Rogue Cultivators (散修客)

A Rogue Cultivator is a lawless wanderer with a realm, a Dao element and one or two real cultivation arts of its own. It is not a companion and it is not a rival with a name worth remembering. It is danger roaming the wild, and it comes for you.

v0.10.2 Rogues are on by default (Rogue-Enabled). They exist so a quiet server still has someone worth fighting: up to two roam a world at once, each fighting with a sword and a pair of arts, and each leaving something behind when it falls.

Rogue or Rival?

The Three Tiers

Rogues come in three tiers, and the tier is decided by the realm the rogue rolls. The seven realms are cut two, two and three:

A melee hit varies by up to 10 percent either way. A rogue's nameplate does not show the role name. It reads like Mo Yan the Gale, Golden Core Formation Rogue - a given name, an epithet for its element, then its realm. That nameplate is always English, whatever language you play in.

Realm and health

A rogue's realm is the realm of the player it spawned near, shifted by a random -1, 0 or +1 (Rogue-Realm-Offset-Min and Rogue-Realm-Offset-Max) and kept inside the real ladder. It is fixed for the rogue's whole life.

Max health is Rogue-Base-Health (180) × (1 + Rogue-Health-Per-Realm (0.55) × the realm's number), counting Body Refinement as 0:

Where and When They Appear

Every world with a player in it runs its own timer. When it comes due, the world rolls for a rogue; the next roll is set between Rogue-Spawn-Interval-Min-Minutes (15) and Rogue-Spawn-Interval-Max-Minutes (35) later. A world that already has Rogue-Max-Concurrent-Per-World (2) rogues roaming skips the roll, and a world with nobody in it simply waits. Only the Heavenly Realm is exempt.

A roll first picks one online player as the anchor, then places the rogue on a ring Rogue-Spawn-Anchor-Min-Radius-Chunks (4) to Rogue-Spawn-Anchor-Max-Radius-Chunks (14) chunks away. A chunk is 32 blocks, so that is roughly 128 to 448 blocks.

Who gets picked

The pick is weighted, not fair. Every eligible player starts at weight 1, then:

• Richer ground. Standing on a rich or dragon Spirit Vein raises the weight by Rogue-Qi-Weight (1.5) scaled by vein tier. By default that is 1.0 on ordinary ground, 1.75 on a rich vein and 2.5 on a dragon vein.
• Lonely and far from home. If no other player is within Rogue-Lonely-Radius-Blocks (96) of you, and you have no sect, or your sect has no hall, or its hall is more than Rogue-Far-From-Hall-Chunks (12) chunks away or in another world, your weight is multiplied by Rogue-Lonely-Weight (2.0).

So the cultivator most likely to meet a rogue is the one alone on a dragon vein, far from the sect hall. A crowd near a hall rarely sees one.

What never gets picked

These are hard refusals, not low weights:

• A player standing inside claimed sect territory or protected land.
• A player in the middle of a breakthrough ritual, while Rogue-Skip-Ritual-Players is on (the default).
• A ring position that falls inside claimed sect territory or protected land. The roll tries up to six positions, then gives up until the next roll.

How They Fight

A rogue chases and swings its sword like any hostile creature (it is hostile to players by default), and on top of that it casts its arts every Rogue-Art-Cooldown-Seconds (6) while it has a target within 12 blocks and a clear line of sight. It rolls its two arts when it spawns:

• Elemental Burst - always known. It is the burst technique of the rogue's element, a blast around the rogue.
• A second art - an even coin flip between Sword Qi Slash (a cone in front of it) and Control.

Each cast picks one of its two arts at random. Burst and Qi Slash use the same numbers as the matching player technique, then multiply by Rogue-Art-Power-Multiplier (0.75). Retuning that technique retunes the rogue too. The damage carries the rogue's element.

Each rogue's element is one of those ten, picked at random, with an epithet to match (the Verdant, the Mountain-Bound, the Tide, the Ember, the Edge, the Frost, the Gale, the Miasma, the Thunder, the Hollow). If an add-on has claimed the spare off-ring element slot, that joins the pool too.

Control deals no damage. It slows its target to Rogue-Control-Slow-Multiplier (40 percent) of their normal movement speed for Rogue-Control-Duration-Seconds (5). Being hit again re-times the slow rather than stacking it.

The Codex notes that a rogue's element never counters yours the way another cultivator's would.

