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.
• Choose the origin with care. You are offered a handful, and can re-draw them twice; after that, only Origin Re-draws bought from the Celestial Caravan will turn the wheel again. Leaving the screen does not deal a new hand.
• 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.

World-realms

The realm-select screen lists every world that is open, and each is a separate game that happens 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.

Manuals, techniques and mastery

You carry three cultivation manuals — one for the body, one for the mind, one for the spirit — and comprehend each of them separately. A manual is not a stat stick you equip. Almost everything it is worth arrives per level of comprehension, and comprehension is slow, so the manual you stay with beats the one you swapped to because its top line looked bigger.

• Milestones are most of the value. A manual pays out at set comprehension levels: stat jumps, an elemental absorb, sometimes a whole battle technique or a passive. Several of the best arts in the game exist nowhere else.
• A few manuals are not for everybody. Some can only be comprehended at all while you carry a particular bloodline or physique, and are forgotten the moment you change it. The manual itself still has to be found — the trait only grants the right to study it.
• Techniques are gated by element and by weapon. What you have comprehended and what you are holding decide what you can actually bring to a fight.
• Weapon mastery levels on its own. Swords, spears, hammers, axes, staffs, daggers, fans and shields each build separately, through use and training, and pay out whenever that type is equipped. It is the quiet argument for committing to one style.
• Dao Insight is daily. A contemplation you can take once a day, with your mental fortitude and your realm deciding how much you get from it. It compounds over a long climb, which makes it one of the few things in the game where turning up every day genuinely beats turning up sometimes.

Battle arts, mastery and Variations

Battle arts come from manual milestones, your bloodline and physique, weapon mastery and scrolls. Knowing an art is not the same as carrying it: only the arts in your equipped slots come into a fight. You start with two slots, and more open at major realms 3, 5, 7 and 10.

• Equipping. Tap an art to see its elements, its numbers and how you came by it, and press Swap in: it takes a free slot, or asks which equipped art it replaces. Or tap an empty slot first and then the art to put in it. Passive arts are always active and take no slot.
• Mastery is earned by use. Every cast in a fight you play counts toward that art's mastery, up to level 10. Foes far below the art teach it less, and bloodline and physique arts take twice the uses.
• Each level past the first gives that art 3 mastery points, for it alone. They are what a Variation is paid with.

Variations reshape an art into one of your own. Each change is a pair: a bonus and the burden that pays for it. An art can hold three pairs, opened at mastery levels 2, 4 and 6.

• Choosing a change. A square opens every bonus or burden the art can take. Pick one and its rank to see exactly what it does, such as +20% damage or 3 uses per battle, and how much it adds to the balance.
• Balance. Your bonuses against your burdens. While the first number is no more than the second, the Variation can be forged. The mastery you put into it carries a little of the weight too.
• Cost. Bonuses spend the art's mastery points, and forging takes a share of your Qi pool for each point. Removing a Variation gives the points back, but never the Qi.
• A name of your own. A forged Variation takes a generated name, and you can give it your own. It may contain an art's name but not be one, and it is checked like any other name.
• It is still your art. A Variation fights as forged everywhere you take the art, PvP included, and others can see it when they inspect you.

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.

Guardian beasts and soul demons

Two systems that open late and change the shape of a fight rather than adding to it.

Guardian beasts arrive from the Celestial realm. Each species carries a fixed signature bonus and an archetype that decides the shape of its kit, and has four abilities of which you bring one into a fight — or two, once it is Mythic. Choosing which ability to bring is most of the decision.

Soul demons are bound into the soul from Immortal Emperor onward, one to a slot. Every bonus a demon carries is a range rather than a figure, rolled when you bind it, so two of the same demon are not the same demon — and each also carries a weakness that no amount of levelling will scale away. Sixteen ranks in each of eleven elements. The stone that calls one is found by exploring the Celestial Realm, and the last two ranks only by felling a tyrant.

Reincarnation and the Soul Tree

From Nascent Soul you can end the life and begin again. Rebirth resets your realm and banks Dao Soul Points, which buy nodes on the Soul Tree — four trees, permanent, kept by the soul across every life after. Deep nodes cost several lifetimes' worth on their own. That is intentional: the tree is meant to be many lives of progress, not one.

