Dao Seals

A Dao Seal (道印) is a rune you bind into one of Hytale's ability slots. Casting it spends Qi instead of the slot's own cost, strikes with one of ten elements, and leaves a mark of that element on whatever it hits. The mark does little by itself and fades after six seconds. It is a window: strike the marked target with the element that overcomes it and the mark detonates, consumed in a burst of damage and a short control effect.

What sets a reaction off is not tied to one seal. Another seal will do it, so will an ordinary elemental rune that a conversion seal has retuned, and so will a Dao walker's own sword or technique. A mark also does not remember who laid it, so one player's seal and a party member's blade can finish each other's work.

Seals are built on the ability slots Hytale added in Update 7, and Cultivation 0.11.1 as a whole asks for a 0.7.2 server (ServerVersion: >=0.7.2 <0.8.0). Like every core rune, a seal is cast with a weapon in hand.

The Two Rings

The ten elements form two rings of five. Inside a ring each element overcomes the next one around, exactly as on the Spiritual Root page, and the two rings never react with each other.

"Overcomes" has one meaning here: a strike of the overcoming element detonates the mark of the element it overcomes. A Metal strike pops a Wood mark, a Fire strike pops a Metal mark, a Void strike pops an Ice mark, and so on. Casting a shadow seal asks only for the higher realm. You do not need a shadow root to cast one; the root matters only for resonance.

Casting a Seal

Each core ability slot answers to its own ability key, and a cast works only while a weapon is in your hand. In order, a cast checks:

1. For the Black Tide Seal and the Mountain-Suppressing Seal only, that you are standing on the ground.
2. The system is on (Dao-Seals-Enabled, and Techniques-Enabled), you are alive, and you are not a fleeing soul.
3. You have set foot on the path of cultivation, and your realm meets the floor for that seal's ring.
4. You have the Qi, which is paid up front. Short of it, you are told the price and what you hold, and nothing is spent.

A refused cast plays Hytale's usual cast-fail feedback and starts no cooldown. The refusal lines are throttled to one every 1.5 seconds, so holding the key down does not flood your chat.

Two slots, never two copies. Hytale gives you two ability lines, each a core slot plus two support slots. A seal is a core rune, so you can carry two at most, and the game's own slot filter (AbilityCoreSlotFilter) refuses a core rune that is already bound on the other line. Bind two different seals to carry two. A Domain Heart from Dao Domains is a core rune as well and takes a slot a seal would have had.

Resonance

A cultivator whose chosen Dao is the seal's own element is in resonance with it: the seal costs 25% less Qi (Seal-Resonance-Qi-Discount-Percent) and deals 15% more damage (Seal-Resonance-Damage-Percent). Beyond that, a seal's hit skips the Dao's element conversion. It is never recolored to your own element, and it collects neither the flat Dao damage bonus nor the Wu Xing counter bonus an ordinary Dao strike gets. The reactions are the seals' counter play.

The shadow elements are mutant roots, which are off by default (Dao-Mutant-Roots-Enabled), so on a default server a shadow seal is cast without resonance. It casts and reacts all the same.

The Ten Seals

Core seals are crafted items of Rare quality. The Qi price shown is the base Seal-Qi-Cost-<Element> before resonance, and the cooldown is the seal's own. Base damage is what the asset deals before your damage multiplier (levels, race, skill tree and the rest), resonance and any support rune beside it.

The Poison seal fires nothing itself, and the Wind and Void seals can be aimed at empty ground: with nothing under the crosshair they are placed at their maximum reach along the aim line. Support runes bound beside a seal can stretch its duration or area and scale its damage and cost; that is Hytale's own support-rune system, and the tables above are the seal with none bound.

The Wind lift is a zero-damage push and lays no mark; the mark comes with the damaging strike a second later.

Marks

Every damaging hit of a seal lays the mark of its element on the target for six seconds. Hitting an already marked target refreshes it rather than stacking. The names below are the ones the in-game Codex uses.

The burn of Kindled and the poison of Envenomed are damage-over-time ticks, not blows, and a tick never detonates a mark.

