Cultivation: SoulRings

Douluo Dalu (斗罗大陆). A full re-theme that swaps the Xianxia ladder for a Soul Land one. You awaken a martial soul, hunt soul beasts for spirit power across a hundred levels in place of seven realms and twenty-eight sub-stages, and absorb the soul rings those beasts leave behind to claim their skills.

SoulRings is not a standalone mod. Everything a player sees — the HUD, the stats page, /cultivation, the rankings, and the meditation ritual that settles a level — still belongs to Cultivation, and reads its numbers from SoulRings. It is the scenario the 0.5.0 add-on API was built for: it replaces the ladder, re-words the mod's vocabulary, registers its own techniques, and adds its own sections to the admin config editor. Sects, formations, abodes, duels, alchemy, spirit beasts and the skill tree all carry on unchanged on top of it.

Only one mod may replace the progression ladder at a time, so SoulRings cannot run beside another progression add-on, and a REVERSE profile cannot begin on a SoulRings server.

Awakening

Before a player can gain a single point of spirit power they must awaken a martial soul (Awakening-Required, on by default; turn it off and everyone levels from the moment they join, with souls as an optional extra). /soulrings awaken <soul> does it, once. /soulrings souls lists the choices.

Awakening also rolls two things:

• Innate spirit power, rank 1 to 10. Each rank is 0.45 times as likely as the one below it: rank 1 is overwhelmingly common and a full rank 10 lands roughly once in a thousand awakenings. It sets the level you begin at — a rank 9 prodigy starts at level 9, everyone else at 1 — raises your max health by 1.5% per rank above 1, adds 4% per rank above 1 to all spirit power you gain, and softens the risk of reaching for a ring too strong for you.
• A twin martial soul, for those who rolled rank 9 or 10: a 1% chance of a second soul. A twin soul draws its skills from both souls' lists, the odd rings from the first and the even from the second, and adds 15% to health and damage. It is meant to be the rarest thing on the server.

By default you choose your soul from the full list. A server can instead deal one at random, and can allow /soulrings awaken to be used again, which replaces the soul and re-rolls the innate rank without returning absorbed rings.

The ten martial souls

Each soul belongs to a family — beast souls take the shape of a creature, tool souls of an object — and a combat discipline that tilts the stat spread. The real difference is the nine soul skills each lists in ring order: two soul masters with identical rings and different souls fight nothing alike.

These multiply the health and damage a level and its rings are worth. They tilt a build rather than decide it.

Spirit power and the hundred levels

You climb one level at a time, from 1 to 100, and your rank is read straight off your level. Every tenth level is a new rank and a new soul ring.

Earning it

By default, killing is the only source of spirit power. A creature of ordinary strength (20 max health) is worth 10. Anything tougher is worth proportionally more, so a beast with ten times that health is worth ten times as much, up to 250 times the base — which is what makes hunting real soul beasts worthwhile instead of farming the easiest mob in the world. A player kill is worth three times as much. Only kills you land yourself count.

Sitting on a Spirit Vein does not feed spirit power unless the server turns on Meditation-Grants-Xp; even then each point of Qi is worth a quarter. In Soul Land you grow by hunting, and cultivating is only how you settle what you have already taken.

Taking a level

Once you have banked enough, you sit and cultivate, uninterrupted, to take the next level. Cultivation's own ritual does the work: an ordinary level is its routine advancement (about 25 seconds to start, growing 2.2% per level), and every tenth level is a breakthrough (110 seconds to start with), which is longer and draws tribulation lightning. Leftover experience is kept, not wiped.

A failed ritual — breaking off, or a Qi deviation — costs 35% of your banked progress, but never a level: spirit power that has settled does not unsettle.

The cost of a level climbs in bands. It is 60 at the start, rises by 7.5% of that base with each step inside a rank, and is multiplied by 1.85 at every rank boundary. From level 96 the curve is dropped altogether: each of the last levels costs as much as everything you have ever banked, which at the default means each one doubles your lifetime total. Reaching God is meant to be a server-defining event. Set the final-stretch factor lower for a hard but reachable endgame, or to zero to let the ordinary curve run to 100.

What a level is worth

Max health is 3 per level plus 14 per point of ring power, then multiplied by your discipline and your innate rank. Damage is 0.85% per level plus 2.5% per point of ring power, multiplied by your discipline. A ring's power is its tier multiplier, so a soul master's rings can matter as much as their level.

