Secret Realms

A Secret Realm (祕境) is a piece of the world that becomes temporarily better, and then stops. It opens on its own every few hours somewhere near where people actually are — or the moment somebody tears one open with a Realm Map Fragment — stays open for forty-five minutes, and seals itself.

Inside is genuinely better ground: 1.75× on every Qi you draw, a wild population drawn from the rarer half of the tameable spirit beasts, and an extra roll for a technique manual on every kill you land in it.

How one opens

Two routes, and both announce themselves.

The heavens open one

With Schedule-Enabled, every world holding at least one online player rolls for a new site roughly every two to four hours — a random point in that band, so it never feels metronomic. The site is anchored 8 to 24 chunks from a randomly chosen online player in that world, retried a few times if the roll lands on ground a sect or a warded claim already holds.

Anchoring to a present player is deliberate: there is no reliable "centre of the world" to place a realm relative to instead, and a realm nobody is near is a realm nobody finds.

Only one realm per world may be open at a time by default (Max-Concurrent-Per-World).

Somebody tears one open

A Realm Map Fragment drops from creature kills anywhere in the world at 0.3% (Fragment-Kill-Drop-Chance). Using it opens a realm anchored to the chunk you are standing in.

It is refused if:

• that ground is already claimed by a sect or warded by a land claim, or
• your own realm has not reached Foundation Establishment — opening a realm you would immediately be turned away from is refused up front rather than wasting the fragment.

Fragment-Restricted-To-Opener-Sect limits entry to the opener's own sect. It is off by default, because a found realm is meant to be a shared discovery.

Inside

The Qi multiplier stacks — it multiplies what you draw per tick on top of the vein's own tier, your formations, your Cave Abode and your sect hall, rather than replacing any of them. That is what makes a realm better ground rather than merely different ground.

The footprint is a Chebyshev square, so "3-chunk radius" means seven chunks on a side, not a circle.

What lives there

A realm stocks its wild population once, the first time an eligible cultivator is detected inside an un-stocked open site. It draws 4–7 creatures from the same spirit beast roster taming already uses, filtered to species whose own minimum realm is Foundation Establishment or higher — the rarer, stronger half.

They are ordinary wild NPCs, tameable exactly like any other wild beast. And they are not despawned when the realm closes: the barrier ends, the creatures it drew stay.

The land rules

A realm is preserved ground. Every visitor gets the same permissions — there is no owner or member tier, because nobody owns a realm. The shipped interact,entities lets you fight, tame and use things, and forbids breaking blocks, placing blocks and opening containers.

cultivation.land.bypass and the admin bypass skip this exactly as they skip every other land claim.

How one closes

The life of a realm, from opening to grace period

At the close, the elevated Qi, the land protection and the entry gate switch off immediately — but nobody is thrown out on the spot. For Grace-Seconds (30) afterward, anyone still inside is gently walked out to the boundary rather than teleported the instant the timer expires.

Depths

v0.9.1 An escalating, solo layer inside a Secret Realm you have already opened. /cultivation depths, standing inside the open site, gets you in — it needs Golden Core Formation or higher, and a 30-second cooldown applies after any run ends before you can start another.

Push in and you descend floor by floor. Each floor spawns a wave of beasts — starting at 3, growing by roughly 1 per floor — with the minimum species realm allowed to spawn stepping up one realm every 3 floors, and past floor 4 a real chance of an elite at +15% scale per floor. Difficulty stops climbing at floor 10; the floor number keeps counting past that, but nothing gets harder beyond the plateau.

Clear a floor and it rolls a chance — starting at 50%, +5% per floor — at a technique manual, dropped into your escrow: yours to keep, but not banked yet. Then the choice: Extract and walk away with everything in escrow, or Push Deeper for a harder floor and another roll. Push Deeper is a deliberate two-step choice — armed, then confirmed — so a stray click never risks a run you meant to end.

Die with an active floor and the escrow is lost entirely. Disconnecting is treated differently depending on when it happens: between floors, deciding, it auto-extracts what you have earned; disconnect mid-fight and it is forfeited exactly like dying, so there is no way to dodge a losing floor by logging out.

Tuning

Everything above lives in SecretRealmConfig.json. The two background checks that drive all of it are Realm-Presence-Tick-Interval-Seconds (2s — who is inside) and Realm-Schedule-Tick-Interval-Seconds (30s — should one open or close). Lower them for tighter timing at the cost of more frequent checks.

Realm-Enabled is the master switch for the whole system.