Reactions

When a marked target is struck by the element that overcomes its mark, the mark is consumed, a burst lands and an outcome is laid on the target. In the table below the first column is the element that strikes and the second is the mark it consumes. The burst is a single hit of the listed base damage, not a damage-over-time.

A target immune to freezing is not frozen but still takes the Flash-Frozen burst, and the mark is still spent.

What sets one off

All of these must hold at the moment of the blow:

• A player struck it. Mobs, spirit beasts and NPCs never detonate a mark. Any player's blow can, whoever laid the mark.
• The blow carries the overcoming element. That means a seal, a rune whose damage a conversion seal has retuned, or a Dao walker's melee blow or damaging technique, which are converted to the walker's element (a refined weapon supplies its element the same way). Damage the game itself types as Fire, Ice, Poison, Earth, Water, Wind or Lightning counts as well. A damage-over-time tick never counts.
• The mark has been on for at least 0.25 seconds (Seal-Reaction-Min-Mark-Age-Seconds), so a single hit that both lays a mark and carries the overcoming element does not pop it on the spot.
• The target is not in the reaction cooldown. Each reaction leaves a hidden 4-second lockout on the target, so one target cannot be chain-detonated on every hit.
• The blow does not kill. A killing blow detonates nothing; the victim is already going down.
• The attacker may hit the target at all. The same rules that stop a technique from hitting your own spirit beast, your own sect's Guardian posts, quest givers, the Traveling Merchant or a sword mount apply here. Another player's beast is a legal target only where PvP would let you hit its owner.
• If the blow is a seal's own (a converted rune included), the attacker meets that ring's realm floor. Raising a floor in the config therefore also stops a cultivator below it from detonating marks with a seal they already hold.

Missing any one of these means nothing happens and the mark stays. Every effect a reaction needs is checked before the mark is consumed, so a broken asset pack skips the reaction instead of eating the mark for nothing.

Miasma Gale

When Wind detonates an Envenomed mark, the poison spreads: the Envenomed mark is laid on up to Seal-Miasma-Spread-Max (3) other creatures within Seal-Miasma-Spread-Radius (4) blocks of the victim, nearest first. It spreads only the mark, not a second burst. The spread never reaches you, the dead, a fleeing soul, or anything a technique could not hit. A player caught in it must be someone you could damage in PvP, and never a party or sect mate.

Reaction damage

The burst, and the one damage-over-time outcome (Molten), are the listed base damage times:

• Seal-Reaction-Damage-Multiplier (1.0);
• your own outgoing-damage multiplier (levels, race, skill tree and breakthrough modifiers), the one that makes a higher realm hit harder everywhere else in the mod. With Endless Leveling installed and its damage handoff on, Cultivation leaves that term to Endless Leveling and does not add it here;
• Seal-Reaction-Pvp-Multiplier (0.6) if the victim is a player;
• and a bonus inside your own Dao Domain (see below).

The effects are owned by the player who set the reaction off, so a kill from the burst or from Molten is credited to them.

Against other players

A reaction hits a player at 60% of its normal damage by default, and only off a blow that PvP let through in the first place: the world's PvP flag, a duel between exactly the two of you, or an opposed side in an open Path War window. A blow the game cancels never reaches the reaction. Flash-Frozen is also gentler on players: it lasts 0.8 seconds instead of 1.2, and it leaves them their basic attack and block, so it is a setback rather than a lockout.

The same targeting rules apply to the seals' own hits. A blow the technique rules refuse is canceled outright, knockback included, so the Fire and Earth area seals do not hurt your spirit beast, your sect's Guardian posts, the Traveling Merchant or a quest giver standing in the blast.

Conversion Seals

A conversion seal (Cultivation_DaoSeal_Convert_<Element>) is a support rune. Bound in a support slot beside an ordinary elemental rune, it turns that rune's damage into seal damage of its element, so even a vanilla rune can detonate a mark. It does not go beside another Dao Seal.