It happens in two steps, and the second is the interesting one. What a soul is allowed to carry through is itself bought on the tree: comprehension levels in an aspect, a number of items, a ceiling on their rarity, a masterwork, your bloodline or your physique, a realm to start at, more origins to choose between, a share of your raw materials, crafting levels, array diagrams, a sliver of the old life's combat attributes. A first rebirth carries almost nothing. A tenth carries most of a character.

Every soul gets one free turn of the wheel when it comes to rerolling the origin on offer; further rerolls are bought and banked until you need them, and a banked one can just as well be spent on a brand-new character once its own free re-draws are gone. The practical advice is simple: reincarnate when the life has stopped paying, not when the button appears.

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. Training it while you cultivate follows the weapon in your hand.
• Hunting tires you. Every sixty beast hunts without a break adds a level of exhaustion, each one weakening you further in every fight against the world, until you collapse and wake rested. Five minutes away from the hunt takes a level off; duels and sect wars do not care how tired you are.
• 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 are the campaigns and climbs, and the events a region throws up on its own.

What a fight does to you

Most of what decides a fight is not the damage number, it is what is still on you three turns later. Every status in the game is listed, with its real figures, on the status effects page of the wiki, which also explains the mechanics that are not statuses. The short version:

• Wounds ignore defence. A bleed or a venom does not care what you are wearing, and its bite is set by the attack of whoever opened it, at the moment it opened. Armour is not the answer to poison; not being poisoned is.
• Absorb and reflect refuse a blow outright. Absorbing an element takes no damage and heals you; reflecting takes no damage and sends part of it back. Absorbing comes from a bloodline, a physique, a manual milestone or a bound soul demon; reflecting only from a bloodline or a physique. Tap an element on your character sheet to see which of yours grants it. Both are why reading an enemy's element before you commit is worth a turn.
• A weakness is one and a half times damage. Most traits above A rank have one. So do a great many creatures, usually the obvious counter to whatever they drink.
• Losing a turn and losing your options are different. A stun costs you the turn; a silence costs you your techniques but not your sword; a pin leaves you able to do nothing but swing. The answer to each is a different answer.
• A tyrant tells you what is coming. A region's seat announces its opening blow a turn before it throws it. That turn is the fight.

Exploring, and what is out there

Searching sends your cultivator into a zone on a timer that keeps running while you are away, exactly as cultivation does. Pick a region, pick a zone inside it, and read the log when you come back. New regions open as your realm rises, each with harder things in it and better things to find.

• Observe Nature in a zone for a chance to read a talisman pattern out of it. Patterns are not sold anywhere; this is how a talisman maker learns anything.
• Every region has a roaming tyrant — a named beast that guards the best of what the region has. They hit far harder than anything else at their tier, and they telegraph.
• Fortune decides how often the world finds you. Random encounters fire while you play, and your fortune stat sets how often. It does nothing for your damage, which is why it is easy to dismiss — and bloodlines and physiques start carrying it from A rank for a reason.

Campaigns and climbs

Three structured ladders, each with a different shape, all running alongside everything else.

• The Mortal Road — eleven acts, beginning the moment your character does. It is the game's own tutorial in disguise: it walks you past every system in the order you become able to use it, and its act rewards beat anything you would find wandering at the same level. Follow it.
• Conquer the Tower — opens at Qi Condensation. A hundred floors on a seed that resets monthly, which means everybody that month is climbing the same tower. Each floor pays as you pass it, and the floor you stopped on is your mark for the season.
• Elemental Escalations — opens at Core Formation. Ten elemental chapters, each a winding path of fights that teaches its element and drops themed rewards. Clear Normal to progress; Hard needs all of Normal behind you and Immortal Ascension under you; Hell is for later than you think.

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. The World Boss shows the exact piece of gear each placement wins that week, chosen for your realm, so you know what you are fighting for.
• 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.

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.

Making a living

Spirit stones are the currency of everything, and there are three honest ways to come by more of them than killing things provides.

• The market is world-wide. You list an item, it leaves your inventory and sits in escrow at your price until somebody takes it. You cannot buy your own listing, and a masterworked item cannot be listed at all — the end of the refining road is something you made for yourself.
• Crafting orders are posted by sect members for sect members: somebody names what they want made and what they will pay, and a crafter fills it. They pay in stones and in reputation, and they are how a crafter with no market presence gets a first customer.
• The Celestial Caravan trades in Celestial Crystals rather than stones — consumables, bundles, cosmetics, and draws on design pools you have not exhausted. Everything in it is a convenience or a cosmetic. The whole game is playable without ever opening it.

