Guides

Getting started

You pick a world-realm, then make a cultivator in it. Both choices matter and only one of them is reversible, so take a moment over the first.

Character creation rolls you a bloodline and a physique, and asks you for an origin. The origin is the one that does the most work: it decides where you begin, what you begin with, who you already know, and it carries percentage bonuses that follow you for the whole life of the character. It is not flavour text.

• Do not reroll for an hour looking for an S-rank. Bloodlines and physiques are replaceable later, with crystals taken from beasts. The origin is not.
• Cultivate while you are away. Progress continues offline. Set yourself to something before you close the game rather than leaving a cultivator standing still.
• Follow the Mortal Road. It is an eleven-act campaign that starts the moment you do, and it exists to walk you past every system in the game in the order you can use them. Act rewards are worth more than anything you will find wandering at the same level.

Cultivation and realms

Cultivation is the spine. You gather Qi, you fill a realm, and then you attempt a breakthrough into the next one. Each major realm is a different order of magnitude — gear, monsters and your own stats all climb together, so a realm you have just entered feels the way the last one did when you arrived in it.

Higher breakthroughs bring tribulation: a fight you must survive rather than a bar you must fill. Tribulations are elemental, and this is where an unlucky elemental weakness on your bloodline stops being theoretical. Go in with resistance, not just with attack.

From the Celestial realm onwards a second half of the game opens up — guardian beasts, soul demons, and the events that go with them. A great deal of content is waiting behind that gate, so it is a reasonable medium-term goal to aim everything at.

Bloodlines and physiques

They are two halves of the same idea and they pull in opposite directions. Bloodlines are inborn and offensive — attack, elemental damage, Qi. They are named after creatures, and a crystal that carries one drops from a beast of that kind. Physiques are the body: defence, health, resistance, and the elemental absorbs that turn an incoming attack into healing instead of damage. They are named for elements and drop from them.

• Ranks run D to SSS. Low ranks come with drawbacks; from S upwards they carry none at all, and from A upwards they also improve your fortune.
• Weaknesses are real. A weakness means one-and-a-half times damage from that element. A high rank with a weakness you keep meeting can be worse than a lower rank without one.
• Milestones unlock as you climb. Most of what a trait is worth is gated behind realms you have not reached yet. Read the whole entry, not the top line.

Every one of them is listed, with its full stat block, in the wiki.

The five professions

Each is a genuine profession rather than a menu, and none of them is optional forever.

• Alchemy — pills. Quality, efficacy and quantity all move independently, and the cauldron's time and temperature are yours to get wrong. Recipes can be researched into variants.
• Artifact refining — weapons and heavy armour from blueprints, then enhancement on top. Masterworking doubles an item's stats and is the end of that road.
• Arrays — formations, forged on a timer, that do things no item does.
• Talismans — paper and energy, with patterns you learn by watching the world rather than by buying a book.
• Tailoring — cloth armour, and heraldry: the crest and banner your family flies.

Designs come from three places: research, drops, and masters who teach. Some of the better ones come only from a master, so find one.

Pills, and how many is too many

Pills are the fastest way to move a number, and the game puts a hard edge on that: there is a daily safe limit on how many your body will take. Go past it and you are not wasting the pill, you are poisoning yourself.

The same rule is what makes medicinal ponds a real decision rather than free value. A pond gives you the benefit of one pill every ten minutes, and the longer you sit the stronger every one of them is — but the longer you sit, the better the chance the water leaves something behind. Usually that is an affliction you can cure. Sometimes it is a permanent cut to your daily pill capacity that nothing but rebirth will undo. You choose the length on the way in and you cannot get out early.

Combat

Turn-based, against packs of up to five. You choose targets, and area techniques hit several at once, so what looks like a damage problem is often a targeting problem.

• Techniques are gated. Many require a particular element or a particular weapon. Your manual and your weapon decide what you can actually bring.
• Weapon mastery accumulates. Sticking with one weapon type is worth more than swapping to whatever dropped last.
• Mitigation matters more than it looks. Defence and resistance scale with realm alongside everything else; skipping them does not make you a glass cannon, it makes you glass.

Beyond ordinary fights there is the Tower — a hundred floors on a monthly seed, the same climb for everybody that month — and Elemental Escalations, ten element chapters at three difficulties.

Sects and sect war

A sect is the social spine of a world: shared storage, a merit shop, crafting orders placed by members for members, and people who can teach you things.

Sect war is inter-sect PvP, and it is not fought live. A war is declared, a seventy-two hour countdown runs, and then the battle resolves as an elimination between the two rosters — ordered by Dao Power, with damage carrying over between fights. Nobody has to be awake for it. What follows is a loot window, and then another, and a war log explaining exactly what happened to whom.

The practical consequence: the time to influence a war is during the seventy-two hours. After that it is arithmetic.

Events worth dropping everything for

Regions spawn events on their own. Most last four hours, and the good ones are worth rearranging an evening around.

• Soul Demon Incursions. A breach opens over a Celestial region and several of one soul demon come through. Everyone in the band may put down one — not as many as they can reach — and what you carry off is that demon's summoning stones, which is how you fight it properly, alone, later. The breach closes when the last one falls or after four hours.
• Medicinal ponds. Above. One bath each, per spring.
• World bosses, secret realms, bounties and the quest board — the steady supply, always worth clearing.
• Region events of seven kinds, including a damage trial and a real tournament bracket.

Nearly all of them are one-attempt-per-player by design. That is so a region clears an event together instead of it going to whoever happened to be online and strongest.

World-realms

There are five — Sirius, Logi, Naeritus, Mordo and Heritia — and they are separate games that happen to share your account. Characters, sects, markets, rankings and world firsts in one are invisible from another.

What that means in practice: play where your friends play. A character in the wrong world cannot be moved to the right one, and nothing you own crosses over. The server stats page shows how populated each one is.

World firsts are claimed once per world and never again. If you want your name on that list, a quieter world is a better bet than a busy one.