Duels

A duel is a consensual 1v1 between two cultivators with banked Qi staked on the outcome. Both sides opt in, the loser forfeits their Qi to the winner, and the transfer conserves Qi exactly - nothing is created.

Gated behind Duels-Enabled (default true).

Challenge and Accept

v0.11.0 Walking out of a duel is a forfeit, after a short reconnect grace - see Disconnecting Mid-Duel.

• /cultivation duel challenge <player> [wager] stakes that much of your banked Qi and challenges them. Omit the wager entirely for an honor duel with nothing on the line. Type something that is not a whole number and the challenge is rejected rather than quietly staking 0 - so 1O0 for 100 tells you, instead of sending a duel you thought was worth a hundred Qi. A negative wager is refused too.
• The challenge expires after 60 seconds if it goes unanswered (Duel-Challenge-Expiry-Seconds).
• Duel-Max-Wager caps the stake. It is 0 by default, meaning uncapped; any positive value is a ceiling, and a challenge above it is refused.
• /cultivation duel accept <player> accepts that player's pending challenge and the duel begins at once. Both duelists are told the stake.
• /cultivation duel decline <player> throws the challenge away.
• Neither player may be in another duel - one duel at a time, on both sides.

Duels are never persisted. A server restart voids anything in flight. A test-profile (sandbox) cultivator cannot stake: a challenge with a wager is refused when either side is on one, because nothing on a test cultivator is real - duel for nothing instead. See Profiles.

Deciding a Duel

A duel ends in one of four ways.

By death. The duel is decided by one duelist dying, not by who struck them. The opponent wins whether they landed the blow themselves, their Spirit Beast did, a third party interfered, or the loser simply drowned. Anything narrower would leave duels that can never resolve.

By yielding. /cultivation duel yield (alias forfeit) ends it immediately and pays the wager to your opponent.

By walking out. v0.11.0 Leaving the server mid-duel, by your own doing, is a yield. You get a short window to come back first - see Disconnecting Mid-Duel.

Voided. No Qi changes hands at all when a duel becomes undecidable:

• The server ends it for them: a stop or crash, the world closing, a staff /kick or ban, or NineHeavens' Discord kick. v0.11.0 (Before 0.11.0 any logout voided the duel, which made logging off a free escape from a losing fight.)
• The duel runs past 600 seconds of play (Duel-Max-Duration-Seconds; 0 disables the timeout). Time spent paused for a reconnect does not count. This is the backstop against an opponent who simply stands still and never fights.

Whoever is still online is told the duel was called off.

The Payout

The loser forfeits up to the wager in banked Qi, and the winner gains exactly what the loser actually forfeited. If the loser could not cover the full stake, the winner receives only what was really there - a duel is never a Qi faucet. A loser who cannot be reached forfeits nothing, so the winner gains nothing either.

v0.11.0 A winner who cannot be paid on the spot - offline, between worlds, or on a test profile - is owed the Qi instead of losing it. The payout is recorded and delivered the next time they log in on a real profile. This covers wins by death, by yield and by forfeit alike. (/cultivation duel claim is a different thing: it collects undelivered Spirit Stone stakes from a Dao Duel, not Qi.)

The Qi moves off your banked total; it does not touch your realm or stage. See Cultivation Realms for what banked Qi is spent on.

Disconnecting Mid-Duel

v0.11.0 What happens when a duelist drops depends on who ended the connection.

A logout the player caused - quitting, a dropped connection, a timeout, or the AFK kick from Siren's Commands - pauses the duel for Duel-Reconnect-Grace-Seconds (30 by default; capped at 120).

• The leaver's wager is held in escrow for the pause: what they staked, or what they had banked if that is less.
• The duelist who stayed cannot yield, challenge, accept or lose the duel by dying while it is paused. They are told how many seconds remain.
• Back in time: the duel resumes at the health the leaver left with. Logging in does not top it up. The held Qi returns to their bank.
• Not back in time: it counts as /cultivation duel yield. The held Qi goes to the opponent, and the leaver reads a note about it at their next login.
• Once per duelist per duel (Duel-Reconnect-Grace-Max-Per-Duel, 1). After that, or with the grace set to 0, a disconnect forfeits at once, as it did before this grace existed.
• The waiting duelist may not walk out either. If they quit (or are AFK-kicked) while the other side is paused, they forfeit to the absent duelist, who finds the win waiting at their next login.