The thing worth internalising early: materials are worth more than the gear you make out of them until your crafting level catches up with your realm. Selling raw is not a failure of nerve.

Sects, sect war and morality

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 forty-eight 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 forty-eight hours. After that it is arithmetic.

Sects are righteous or demonic, and that is an alignment rather than a label. Your own morality moves on what you do — sect missions, the creatures you put down, the answers you give a stranger on the road — and every movement is written down with its reason, so you can always find out why your standing changed.

In the arena it only moves across the line. Putting down a demonic cultivator is a service to the world if you are not one yourself; two righteous cultivators settling a wager settle nothing about either of their names, and neither do two demons. Only the winner's standing moves, and only once per opponent per day — both of those exist because the alternative is two players arranging the whole scale between them in an afternoon.

The Wanderer's Path

Joining no sect used to mean going without: no storehouse, no formation hall, no teacher. An estate is the other half of that choice — what the grounds would have given a disciple, owned outright and paid for yourself.

• A storehouse of a hundred slots, which is a good deal more than a bag and a good deal less than a sect's warehouse.
• A formation yard, drawing on your own spirit stones instead of a treasury.
• A teaching hall, where you take a master or take apprentices — and handing over a whole art is the one thing a sect cannot do for you. It takes days rather than minutes, and a master needs real comprehension before anybody will learn anything from them.

And the cost, which is the whole point of the choice: an estate stands in one town. A sect disciple reaches their storehouse from anywhere in the world through a panel. A wanderer has to go home. A sect gives you a structure that follows you around and takes a say in your life; an estate gives you one that is entirely yours and does not move.

Swearing to a sect later does not confiscate anything — your belongings stay yours and the storehouse stays open — but the formation yard switches off and so do the wandering bonuses. Otherwise the correct opening would be "found an estate, then join a sect", which is exactly the choice this was built to stop being free.

Renown, achievements and titles

Renown is the only number in the game that is about other people. Dao Power says what you can do and spirit stones say what you can afford; renown says whether anybody has heard of you. You carry a current figure, which can fall, and a lifetime total, which cannot — and only the lifetime total is ever read for anything that matters. A legend who disgraces themselves is a disgraced legend, not a stranger.

There are four tiers of being known: Whispered Of, Known, Renowned and Legend. Each raises the same three things a little further — better prices at a counter, more turned up by a search, and faster comprehension, because cultivators who would ignore a nobody will argue with a legend and arguing about an art is how an art is understood. They are all deliberately small. Fame is meant to be something you accumulate by doing what you were already doing, not a build.

It comes from breakthroughs, arena wins, crafting orders you fill, where you place on a world boss, and achievements. Achievements are claimed once per world; several carry a title as well as a reward, which is the visible half. A world first can be taken by exactly one cultivator in each world, ever — so if your name on that list is the goal, a quieter world is the better bet.

Families, companions and heirs

A character may take one Dao companion. While both of you are slotted for dual cultivation a shared bar fills — a few days of it, if you both keep at it — and the pair of you unlock things neither could alone.

Out of that comes a family line: a family name nobody else in the world can take, a head who speaks for it, and heraldry — the crest and the banner, which a tailor makes rather than a shop sells. A line accumulates a Dao Soul and heirs, and an heir can be born into a legendary origin, which is the only way to hand a future character one.

Other people

The Social page is where the rest of the world lives: direct messages, friends, world and sect chat in the Gathering, and inspect, which shows you what another cultivator has actually built rather than what they say they have. Adding a friend sends a request they accept or decline, and once accepted it is mutual. Friends are grouped by the account they belong to, so one person's characters sit together, and can be given a name of your own choosing, which only you see. A green dot on the chat button means someone has spoken in world chat since you last looked. If you would rather not be asked, Settings → Invitations turns off duels, sect invitations, Dao Companion proposals and friend requests, each on its own. The Family Line tab sits there too.

Rankings list the strongest cultivators and sects in your world by Dao Power and by other feats. The arena is where that gets settled directly — singles bouts you arrange yourself, and tournaments run as a real bracket. A win moves your morality only if it crossed the righteous/demonic line, and only once per opponent per day.