• It detonates but never marks. Only the ten core seals lay marks.
• It costs no Qi of its own; the rune it sits beside is cast and paid for the usual way.
• The converted hit follows the same rules as a seal's own: it gets resonance, it needs the ring's realm floor to detonate, and it is subject to the seal targeting rules.

There are ten, one per element: Seal of Metal Conversion, Seal of Wood Conversion, Seal of Water Conversion, Seal of Fire Conversion and Seal of Earth Conversion for the classic ring, and Frost Conversion Seal, Gale Conversion Seal, Venom Conversion Seal, Thunder Conversion Seal and Void Conversion Seal for the shadow ring.

Binding Seals

Two ways open Hytale's ability bench over your own ability slots:

Both run the same checks, in this order, and tell you why if one fails (a dead player gets no message at all):

1. Dao Seals are enabled.
2. You are alive, and not a fleeing soul.
3. You have a cultivation profile, and your realm is at least Seal-Min-Realm.
4. You are not in combat, if Seal-Bench-Refuse-In-Combat is on (it is by default). Combat here is the same lockout the Transmission Array uses (Array-Combat-Lockout-Seconds, 10 by default), and the refusal tells you how many seconds are left.

The admin bypass waives the cultivation-profile, realm and combat checks, never the feature switch. The combat check is made when the bench opens; a bench you already have open stays open.

The first time. The first time you get past every check, an introduction page appears instead of the bench. It explains the weapon rule, the two rings and the one-copy rule, and offers Bind Seals, which re-checks everything and opens the bench, or Close. It is shown once per player: the Seen-Dao-Seal-Intro flag is set the moment the page opens, so dismissing it with Escape does not bring it back. After that, the altar and the command go straight to the bench.

Crafting

Everything is made at a Workbench, on its Tinkering tab, in 3 seconds, with no recipe to learn first. The recipes are fixed asset data and cannot read the config, so they stay craftable even when Dao Seals are switched off.

Core seals:

Conversion seals take half the element's material, rounded up, and Spirit Cores:

The Dao Seal Altar: Runestone Shard x4, Spirit Stone x8, Profound Core x1, Cinnabar Ink x2.

The Runestone Shard and the shadow materials are Hytale's own items; the herbs, cores and ink are Cultivation's. Profound Cores drop from tougher creatures (Profound-Core-Drop-Chance, see Spirit Core Config). Cinnabar Ink is sold by the Traveling Merchant when it is switched on, and it turns up in Heavenly Realm shrine chests. The in-game Codex shortens a few of these names (it says Rune Shards, Ice Essence and Light Feathers); the lines above are the item names you will see at the bench.

Beams

Update 7 added Beam entities, textured lines the game draws between two points. Cultivation uses them in three places. All three are cosmetic: none changes who is hit or for how much.

• Heaven-Splitting Arc. A lightning beam is drawn from your chest to the first victim, then from each victim to the next one struck within three quarters of a second. The same creature struck again within a tenth of a second draws no second beam, and a chain does not cross between worlds. Each beam lives about a third of a second. Seal-Arc-Beams-Enabled (on by default) switches it off; with it off, or on a server without the Beam module, the leaps still happen and only the beam is missing.
• Piercing Sun Qi Beam. The technique now draws its lance as a real gold Beam from just in front of and below your eyes to where the lance ends (it stops at the world, as it always did). The beam is wider the deeper you gathered and lasts a little under half a second at a tap, up to about 0.8 seconds at a full gathering. The particle trail it used to be is still there, thinned to half as many particles because the beam carries the line. See Techniques.
• Verdant Bind Seal. A vine beam stretches from your hand to the hook. It is part of the seal's asset and has no setting.

The fallback is automatic. If the Beam asset or the Beam module is missing, or a beam cannot be spawned, the Piercing Sun Qi Beam falls back to its old full-density particle trail and the Arc simply draws nothing extra. The manifest lists both the Beam and the Abilities modules as optional dependencies.

Beside Dao Domains

Dao Domains and seals meet in two places.