A server-side exit - a stop or crash, a staff kick or ban, the world closing - voids the duel instead. No wager changes hands, and any Qi held in escrow is refunded at the leaver's next login.

Spirit Stone stakes from a Dao Duel follow the same outcome: a forfeit settles them as a yield, a void returns them.

Duels on a PvP-Disabled World

Duel-Overrides-World-Pvp is new in v0.4.1 and defaults to true.

Normally a world with IsPvpEnabled set to false cancels all player-versus-player damage, which would leave a duel decidable only by yielding. Since a duel is explicit, mutual, staked consent, Cultivation re-permits exactly that damage - and only that damage:

• Only between the two duelists, only while their duel is live.
• Only when the world's PvP flag was demonstrably the sole reason the hit was cancelled. If PvP is actually enabled there, the cancellation came from something else and is left alone.
• Never through spawn protection, invulnerability, intangibility, a player already dead, or a world with incoming player damage switched off entirely.
• The revived hit still runs through all of Cultivation's own damage filters afterwards, so realm scaling, Dao conversion, Life-Bound and technique effects all apply as usual.

Set it to false to make the world's PvP rule absolute - in which case a duel on such a world can only be settled by /cultivation duel yield.

Dao Duels — Spirit Stone Stakes

v0.10.1 /cultivation duel challenge <player> <qi> <stones> and /cultivation duel accept <player> <stones> add a Spirit Stone stake alongside the existing Qi wager — real items, held safely in escrow until the duel resolves.

• The stake is returned in full if a challenge is declined, expires, or the server goes down mid-duel.
• Yielding costs a stake too. /cultivation duel yield settles the stones as a loss: they go to whoever you yielded to, exactly the same as a loss decided in the field, elemental bonus included. Walking out of the duel is settled the same way. The wording of the description inside DaoDuelConfig.json that says a yield returns both stakes is out of date; the stones are not returned.
• Fight a duel with a Dao element chosen and your Wu Xing matchup against your opponent's is shown before the first blow. Overcome their element and the win pays a bonus on top of the stake — drawn only from what your opponent can actually cover, so nothing is ever minted.
• Anything that could not be delivered — a full inventory, a disconnect at the wrong moment — waits for you at /cultivation duel claim.

Staking stones. The Qi figure always comes first, so a stones-only wager writes the Qi as 0: /cultivation duel challenge Rival 0 50. The player accepting restates the figure they are agreeing to, /cultivation duel accept Challenger 50. A figure that does not match what was offered is refused and nothing is taken, because stones are real items leaving an inventory. The stakes leave both inventories the moment the duel starts, so each side has to be able to cover theirs, and a side that cannot cancels the duel and refunds the other.

Both duelists need a chosen Elemental Dao (DaoDuel-Requires-Chosen-Element, on by default): pick one with /cultivation dao. As with a Qi wager, a cultivator on a test profile cannot stake stones.

The Dao Duel Tournament

v0.10.1 /cultivation duel tournament register enters a server-wide, single-elimination bracket with a real Spirit Stone entry fee and prize pool, split between the champion and the runner-up.

• /cultivation duel tournament status shows where the bracket stands — registration open, a round in progress, or idle.
• A bye is seeded automatically if the field is uneven, so an odd number of entrants never stalls a round.
• /cultivation duel tournament unregister withdraws before the bracket locks; the entry fee is refunded.
• /cultivation duel tournament claim collects a prize or refund that could not be delivered the moment it was earned.
• A server owner can open registration on demand with /cultivation duel opentournament, or let it reopen itself automatically on a configurable interval once the last one finishes — no longer something that has to be triggered by hand every time.
• Winning the tournament grants the Dao Duel Tournament Champion title.

Entering. Registration is only open during a signup window, which is DaoDuelTournament-Registration-Window-Seconds (300, five minutes) long and is announced server-wide when it opens. /cultivation duel tournament register needs a chosen Elemental Dao and enough Spirit Stones to cover the entry fee, and a cultivator on a test profile cannot enter for a prize. The field runs from DaoDuelTournament-Min-Entrants (4) to DaoDuelTournament-Max-Entrants (32). If the window closes with too few, the tournament is cancelled and every fee is refunded.

