing: no daze, no silence, no haste.

Divine Sense Assault

A cone in front of you, 8 blocks long and 35 degrees to each side of your look direction, measured from your eyes and so up and down as well. Everything in the cone with a clear line to it is hit; there is no cap on how many.

There is no gap bonus here: the damage is the same against a gap of 1 or 6. The stagger roots a target in place and applies the same stun that interrupts a creature's melee swing. The casting message reports how many foes were hit and how many staggered; a cone that catches nothing says so, and, unlike the needle, keeps the Qi.

Who they can hit

Both arts follow the same hit rules for a player target as every other area art: the world's PvP setting or a duel or an open Path War, never your party, sect or allied sects, never a shielded or sanctuary player, and a duelist is closed to bystanders. A blocked hit counts for nothing. Walls matter too: the line to the target must cross only empty air, so any block in the way, and any chunk that is not loaded, stops the needle and shields a target from the cone. A kill by either art credits you as the killer and shows the death cause "Your soul was pierced in your sea of consciousness!".

Learning them

Both are ordinary learnable arts with Requires-Unlock on, so every route applies: a manual (the Manual of the Soul Needle for the needle and the Manual of the Roaring Sense for the cone, see Manuals), enlightenment, a breakthrough, a sect hall's inscription, a master's teaching, or a Tattered Manual once you have grown into their realm.

Every figure above is a rule parameter in Arts/TechniqueConfig.json, under the art's entry:

Mastery

Before 0.7.2 an art was exactly as strong as your realm made it. Learn Sword Qi Slash at Foundation Establishment and it did what a Foundation Establishment art does — and it kept doing precisely that until you broke through, however many thousand times you had thrown it. Mastery is the mod measuring practice instead.

Every technique climbs its own five-rung ladder, separately from every other art you know. Two cultivators of identical realm can be nowhere near each other on the same technique.

All three, at once

A rung is not bought and is not a ritual. It needs every one of its three requirements satisfied together:

• A realm you have reached. The only part of the old model that survives.
• Practice XP the art itself earned, and only from successful uses — a refused activation teaches nothing. Each use is worth 2 XP plus 0.05 per point of the art's Qi cost, so an expensive art climbs faster per cast and a cheap one climbs by being used often.
• Copies of its manual studied into it. Reading a manual for an art you already know no longer tells you that you knew it — it studies the art deeper.

Whichever of the three lands last is what promotes the art, and you are told the moment it happens. That includes a breakthrough: clear the realm gate on an art that already had the XP and the books and it advances there and then — possibly several rungs at once, if it had been waiting a long time.

What a rung is worth

Mastery pays in three directions at once, and all three matter. At Pinnacle an art hits 2.2× as hard, costs 25% less Qi, and returns 30% faster. That is a genuine reordering: a well-worn art from three realms ago can be worth more in a fight than one you unlocked this morning.

The multiplier applies to every magnitude the art produces — damage, healing, absorption pools, buff percentages. The cost and cooldown discounts are applied everywhere the raw numbers used to be read, including the affordability check and the “you need N Qi” message, so what /cultivation technique lists is what you will actually pay.

/cultivation technique shows the rung each art stands on and what its next one still needs. Realm now decides only whether you may hold an art; what makes it strong is having actually used it.

Technique Fusion (合道)

New in 0.8.0, and the answer to what the top of the mastery ladder is for. Two arts you have carried to Pinnacle can be fused into a single stronger art that did not exist before.

/cultivation technique fusions        # every recipe, and how close you are
/cultivation technique fuse <id>      # attempt one

The four shipped recipes

Each fusion takes something the two parents could not do apart:

• Thunderous Blade Requiem — the palm's lightning carried on the blade's edge. Sword Qi Slash was a cone; the Requiem breaks outward in every direction at once, radius 8 (+0.6/realm), 45 damage (+9/realm). Fusing away the "aim it" half is the point.
• Diamond Sovereign Ward — one activation that hardens the flesh and weaves the absorbing shield, on the same 18-second duration: 55% reduction (+2%/realm) and a 110-point pool (+20/realm). Both stronger and longer than either defense managed alone.
• Vital Ascendance — a heal of 55 (+12/realm) that, rather than fading once the wound closes, carries straight into 14 seconds of +40% outgoing damage (+3%/realm).
• Frost-Flame Cataclysm — the Ice and Fire daos torn together. Two elements from opposite rings, never meant to share one hand, break outward in every direction at once: radius 8 (+0.7/realm), 55 damage (+10/realm) as Fire, with a ring of alternating fire and ice at its edge. Both parents are Dao-locked arts, so you will normally have walked the Ice Dao and the Fire Dao to carry each to Pinnacle. The result itself costs 95 Qi per cast on a 13-second cooldown, and unlocks at Nascent Soul.

