Alchemy

Alchemy (丹道) turns Spirit Herbs into spirit pills — consumable one-shot advantages that make a stretch of cultivating, or a single dangerous ritual, go your way. Four ship with the mod.

Since v0.8.0 alchemy is a craft, not a recipe. You place a Pill Cauldron, you feed it herbs you grew, and you sit through a ritual that drains your Qi, can fail, and occasionally explodes. What comes out carries a grade, and the alchemist who has done it a hundred times rolls better grades than the cultivator who happens to own a cauldron.

The loop

Grow, refine, climb — and the climbing feeds back into the refining

The Pill Cauldron

Use a Pill Cauldron Flag to set down your personal cauldron. Using the flag again elsewhere moves the cauldron there rather than giving you a second one — one cauldron per cultivator.

Stand within 4 blocks of it (Cauldron-Interaction-Radius-Blocks) and begin:

/cultivation alchemy refine <qigain|ritualspeed|tribulationshield|clearmind>

The herbs are spent the moment it starts. That is the cost of even a cancelled attempt, and it is what makes beginning a refine a decision.

Failing, and botching

A completed ritual rolls against a failure chance:

A veteran alchemist working perfect herbs sits at the 5% floor. A first-timer with poor herbs is failing better than a third of the time — which is why the first cauldron feels like a gamble and the hundredth does not.

Of every failure — not of every attempt — 30% botches the flame outright (Refine-Botch-Chance-Of-Failure). A botch costs the alchemist 12% of maximum health through the ordinary damage pipeline, the same path tribulation lightning takes, so everything that defends against a bolt defends against this. It is non-lethal unless Refine-Botch-Explosion-Lethal is turned on.

A plain failure, with no botch, only wastes the herbs.

Grades

Every pill out of a cauldron comes out at one of four grades.

The grade is rolled from a 0–1 quality score:

The two weights are normalized against each other, then the result is banded at 0.30 / 0.60 / 0.85 (Grade-Threshold-Mid, -High, -Perfect).

So both halves matter and neither is sufficient. Dragon-vein herbs in a novice's cauldron and ordinary herbs in a master's cauldron land in much the same place; Perfect wants both.

Alchemy mastery

丹道境界 — a ladder of its own, fifty levels, climbed only by refining and entirely separate from your realm. A Body Refinement cultivator can be a better alchemist than a Nascent Soul one.

It uses the same growth curve the fist-art ladder does. And it feeds straight back into both the grade roll and the failure chance — which is what makes a career alchemist genuinely better at this than a cultivator who owns a cauldron.

Failing still teaches you something. Botching does not.

Spirit Herbs and Spirit Fields

Herbs are grown, in a Spirit Field plot inside your claimed Cave Abode — one plot per abode.

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

It yields every real-world hour whether you are online or not, on the same terms as the abode's Spirit Spring: it accrues only while the abode's upkeep is sustained, and the plot is dropped if the abode ever lapses or is abandoned.

Quality

Each harvested herb is stamped with a quality read from the vein tier at harvest time, plus a formation bonus:

A Qi-Gathering formation covering the chunk lifts the plot's yield and its quality (Herb-Quality-Formation-Bonus-Scale) — since v0.8.0 a formation over a field is not merely a faster field, it is a better one.

That quality number feeds directly into the cauldron's grade roll, which is the whole chain: good ground → good herbs → good pills.

Herb Varieties

plant takes an optional variety — the plain Spirit Herb if you leave it off, or one of three elemental herbs, each grown for a specific refine rather than for pills in general:

See Dao for what each element means. Ironleaf and Loamroot round the herb family out to one variety for every classic Wu Xing element — but unlike the original three, neither can be planted. They only grow wild, scattered by the world itself; see Solar Terms & Wild Spirit Herbs for where they turn up and why.

The favor is not flavor text. At the cauldron, a herb whose variety favors the effect you're refining toward weighs into the ritual's average quality at Herb-Affinity-Matched-Multiplier (×1.35) — a real bump over the plain Spirit Herb's steady ×1. Use an elemental herb for anything other than its favored effect and the weighting goes the other way, at Herb-Affinity-Mismatched-Multiplier (×0.9) — worse than just reaching for the base herb. An elemental herb is a bet on one specific pill, not a strict upgrade.

Which variety is worth planting also depends on the sky over your abode: an elemental herb grows faster under weather that shares its element. See Cave Abodes for the full mechanic — the abode's plot is the same one this page's yield and quality numbers describe.

The Pills

Grade multiplies the duration of the first two and the banked charges of the last two.

Qi Gathering Pill

Applies to every source of cultivation Qi — meditation drain and absorbed cores alike — for five minutes. Re-consuming refreshes the timer rather than stacking a second copy. It multiplies alongside your race bonus, your skill tree's Insight branch, and everything else that touches Qi gain.

Clarity Pill

Multiplies the duration of a breakthrough, an advancement or a refinement ritual by 0.75 — a quarter faster — for five minutes. It stacks multiplicatively with the race and skill-tree ritual-speed bonuses, and the same 90% floor that clamps those applies to the total.

Shorter rituals also mean fewer tribulation bolts, since bolts fall on a fixed interval of ritual progress.

Tribulation Ward Pill

A banked charge fully negates the damage of one tribulation lightning strike. The bolt still falls, with all its noise and light — it simply does not hurt you. Charges persist until they are spent, so you can bank up to three before a dangerous breakthrough and walk into it knowing the first three bolts are free.

This is the direct counter to a heavy karma ledger, and the standard preparation for an Ascension attempt, which throws roughly forty-five bolts.

Clear-Mind Pill

The Heart-Devil Trial's answer to the Ward Pill, and it does two jobs.

A banked charge holds your composure through one pulse of the trial — the inner demon still appears, but that pulse drains no composure at all. Charges persist until used, up to three at a time.

The same pill also cures Qi Deviation outright — the lingering affliction a broken trial leaves behind. So it is worth carrying one going into a trial and one coming out of it.

A deeply Yin- or Yang-leaned cultivator faces the Heart-Devil Trial instead of lightning, so a Ward Pill does them no good and a Clear-Mind Pill is the only ward that helps. See Tribulations.

Notes

• None of the four drop on death.
• All four are also valid spirit beast food, worth 25 Qi each when fed — a considerably worse use of a Perfect-grade pill than eating it yourself.
• Alchemy-Enabled is the master switch for the cauldron; Fields-Enabled for the plots.

Every duration, multiplier, grade threshold and charge count lives in AlchemyConfig.json; the field tuning lives in DwellingConfig.json. See Config, and the related commands on the Commands page.