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> <abbreviation> 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. v0.11.0 It also wipes the sect's war cooldowns, so a new sect founded under the same name starts clean instead of inheriting them - and a disband is refused while the pavilion still holds stocked items.

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.
• v0.11.0 Inviting a player who already holds a live invite from your sect is refused. It no longer re-arms the expiry or messages them again, so an invite cannot be used to spam someone.

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 War of Conquest, by unclaiming it, or by disbanding - 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 War of Conquest 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 labeled 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 - taken in a War of Conquest, 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's Spiritual Root Type

Since 0.7.2 a sect can name an element of its own with /sect dao set {element}. v0.11.0 Player text now calls it the sect's Spiritual Root Type (灵根类型) rather than its Dao, to keep it apart from the Daos; the command is still /sect dao, and so is /sect building dao. Cultivate on ground the sect holds — its hall, and any building whose root-type switch is on — and the Qi turns toward that element.

Sect-Dao-Enabled (default true) switches the whole feature off.

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 /sect dao set none to clear it. A sect with no Spiritual Root Type 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.

v0.11.0 The sect pays only for new ground. It remembers the highest realm and stage it has paid each member for, and a member's advancement earns XP only above that mark - so starting a fresh profile, or falling back and climbing the same stages again, no longer re-earns what the sect already banked (four times over, in a one-member sect). The mark starts from the best stage any of the member's real stored profiles holds, and a new joiner is seeded the same way, so joining with an established cultivator and then opening a new profile does not pay out the early stages again. A test profile earns the sect nothing, and after an Ascension, Reincarnation or demotion a member feeds the sect nothing until they climb back past their old peak.

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 centered 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 root-type 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 root-type switch you set are yours to keep; renaming what a chunk is for will not quietly unseal it.

Other sects' arrays stay off your ground

v0.11.0 Nobody can plant a permanent Formation on a rival's land any more. A formation flag or altar is refused on another sect's hall or building chunks, and a Trapping or Warding array is also refused if its whole reach would cover them. Your sect's leader and elders can disperse a foreign array that already stands on the sect's own ground, with the same flag gesture its owner would use, or by breaking a foreign altar's eye.

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. assign none takes the use off a chunk and leaves it plain ground, and /sect building list is the same as the bare command. The ids you type are the lowercase names with underscores: scripture_hall, pavilion, guest_court, alchemy_garden, forge, trial_ground and ancestral_shrine. A server owner can change the list in Sect-Building-Types.

The Scripture Hall has a second job: the Sect Library only researches while the sect holds at least one chunk assigned to it.

The switch that matters

Every building carries one switch above all the others: whether the sect’s Spiritual Root Type 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. The pavilion is where most of it is spent, but not the only place; see Where it goes.

There are six 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.

Where it goes

Contribution is always spent from your own balance, and a balance never drops below zero.

Some of it is taken without anyone choosing to spend it: every member of a sect that has just lost a siege loses 10 CP (War-Suppression-Contribution-Penalty-Per-Member), and every member of a sect that loses a Beast Tide at its hall loses 30 CP (Tide-Loss-Contribution-Penalty).

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. v0.11.0 And the shelf is really stocked: an item offer sells only what the Patriarch has put on it. A purchase draws from that stock, so the pavilion never creates items out of thin air, which it used to.

Two kinds of offer:

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

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

additem only sets the price, quantity per purchase and rank; the offer sells nothing until it is stocked. Hold the items and run /sect pavilion stock <id> to move the held stack onto the shelf.

list shows each offer's remaining stock beside it. With Sect-Pavilion-Enabled off, the shelf is closed to buying, but the Patriarch can still list the offers that hold stock and remove them to get the items back.

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. v0.11.0 That cooldown now survives leaving the sect: /sect leave and rejoining clears a member's progress but not a cooldown still running, so it is no longer a free reset.

The Sect Library

The pavilion spends contribution on goods that come and go. The Library spends it on something a sect keeps for good: one exclusive technique manual, researched together. The hall inscription lends a technique only while the hall stands and is lost the instant it falls to a siege. A compiled Library manual belongs to the sect for ever, and every eligible member can take a real, tradeable copy.

Everything runs through /sect library. Bare, it reports the lot: what is being researched and how far along it is, an estimate of the time left, the funding banked, and every technique the sect has compiled with whether you have claimed yours.

1. Choose a subject. /sect library choose {technique} (an elder or the Patriarch by default) names the art to research. Only some arts are on offer. They must be ones that are unlocked by a manual, not fusion, pact, campaign, Transcendent, Grand Dao or Merit arts, not the art your hall already lends, and the sect's level has to reach the art's unlock realm (the realm's number from Body Refinement as 0, times Sect-Library-Sect-Level-Per-Realm). Name one that is not on offer and the command lists the ones that are. There is no vote: a subject nobody wants simply sits at zero.
2. Fund it. /sect library fund {amount} moves that much of your own contribution into the sect's shared funding pool (outer disciples and up by default). It is the pavilion's currency, not a new one, and it is spent: the pool is the fuel and time is the limiter. Funding is accepted even while research is paused.
3. Wait. Progress arrives over real time, Sect-Library-Progress-Per-Hour (25) plus Sect-Library-Progress-Per-Member-Bonus (1.5) for every member, and each point of progress burns Sect-Library-Funding-Per-Progress (2) points of funding. With no funding there is no progress. The target is Sect-Library-Cost-Base (600) divided by the art's manual weight (never below Sect-Library-Cost-Weight-Floor, 0.25), so a rare manual costs more research than a common one. When it fills, the art is compiled, the whole sect is told, and any leftover funding carries forward.
4. Redeem it. /sect library redeem hands you your own copy of the finished manual (inner disciples and up by default), once per compiled art. If your inventory is full nothing is marked as claimed, so you can try again.