The bracket. Each match is an ordinary Dao Duel with nothing staked: standing is all that is on the line, and only the prize pool is real currency. A paired match that has not started within DaoDuelTournament-Match-Deadline-Seconds (300) is forfeited to whichever entrant is still ready, or eliminates both if that cannot be told. A bracket that ends with no champion refunds every fee. /cultivation duel tournament on its own reports the same thing as status, including who your next opponent is.

The purse. Entry is free by default (DaoDuelTournament-Entry-Fee-Spirit-Stones, 0), and the pool starts empty. A server owner can set a fee, which every entrant pays at signup and which goes into the pool, and can add a flat top-up of their own (DaoDuelTournament-Prize-Pool-Spirit-Stones, 0). The champion takes 70% of the pool and the runner-up, the loser of the final, takes 30%. The percents can sum to less than 100, in which case the rest is simply not paid out.

Opening one. A tournament opens by itself every DaoDuelTournament-Auto-Open-Interval-Hours (24) while the bracket is idle. Set it to 0 to turn the schedule off. /cultivation duel opentournament (admin, cultivation.admin) opens registration on demand either way, and refuses if one is already running.

Tournament Wagers

v0.10.2 Spectators can stake Spirit Stones on a single tournament match. It is off by default (Wager-Enabled ships false): switching it on means real stones change hands between people who are not the two fighting, so a server owner has to opt in. When it is on, every match in the bracket opens a betting market the moment its pair is drawn, and the server announces it with the match number. The duel itself is held back for Wager-Window-Seconds (60, at most 600) while bets come in, so a bet can never land after the first blow.

• /cultivation duel bets is the board: every match open for bets with the stake on each side and how long it has left, plus your own stakes and roughly what each would return.
• /cultivation duel bet <match> <duelist> <amount> stakes that many Spirit Stones on one of the two duelists in that match. The duelist is a plain name, case does not matter, and they need not be online.

The rules of a bet. One bet per match, and you cannot switch sides or add to it. You cannot bet on your own match, and by default you cannot bet while you are still alive in the bracket yourself (Wager-Exclude-Live-Entrants). The sect-mates of a duelist may bet unless Wager-Exclude-Duelist-Sectmates is turned on. A bet has to be at least Wager-Min-Bet (1) and no more than Wager-Max-Per-Bet (200). You can only have Wager-Max-Per-Player-Per-Tournament (1,000) riding across a whole run, and a match's two pools together stop at Wager-Max-Pool-Per-Match (5,000). A voided market gives your stake back against that budget.

How it pays. It is parimutuel, with no fixed odds and no house bankroll. Everyone who backed the winner shares everyone who backed the loser, in proportion to what they staked. First Wager-House-Cut-Percent (5%) of the losing pool is burned, and then the rest is split. A winner gets their stake back plus their share, and a winner's profit is never more than Wager-Max-Profit-Multiplier (3) times their own stake; whatever the cap trims is burned too. Every Spirit Stone paid out is another player's stake from the same match, and none are ever created.

For example. Four spectators put 100 each on Rival (400 in all) and two put 100 each on Sage (200). Rival wins. Ten of the losing 200 is burned and the other 190 is shared out by stake, so each backer of Rival gets their 100 back plus 47. The two backers of Sage lose theirs.

When the market refunds instead. To stop two friends passing stones back and forth through a rigged match, a market is voided and every stake returned in full if either side ends with fewer than Wager-Min-Bettors-Per-Side (2) separate backers, or with less than Wager-Min-Pool-Per-Side (100) staked. The board warns when a match would void right now. Only a fight decided by one duelist's own damage to the other pays out. A yield, a death to lava or a fall or a formation, a third party stepping in, a forfeit, a no-show, a voided duel, a double elimination, an admin resetting the tournament and a server restart all refund every stake.

Winnings or refunds that do not fit your inventory wait for you and are collected with /cultivation duel tournament claim, a part at a time if need be.

All of these live in WagerConfig.json.

Commands

Duels-Enabled, Duel-Challenge-Expiry-Seconds, Duel-Max-Wager, Duel-Overrides-World-Pvp, Duel-Max-Duration-Seconds, v0.11.0 Duel-Reconnect-Grace-Seconds and Duel-Reconnect-Grace-Max-Per-Duel all live in the society config - see Society Config for the full field reference, and Commands for every command in the mod. For the other ways cultivators come to blows, see Sect Wars and Sects. Interrupts and Punish Windows earned mid-duel are covered on Combat Depth.