Sects

A Sect (宗门) is Cultivation's guild system. Found one, gather disciples, claim a mountain of your own on a good Spirit Vein, and the whole roster cultivates faster for it. A sect that holds a hall can also carve an art into it that every disciple may wield, raise Formations on its ground, grow a shared Spirit Spring in the hall, and go to war over someone else's mountain.

Everything on this page is gated behind Sects-Enabled (default true). With it off, every /sect command refuses politely, the sect Qi bonus stops applying, and existing sect data is left on disk untouched.

Founding a Sect

/sect create <name> founds a sect with you as its leader.

• Names are 3 to 24 characters of letters, digits, spaces, hyphens and apostrophes. Anything else is refused.
• Names are unique, case-insensitively - no two sects may share one.
• You cannot found a sect while you belong to one.
• A roster holds up to 12 members including the leader (Sect-Max-Members).

/sect info (alias i) prints your roster, your hall, your hall's inscription and your sect's score. /sect leave walks away - and drops your elder rank with you, so rejoining does not silently restore your authority. A leader may not leave; they must /sect disband, which dissolves the sect, disperses every formation the sect controlled, drops its pending invites, and lets its hall spring be reaped.

Ranks: the four rungs

Since 0.8.0 a sect has four rungs rather than three.

Only the Patriarch makes or unmakes an Elder — deliberately, because an Elder who could appoint Elders could hand out their own authority. Nobody can kick the Patriarch, and an elder who tries to kick another elder is refused. Being kicked or leaving clears your rank and any pending join request you had.

Every sect wears a tag

Each sect carries an abbreviation: 3–6 characters, letters and numbers only, unique across the server. It is chosen when the sect is founded and shown everywhere the sect's name appears — chat, rankings, the roster.

The Patriarch can change it later:

/sect abbr <tag>

A tag already worn by another sect is refused, as is anything with a space or punctuation in it. A sect founded before 0.8.0 simply has no tag until its leader sets one.

/sect kick matches against the sect's own roster, so a member who is offline can still be removed - which is usually the member you actually wanted gone. The name has to match the roster; it does not have to belong to anyone currently on the server.

Join Policies

The leader picks how outsiders get in, from the dropdown in the sect menu's My Sect tab. New sects start on Invite.

Notes on invites and requests:

• An invite expires after 300 seconds (Sect-Invite-Expiry-Seconds). Invites are held in memory only, so a server restart clears the pending ones.
• /sect join only ever works against a live invite. Request and Open sects are joined through the menu, not that command.
• Pending requests appear as approve/deny rows to leaders and elders in the My Sect tab. They persist with the sect.
• Every path re-checks the 12-member cap, and a request from someone who has since joined another sect is discarded rather than approved.

Motto and Renaming

A leader or elder can set a motto from the menu - free text, trimmed and capped at 60 characters. It shows under the sect name in the menu, and since v0.7.0 it is spoken at the moment it means something: the full-screen title a player sees on joining or leaving the sect carries the motto underneath. (A kicked player is deliberately not shown it.)

Only the leader may rename the sect, and the new name goes through exactly the same validation and uniqueness check as founding one. A rename carries everything keyed to the old name along with it:

• every Formation the sect controls, so the sect's own arrays do not suddenly treat its members as outsiders,
• the hall's shared Spirit Spring and everything banked in it (see Cave Abodes),
• every pending invite, so an invitee can still accept under the new name.

The Sect Hall

/sect claim claims the chunk you are standing in as the sect's hall. Only the leader may claim.

A claimed hall pays the whole roster a sect Qi bonus on Qi from every source - meditation, cores, spring collection, everything - multiplied in alongside your race, skill tree, pill and Dao multipliers:

A sect with no hall gets no bonus at all. Lose the hall to a siege and the bonus stops for everyone at once.

The hall also grows the sect's shared Spirit Spring when Sect-Hall-Spring-Enabled is on - it follows the hall, so moving the hall moves the spring and losing the hall hands the spring, and whatever it had banked, to the victor. See Cave Abodes for how springs fill and are collected.

Beacons and Banners

v0.7.0 A claimed hall raises a standing column of light visible to anyone walking past, not just members - a hall is a real, contestable presence in the world rather than a record only its sect knows about. The beacon re-pulses every Sect-Hall-Beacon-Interval-Seconds (2.5s) and is switched off server-wide with Sect-Hall-Beacon-Enabled - see the Society config.

By default the light matches the vein under the hall. A sect's leader or an elder can instead fly a banner - from the Hall Banner picker in the sect menu, or with /sect banner set <name>. Six ship with the mod:

• /sect banner with no argument lists what your sect may fly, marking the current one. The short name (azure) and the full id both work; /sect banner set none returns to the plain vein light.
• A sect with no hall can still pick its banner - it goes up the moment a hall is claimed.
• Lose the hall to a siege and the light drops back to whatever the vein wanted to be - which is how a valley tells you its owners changed before any messenger does. The choice survives on the sect, so reclaiming a hall raises the same banner again.
• Add-ons can register more banners through registerSectBanner; none of the built-in six are permission-gated.