What pauses it. Research stops, without losing any progress, whenever the hall would not teach either: the sect holds no hall, it holds no Scripture Hall building (while Sect-Library-Requires-Scripture-Hall is on), or it is under a lost siege's suppression. Time spent paused is not banked for later, and a single catch-up can convert at most Sect-Library-Max-Offline-Hours (24) of elapsed time, so an untouched Library never finishes itself while nobody is looking.

Changing your mind. Choosing a different subject mid-research forfeits Sect-Library-Abandon-Forfeit-Percent (50%) of the progress so far. Funding is never lost.

One art, ever. A sect compiles Sect-Library-Max-Total (1) art in its whole life. Once it has, choose has nothing left to offer.

All of these live in SectConfig.json.

Sect Guardians

v0.10.2 A sect with a hall can pay to post Sect Guardians there: constructs animated by the hall's own defensive array, which the game calls Warding-Array Puppets (tier 1), Sentinels (tier 2) and Colossi (tier 3). They defend the hall in a siege. They do not hold it for you.

/sect guardian
/sect guardian station
/sect guardian dismiss [post]
/sect guardian status

Stationing. Stand in your hall's own chunk and run /sect guardian station. It needs an elder or the Patriarch, a sect of at least Guardian-Min-Sect-Level (2), and Guardian-Station-Cost-Contribution (60) from your own contribution balance, the pavilion's currency again. It cannot be done while your hall is under a live siege (Guardian-Respawn-Blocked-During-Siege). Each paid post is a guardian, up to min(Guardian-Max-Posts, Guardian-Posts-Base + level ÷ Guardian-Levels-Per-Post) posts: at the defaults a level 2 sect (the minimum) may hold 2 posts and a level 4 sect the cap of 3.

Dismissing. /sect guardian dismiss removes the most recent post, and /sect guardian dismiss 2 removes the numbered one that status shows. Posts are interchangeable, so only the count matters. By default nothing is refunded (Guardian-Dismiss-Refund-Percent, 0). If a server sets a refund, it goes back to whoever paid, only outside a live siege, and only Guardian-Refund-Cooldown-Hours (24) after the post was last paid for. Bare /sect guardian and status print posts owned out of the ceiling, how many are standing, and what another would cost.

How strong they are. A guardian's tier is min(3, 1 + level ÷ Guardian-Levels-Per-Tier) (3), further capped by the strongest Warding array on the hall. With no Warding array at all, a guardian is stuck at tier 1. Health is Guardian-Base-Health (240) plus Guardian-Health-Per-Tier (60% of that) for each tier above the first.

In a siege. Each guardian still standing slows the attackers' hold clock by Guardian-Slow-Per-Living-Percent (12 points). That stacks with the Warding slow under the single ceiling War-Total-Slow-Max-Percent, so guardians can slow a siege but never stop one. A guardian never counts as a defender standing on the chunk: a hall whose members are all absent can still fall with three guardians alive. A guardian fights only the sect that is attacking its hall in a live Contest, only within Guardian-Aggro-Radius-Blocks (16) of itself, and never its own sect or its allies. With Guardian-Aggro-Outside-Siege on (off by default) it also attacks members of a sect your sect has a standing Rivalry with, siege or no.

If one falls. A guardian killed by the attackers comes back after Guardian-Respawn-Seconds (900), but never while the hall is in a live Contest. A guardian killed by its own sect or an ally is gone for good: no respawn, no refund, and the post is lost. Live guardians are not saved, so a restart drops the bodies but keeps the paid posts, and they respawn once the hall's chunk loads.

All of these live in GuardianConfig.json.

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 and does not return within the duel's reconnect grace 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. v0.11.0 The purse scales with the field: it is Tournament-Champion-Contribution × (entrants, capped at Tournament-Champion-Max-Entrants) ÷ Tournament-Champion-Reference-Entrants, rounded down. At the defaults that is 150 CP for four entrants, 300 for eight, and 600 for sixteen or more; a field of two or three would pay 75 or 112. A bigger bracket pays more and a tiny one pays less. Four is also the new default minimum field. A server that already wrote Tournament-Min-Entrants: 2 in its config keeps it - the default only applies to a new config, and the code never accepts fewer than 2.

A duel inside a bracket follows the ordinary duel rules, so a player who drops out gets the duel's reconnect grace (Duel-Reconnect-Grace-Seconds) to come back before it counts as a forfeit. 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.

Proposing names the rung as well as the sect: /sect ally propose <sect> <nonaggression|trade|alliance>. The other sect's leader answers with /sect ally accept <sect> or /sect ally decline <sect> within Alliance-Proposal-Expiry-Minutes (60), or the proposal lapses. /sect ally break <sect> needs no consent, and it starts a Relation-Cooldown-Hours (24) wait before that pair can re-form any rung or declare a new siege. /sect ally list (or bare /sect ally) shows your standing relations and the proposals sent and received. All of it is leader-only.

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 season closes a separate Sect standings ladder that sums each member's gain over the season rather than their absolute level. v0.11.0 An account's season gain is its best real profile's gain, so switching profiles cannot inflate a sect's standing.

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.