Soul rings

Each rank below God is entered by taking a ring, and you may carry at most nine. A ring slot opens when you reach its rank: one at level 10, two at level 20, up to nine at level 90.

The drop

A creature you slay has a 16% chance of leaving a ring standing where it fell. By default a ring only drops when you have a slot standing open, so the world is not littered with rings nobody can use. It stays for 90 seconds, and for the first 30 of them it is reserved for the one who felled the beast. After that it is fair game for anyone nearby, which is how soul-ring hunts turn into fights in the source material.

Tier is graded by the age of the beast that shed it, and the older the beast the stronger the ring:

The tiers are rolled independently, rarest first; the first to hit is the ring that drops. A beast's own strength is also added to every roll, so black and red rings come from dangerous beasts, not a lucky roll on a rabbit.

Absorbing one

Stand at the ring and interact with it. Taking it in needs you to stay within 4.5 blocks, undisturbed, for 12 seconds plus 7 for each tier above white — 12 for white up to 47 for orange-gold. Walking away aborts it with no penalty; the risk lands only once the absorption completes.

If the ring is above the range its tier suits for the slot you are filling, the attempt can fail. Each slot of overreach costs 22 points of success chance, softened by 3.5 points for each innate rank above 1, and the chance never falls below 5%. The odds are shown before you commit. A ring within its natural range never risks anything, and turning Risk-Enabled off makes every absorption succeed.

• On success you gain the ring, learn the soul skill your martial soul lists for that slot, and gain spirit power worth 45% of what your next level costs.
• On failure the ring is gone and its power tears through you: damage of 55% of your max health, which by default is capped to leave a sliver, and 25% of your banked spirit power.

Soul skills

Soul skills are Cultivation techniques. A skill you learn from a ring appears in /cultivation technique like any other art and obeys its cooldown, Qi cost and unlock gate; the rules below are as registered, and a server owner can override any of them in Cultivation's Arts/TechniqueConfig.json. The one thing that sets them apart is that they scale with the strongest ring you carry: the same skill from an orange-gold ring is four and a half times the skill of a white one. The numbers below are the base values, before that multiplier.

Those "unlocks at" gates are Cultivation's realms, and they keep working because SoulRings maps its levels onto them: realm one starts at level 1, then 10, 25, 40, 55, 70 and 85 for the seven realms. A server owner's existing config therefore still means what it meant.

/soulrings rings shows all nine slots, /soulrings skills the skills your soul can teach and which you have learned.

What it changes in the rest of Cultivation

• Ranks are titles. The eleven soul-master ranks become equippable titles, and the seven Xianxia realm titles and the Void Peak capstone are withdrawn while SoulRings runs, since they would name a system nobody is playing. They are handed back if only this mod is unloaded.
• Vocabulary. The HUD, menus and messages use Soul Land's words, such as "Spirit Power Deviation" for a Qi deviation.
• Ascension does not apply. Cultivation's Ascension resets you to the built-in ladder, so it is switched off for the whole server while a replacement ladder is installed.
• Your old progress is safe. A cultivator's stored Cultivation realm sits underneath, untouched, so removing SoulRings hands them back the realm they had.

Commands

Every command uses the soulrings permission node, granted to everyone by default.

For server owners

Three files hold fifty-three settings, and each carries its own Description-* documentation: mods/Siren_SoulRings/Config.json (spirit power), mods/Siren_SoulRings/SoulRings/RingConfig.json (rings) and mods/Siren_SoulRings/SoulRings/MartialSoulConfig.json (martial souls). All three are also sections of the in-game admin editor, on the admin page only: Spirit Power, Soul Rings and Martial Souls.

Spirit power — Config.json

Soul rings — RingConfig.json

Martial souls — MartialSoulConfig.json

Status and requirements

SoulRings is version 0.1.0. It requires Cultivation 0.11.0 or newer and a Hytale Update 7 server (Server API 0.7.0-pre.5.1), and is server-side only. It registers with Cultivation's update, build and compatibility checks like every other add-on, and its in-development build is listed on Compatibility.

Unlike the cosmetic add-ons, SoulRings does not withdraw itself if the published compatibility list marks a pairing as broken. It is Cultivation's progression provider, and handing that back mid-session would drop every player onto a stored realm that was never written on a SoulRings server — it would look like total data loss. It warns loudly in the console instead and leaves the decision with you; the manifest's Cultivation range is what enforces compatibility at load.