The rules

A fused art is a real art

It is keybindable, listed in /cultivation technique, and starts its own five-rung mastery ladder fresh at Entry — the parents' mastery does not carry across.

And fusing is the only way to get one. Fused arts are flagged Fusion-Only, which removes them from the pools that enlightenment, breakthrough, manuals and granttechnique all draw from. There is no manual for a fused art, and no master can teach you one. Once granted it stays fully performable, even if the server later sets Fusion-Enabled to false.

Recipes live in Arts/TechniqueConfig.json under Fusions — see Arts config. Adding a recipe of your own is pure config, provided the result art has its own entry.

Signature Arts

Three arts are won by a milestone and by nothing else. They are not comprehended, not looted, not taught by a master and not inscribed by a sect — and once you have one it is yours for good. All three are a radial burst of Void damage that returns part of what it deals as health.

None of them cares about your dao or your race, and each deals the Void damage type whatever your own Dao is. Voidscar Reclamation drains a shade less than the Void Dao's own Void Devour (20% against 25%), so a reward open to every Dao never simply outclasses the art that Dao is built around. A burst passes over a campaign boss that belongs to another player and over any NPC it cannot hurt, and neither earns you a heal.

Merit Arts

Six arts are granted when your Merit crosses a threshold. Merit is a virtue ledger, the mirror of Karma, and nothing else teaches these six: not a manual, not enlightenment, not a master.

• Guiding Lantern (引路灯) — marks a lower-realm cultivator with a timed bonus to the Qi they gain.
• Merciful Hand (慈悲手) — heals a wounded lower-realm ally, more the wider the realm gap.
• Aegis of Boundless Compassion (慈航护体) — a gathered ward that shields every other player nearby, never you.
• Bestow Virtuous Qi (渡气诀) — passes Qi to a lower-realm cultivator, who receives more than you spend.
• Karmic Absolution (消业咒) — clears a fixed amount of your own Karma, on a long cooldown.
• Body of Accumulated Merit (功德金身) — a self-heal and a timed damage reduction, both growing with your Merit rank.

The thresholds that grant each one, and what Merit is, are on the Merit page.

Notes on a few of them

One Step, a Thousand Li only uses the horizontal component of where you are looking - pitch is ignored - and the path is stepped one block at a time. The dash stops one column short of a wall (a rise of more than 2 blocks), a chasm (a drop of more than 8), a column with no headroom, or an unloaded chunk. Its reach was widened in 0.7.2 — 6 blocks base rather than 4, +3 per realm rather than +2, and a ceiling of 60 rather than 40. You always land standing on solid ground; in the worst case you simply don't move.

Sword Flying costs nothing to toggle. The real price is an ongoing drain of 6 Qi/second while airborne, reduced by 5% per realm reached. Flight speed is 12 horizontal and 10 vertical, +1.5 per realm. Activating it again lands you, and it is refused outright while a breakthrough or advancement ritual is under way. It also spawns a rideable flying sword next to you - right-click it to mount, the ordinary interact-to-mount flow. Flight works whether or not you ever mount it, so a failed spawn costs you nothing.

Sword Qi Slash and Nine Heavens Thunder Palm deal their damage through the same entry point melee combat uses, which means they pass through every damage filter the mod registers. If you walk a dao, your strike converts to your element and takes its counter bonuses for free - your cultivation path colors all your techniques.

An Open Registry

Techniques are not a closed list. Another mod registers one with CultivationAPI.registerTechnique, supplying its own effect and its own default rule, and it appears in /cultivation technique's listing, obeys the same gates, and can be bound to an item exactly like a built-in. A third-party art runs off its own registered default rule with no config entry at all; a server owner can still add an override by hand with a matching Id. See Registries.

A third-party effect that throws is logged and shrugged off - a broken art cannot take the mod down with it.

Per-technique rules, costs, cooldowns and params live in the arts configs — see Config, where the five mastery rungs are also defined — and the commands are on the Commands page.