• A stronger reaction. A reaction you set off on a target standing inside your own live, un-suppressed Dao Domain bursts harder, by Domain-Seal-Reaction-Bonus-Percent (20%). The bonus multiplies the burst and Molten like any other term in Reaction damage, and is zero anywhere else.
• Shared slots. The Domain Heart rune is a core rune, so it shares the two core slots with your seals, and it is bound at the same altar or with the same command. See Dao Domains for the other side of this.

Edge Cases

• Dao Seals disabled. Every cast and the altar refuse with a line saying so. The Codex article reads "disabled", the system is hidden from Progressive Reveal, and no reaction is resolved. Marks already on a target simply run out. Items already crafted stay in your pack. With Techniques-Enabled off the same is true.
• Reactions disabled. With Seal-Reactions-Enabled off, seals still cast and still mark. Nothing detonates.
• Creative mode and the admin bypass. A cast is free of Qi and of the realm floor for a player in Creative mode or with the admin bypass on. Death, a fleeing soul and the feature switch are still refused. At the altar and the command only the bypass waives the profile, realm and combat checks; Creative mode does not.
• Dying. Hytale clears every entity effect from something that dies, and again when a player respawns, so every mark, outcome and reaction cooldown on the dead is gone.
• Fleeing souls. A fleeing soul cannot cast or open the bench, a lingering burn or poison tick cannot damage or extinguish one, and Miasma Gale does not spread to it.
• Weapon and fist progression. A seal's hit is not a weapon swing or a punch: it earns no Life-Bound weapon experience or bonus, and it does not collect the fist bonus or feed the fist ladder.
• Sworn partners. The four area seals (Fire, Earth, Wind and Void) never count as attacking the partner of a non-aggression Heavenly Oath.
• Logging out. Only a chat-throttle entry and the Arc's chain point are dropped. Seals keep no other state; the one thing Cultivation saves about them is the Seen-Dao-Seal-Intro flag.
• Uninstalling. Cultivation saves no seal data of its own, so there is nothing to clean up. The runes are ordinary items in ability slots; if the mod is removed they become unknown items.

For Server Owners

Everything lives in mods/Siren_Cultivation/Arts/DaoSealConfig.json; the full list of arts configs is on Arts Configs. A missing key falls back to its default, so an older file needs no migration, and an out-of-range value is pulled back into range when the file loads or when it is edited in the menu. Cooldowns, base damage, ranges and the durations of marks and outcomes are asset data, not config keys.

A realm is written as its name, for example NASCENT_SOUL; a value the game cannot read is replaced with the default. The file also carries a long Description-Dao-Seals text that is rewritten from the mod on every load, so do not edit it.

In-game editor. /cultivation admin, Config tab, section Dao Seals. It edits every key above except Seal-Reaction-Min-Mark-Age-Seconds. Numbers typed there snap back into range at once.

Codex and Progressive Reveal. The Codex has a Dao Seals article under The Self, filed right after The Dao & Elements. It reads this server's live numbers, so it is correct after you retune. The system is a Progressive Reveal entry with the id cultivation:daoSeals, opening at Seal-Min-Realm; the per-system override and the admin switches are in the Reveal config.

For Add-on Developers

There are no seal events in 0.11.1. The reaction is resolved inside Cultivation's own damage pipeline and no hook has been designed there yet, so Events lists nothing for it. What an add-on can observe are the ids a seal leaves behind:

<Element> is written capitalized: Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth, Ice, Wind, Poison, Lightning, Void. The burst and outcome are named for the element whose mark was consumed, not the one that struck: Cultivation_SealReaction_Wood is Severed. DaoElement.fromDamageCause follows a cause's Inherits chain, which is how a seal cause resolves to its element while Cultivation_DaoReaction, which inherits only the generic Elemental, resolves to nothing. That is deliberate: a reaction can never chain another.

Gate your own seal-related feature on CultivationAPI.isSystemRevealed(accessor, ref, "cultivation:daoSeals") so it appears when Cultivation's own seals do. The config file has no CultivationConfigs accessor yet, and plugin.siren.Utils.DaoSeal is internal.