Every claimed hall is also pinned on Hytale's own world map, tinted with its banner's color and labelled with the sect's name - for everyone, member or not. The map pin is not affected by Sect-Hall-Beacon-Enabled.

Hall Inscriptions

Hall Inscriptions (碑文) let a sect teach one art to every disciple at once. Stand in your hall holding a technique Manual and run /sect inscribe.

• The Patriarch may always inscribe. Since 0.8.0 anyone else may too, if they have bought a one-time hall-inscription right from the pavilion — contribution buys the privilege, not the art, which still costs a physical manual.
• Either way you must be standing on the hall's own chunk - the art is carved into that ground in person.
• The manual is consumed, but only after the inscription actually takes. If the manual cannot be removed from your hands the inscription is rolled straight back rather than teaching the sect an art nobody paid for.
• Only manuals that teach a technique work. Skill-tree manuals grant permanent stat nodes and are refused, because a permanent node cannot be revoked when the hall falls.
• One inscription at a time. Inscribing again silently replaces what was there - the old art is simply gone.
• Running /sect inscribe empty-handed scours the hall clean instead, taking the art from every member and refunding nothing.

The inscription lives in the hall, not in anyone's head. It is resolved live on every technique check, which means:

• Every member can perform the inscribed technique without having read its manual themselves, as long as the sect holds the hall.
• The instant the sect loses the hall - captured in a siege, unclaimed, or the sect disbanded - the art vanishes from every member simultaneously, with no cleanup pass.
• The inscription itself is stored on the sect, so a sect that later claims a new hall gets its old inscription back.
• Members are reminded of the art they are borrowing when they log in, and /sect info only lists it while the hall is actually held.

Set Sect-Inscription-Enabled to false to switch the whole feature off; inscriptions stop teaching immediately while it is off.

The Sect Dao

Since 0.7.2 a sect can name one of the ten Daos as its own with /sect dao set {element}. Cultivate on ground the sect holds — its hall, and any building whose Dao switch is on — and the Qi turns toward that element.

This is deliberately stronger than terrain — 2.5 affinity every 8 seconds against terrain’s 1.5 every 10. A sect’s grounds are cultivated on purpose, and a disciple who sits in them for a season is meant to come out sharing its element. A sect now has a character, and its ground teaches it.

Run /sect dao bare to see the current element, or pass none to clear it. A sect with no Dao named leaves its ground elementally inert, exactly as every sect was before 0.7.2.

Shared Progression

A sect levels because its disciples do. Every time a member advances a stage or breaks through a realm, the sect banks XP for it:

• 10 XP per member stage advancement (Sect-Xp-Per-Member-Advancement).
• 60 XP per member realm breakthrough (Sect-Xp-Per-Member-Breakthrough).

v0.9.1 A sect with exactly one member earns both of those at 4× (Sect-Hermit-Xp-Multiplier), so the stronger halls stay reachable solo instead of at a full sect's pace with none of a full sect's members. The moment a second member joins, the multiplier stops applying.

• Level N costs 200 × 1.6(N−1) — so 200 for level 2, 320 for level 3, 512 for level 4, and so on.

That is the whole of shared progression, and the shape of it is the point: there is nothing to donate and nothing to grind directly. Recruiting people and actually raising them is what builds a sect — a hall full of Body Refinement disciples who never advance earns nothing at all.

Levels gate which buildings a sect may raise. How much ground it may hold is a separate question, and since 0.7.3 that one is answered by how many disciples it has.

Territory

Since 0.7.3 a sect holds a connected stretch of ground rather than a hall and some scattered pins. It spreads outward one chunk at a time from the hall, and the ground it holds is protected.

So a sect founded by one cultivator holds its hall and two chunks around it. Take in a second disciple and it may claim a third. Ground is bought with people, which is the same thing that already drives a sect’s level — and it means an abandoned one-person sect cannot sit on a sprawl.

Claiming from the map

The sect menu carries a live map of your territory: a window of chunks centred on the hall. Crimson is ground the sect holds, faint gold is open ground it could take next, and everything else is inert with a tooltip saying why — another sect holds it, it is out of reach, or the sect has no room left.

Click a chunk to select it, and the row beneath the map offers what can be done with it: Claim Chunk for open ground, or Set Use and Give Up for ground you already hold.

Plain ground, and ground with a use

Claiming and building are two steps. A newly claimed chunk is plain ground — it counts against the allowance, it is protected, and its Dao switch works, but it has no kind. Decide later what it is for with /sect building assign {type} or the map’s Set Use button, and assign none takes the kind back off without giving the ground up.

Assigning a use never re-applies a building kind’s default rules. The land rules and the Dao switch you set are yours to keep; renaming what a chunk is for will not quietly unseal it.

Crossing the border

Walking onto a sect’s ground shows a title on screen naming the sect, and walking off shows another. Your own sect’s border greets you with its motto; a rival’s simply tells you whose land you are standing on. It fires only on the crossing, never while you stand or walk about inside.