Who a rogue will not hit

A rogue's target pick, and the arts it casts, skip:

• Other rogues and Sect Guardians, which its arts never hurt either. Campaign bosses are also exempt from its burst and slash.
• Players standing on protected land or inside claimed sect territory.
• Players mid-breakthrough ritual, while Rogue-Skip-Ritual-Players is on.
• Spectators and creative-mode players who have not opted in to being detectable.

That list governs the arts and the rogue's choice of whom to chase. Its plain sword swings are ordinary hostile-creature behavior.

If a rogue's strike kills you, you get a single line - "A rogue cultivator strikes you down." - and the rogue carries on.

How long they stay

A rogue that is not slain vanishes after Rogue-Lifetime-Minutes (20), and also if its chunk unloads. Rogues are never saved: restarting the server removes every one.

Slaying One

Who gets credit

Whoever lands the killing blow gets credit - and a kill by your Spirit Beast counts as yours. If something else finishes the rogue, the last player to hit it gets credit, but only if that hit landed within Rogue-Kill-Credit-Window-Seconds (30). A rogue that dies to lava, a trap or another creature long after you struck it pays nobody. Credit also needs the killer to be in the same world as the rogue when it dies.

What it pays

A credited kill makes all of these rolls, on top of the ordinary creature-kill rolls any mob gives:

Items go to your hotbar first, then your storage. If your inventory is full, the roll is spent and you get nothing. A cultivator on a test profile (a Profiles sandbox) gets no real cores, manuals or Testaments - the roll is withheld and they are told so.

Azure Dawn standing

Every credited rogue kill earns standing with the Azure Dawn Sect. It counts against the shared daily cap (60 per faction, per player) like Merit does, and Azure Dawn's gain drains a share from its rival, the Crimson Abyss Cult. See Earning Standing and Rivalry. Rogues touch no other faction.

The Rogue's Testament

The Rogue's Testament (散修传承) is an epic-quality scroll: "the last written teaching of a slain rogue cultivator." It remembers the element and the two arts of the rogue it came from, so every Testament is a little different. It is an ordinary item, so it can be traded.

Right-click it to read it. The scroll is used up, and then one of two things happens:

• Most of the time you comprehend a trickle of the Dao: one point of Heavenly Dao comprehension. The message names the rogue's element, but the point always goes to the Heavenly Dao. Against a default cap of 1,000 it is a keepsake, not a power-up.
• Rarely (Rogue-Testament-Technique-Chance, 25 percent) you learn the rogue's elemental art outright, as a real technique. It goes through the ordinary technique-grant rules, so a server restriction on that art still applies. If you already know it, or it cannot be granted, you get the comprehension instead.

Both finding and reading a Testament start the same personal cooldown, Rogue-Testament-Cooldown-Seconds (600, ten minutes):

• You cannot be dropped another Testament during it.
• You cannot read one during it. The Testament is not consumed - you are told your mind "has not yet settled" and can try again later.

That means a Testament you have just found cannot be read for ten minutes. A relog does not reset the cooldown, but a server restart does.

For Server Owners

Lives in mods/Siren_Cultivation/Society/RogueConfig.json. It is JSON-only - there is no section for it in the in-game admin editor. See Society Config for the other files in the folder.

Azure Dawn standing per kill is not here - it is Faction-Azure-Dawn-Standing-Per-Rogue-Slain in FactionConfig.json, covered on Factions.

Commands

cultivation is granted to every player by default. cultivation.admin is granted to nobody - see Permissions.

/cultivation rogue clear has a catch worth knowing before you use it. A rogue already roaming loses its record, so it keeps fighting but pays nothing if you kill it, and it only disappears when its built-in despawn timer fires (a minute past its normal lifetime). The command also resets everyone's Testament cooldown and every world's spawn clock.

For add-on authors

RogueEvents fires PreRogueCultivatorSpawnEvent (cancellable, and can change the rolled realm and element), RogueCultivatorSpawnedEvent and RogueCultivatorSlainEvent. See Events.

Related

• Wandering Rival Cultivators - the peaceful, duel-offering cousins.
• Factions - what Azure Dawn standing unlocks.
• Land Protection and Sects - the ground rogues will not spawn on or cast arts at.
• The Codex has a Rogue Cultivators article in its World category that shows your server's live drop chances.