Sect Buildings

A chunk the sect holds can be given a kind. Each has a meditation multiplier of its own and a sect level it waits for:

Take the chunk you are standing in with /sect building claim, or take it and raise something on it at once with /sect building claim {type}. Name what a held chunk is for with /sect building assign {type}, give it up with /sect building abandon, and run /sect building bare to list what your sect holds.

The switch that matters

Every building carries one switch above all the others: whether the sect’s Dao presses on cultivators inside it. Toggle it with /sect building dao.

The reverse is equally deliberate. A sect that wants every disciple on one element raises Scripture Halls and an Ancestral Shrine and leaves every switch on; a sect that draws from everywhere raises Guest Courts. Both are playable, and the buildings are how a sect says which it is.

Contribution Points

New in 0.8.0. Where shared progression measures what the sect has achieved, contribution points measure what a member has put in — a personal balance, spent at the pavilion.

There are three ways to earn them:

That the war payout goes to the whole roster and not the raiding party is deliberate: a siege is won by the people who held the line as much as by the ones who walked onto the chunk.

The Pavilion

/sect pavilion list
/sect pavilion buy <id>

Every sect stocks its own shelf. Nobody is handed a server-wide shop list: what is on offer, at what price, and to which rank is entirely the Patriarch's configuration.

Two kinds of offer:

Each offer carries a MinRank (outer / inner / elder), which is what makes the four rungs worth having. The Patriarch stocks the shelf with:

/sect pavilion additem  <id> <itemId> <quantity> <cost> <rank>
/sect pavilion addright <id> <cost> <rank>
/sect pavilion remove   <id>

Sect-Pavilion-Enabled is the master switch.

The Mission Board

/sect mission list
/sect mission deposit <id>

Repeatable tasks that pay contribution. Unlike the pavilion, the board is server tuning — every sect on the server works the same list, set in SectConfig.json under Sect-Mission-Types.

Three of the four accrue automatically as you do the thing — meditating on your own sect's ground, slaying a tameable spirit beast species, winning any duel. gather_item is the exception: there is no passive "picked up an item" hook to accrue from, so it is a manual turn-in with /sect mission deposit.

The per-mission CooldownHours is the anti-farm limit — how long a member waits after completing one before it can progress for them again.

Tournaments

/sect tournament status
/sect tournament start

论道大会 — a single-elimination bracket among your sect's own members. There is no signup step: whoever is online when it starts is entered.

Each round pairs the field and runs every pair as a real duel through the existing duel machinery, at a 0 Qi wager — nothing changes hands but standing — announced to the sect as each round resolves. A player who disconnects mid-match forfeits to whoever is still online; if both are gone the pair is dropped.

The champion is paid, and may wear the Tournament Champion title from then on. With auto-start enabled, a tournament runs on that clock whenever a sect has enough members online and none is already running.

Sect Diplomacy

v0.10.0 Standing between two sects is a real three-rung ladder, each rung a strict superset of the one below it. All three are matters between two whole sects, not individual members.

Offer and answer with /sect ally propose|accept|decline|break. Either party can walk away at any time with break.

The tribulation-assist buff

An Alliance's one active-combat benefit: an allied member standing within 32 blocks of you, and online, cuts 25% off one lightning strike's damage during your tribulation. It is a buff to you, not a shared or split hit — the ally takes nothing themselves for standing near you.

Rivalry — the opposite gesture

/sect rival declare|withdraw is unilateral: no acceptance is needed, and declaring costs nothing but the choice. Withdrawing is cooldown-gated, so a Rivalry cannot be declared and immediately taken back the moment it looks unfavorable.

Two sects rivaling each other at once locks out any further escalation between that pair — you cannot also hold Non-Aggression, Trade or an Alliance with a sect you have declared a Rivalry against, and the reverse — until the Rivalry is withdrawn.

Score and Rankings

A sect's score is the summed global cultivation level of every member the leaderboard has seen, where one member contributes realm x 4 + stage + 1. Bigger, higher-realm rosters rank higher.

/sect top (alias leaderboard) lists the top 10 sects by score with their member counts. The sect menu's Rankings tab shows the top 20.

The Sect Menu

Bare /sect, or /sect menu (alias ui), opens the sect menu - the graphical face of every command on this page. Three tabs:

Roster rows show each member's equipped title in front of their name, and the HUD can carry a sect line naming the sect you belong to - it appears once you are in one, and switches off under Show your sect in Settings.

Commands

cultivation.sect is granted to everyone by default; rank checks happen inside the sect itself, not in the permission system.

Every field named on this page - Sect-Max-Members, Sect-Hall-Min-Vein-Tier, the two Qi bonus percentages, Sect-Invite-Expiry-Seconds, Sect-Inscription-Enabled, Sect-Contribution-Per-Spirit-Stone, Sect-Pavilion-Enabled and Sect-Missions-Enabled - lives in SectConfig.json; tournaments have their own TournamentConfig.json, and Sect Diplomacy has its own AllianceConfig.json. See Society Config for the full reference, and Commands for every command in the mod.