Spirit Vein Compass

The Vein-Seeking Sinan (寻脉司南) is a held compass that finds the one kind of ground a breakthrough cannot do without: a rich or dragon spirit vein. Right-click it to divine, and a line in chat names the nearest vein, how far away it lies and which way to walk. Keep the compass in your hand and the vein stays pinned on your HUD compass bar and your world map until you arrive. Its Codex article is titled Spirit Vein Compass (灵脉罗盘).

Anyone can make one from ordinary materials before their first breakthrough. It needs no realm, costs no Qi and is never used up.

v0.11.1 Its upgrade, the Heaven-Seeking Luopan (寻天罗盘), has four dials and also finds open Secret Realms, your Spirit Dens and the Calamity that walks the world.

Why you will want one

A breakthrough ritual only moves while the chunk you sit in holds at least 750 Qi (Breakthrough-Min-Chunk-Qi). An ordinary vein cannot do that, however long you wait for it to refill, because its whole pool is smaller than the bar:

So finding a rich or dragon vein is the hardest part of every breakthrough. The odds above are averages: they are redistributed toward spirit-rich regions (see The Land Has Shape), so the rare tiers cluster. The compass is how you stop wandering. A rich or dragon vein that other cultivators have drained below 750 is a different problem: the ritual pauses until it refills, as described in Realms & Stages.

When you sit down on ground that is too shallow, the ritual says so, and since v0.11.1 the notice ends by pointing at the Sinan. That goes for the breakthrough notice and for the matching "too shallow" notices of sub-stage advancement, weapon refinement and beast reforging.

Making one

Craft the Sinan at a Workbench, on its Tinkering tab. It takes 3 seconds and needs no recipe to be learned first.

There is no realm requirement: you do not need to have broken through anything first. For where Spirit Herb comes from, see wild Spirit Herb bushes and Spirit Fields. The Sinan is Rare quality and does not stack, and there is no permission node for using it. The Codex article shows the recipe live from the item's own asset, so a server that edits the recipe shows the edited one.

Divining

Right-click with the Sinan in your hand. There is no Qi cost, and the only limits are a short cooldown per player (Vein-Compass-Divine-Cooldown-Seconds, 3 seconds) and the world you stand in.

The search runs in the background, so the answer lands a moment after the click. When it finds a vein, three things happen at once:

• A line in chat names the kind of vein, the distance and the direction.
• A soft shimmer sounds at your position, and a short trail of motes drifts out from you toward the vein.
• The vein is locked as your target and pinned. See The pin.

The distance is rounded to the nearest 10 blocks and is never less than 10. It is measured to the middle of the vein's chunk, and a vein fills the whole 32-block chunk, so the number is where the middle lies, not where the edge is. The direction is one of eight: north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-west, west and north-west.

What the needle says

Refusals are shown at most once every 1.5 seconds, so holding the button down does not fill your chat. A dead cultivator gets no answer at all.

The mote trail

The trail is Vein-Compass-Trail-Points motes (8 by default) in a line. It starts about 1.5 blocks from you, spaces them 1.2 blocks apart at about chest height, and spawns them one after another, so the line reads as flowing away from you. It always runs straight toward the vein, even when the vein is behind you, rather than the way you happen to face. Rich veins get jade motes and dragon veins gold ones, and each mote lingers a little over a second. Motes that would land past the vein itself are dropped, so a close vein gets a shorter line. Set the key to 0 and there is no trail.

What it finds

• The nearest vein born rich or dragon. Distance is measured in a straight line from where you stand to the middle of each chunk, and the closer of a rich and a dragon vein wins; dragon veins are not preferred.
• Out to 48 chunks (Vein-Compass-Search-Radius-Chunks), which is 1,536 blocks. The search area is a square, 48 chunks out in every direction from your own chunk. An admin can set anything from 8 to 96 chunks.
• Dragon-only is a server setting, not a player choice. The Codex text "The nearest dragon spirit vein only" is what the article shows when Vein-Compass-Min-Tier is 2. At the default of 1 the compass finds rich and dragon veins alike, and nothing in the item lets a player switch. A server that sets 2 reserves the compass for the grandest ground: Ascension is the ritual that needs a dragon vein.
• It skips land another sect holds, hall included, because that ground already has its own pin and the vein beneath it is not yours to take (see Sect territory). Your own sect's land is never skipped, and if you belong to no sect, every sect's land is skipped. Only sect ground counts: Cave Abodes and personal land claims do not hide a vein from the compass. Vein-Compass-Skip-Claimed-Land turns the skipping off.
• Only in ordinary worlds. It does nothing in the Heavenly Realm, in a Sea of Consciousness or in an instanced world such as a dungeon, and it says so.

The pin

While the Sinan is in your hand and you have a target, the vein is pinned in two places: the HUD compass bar, which draws the same markers the world map does, and the world map itself. The pin shows even when the vein is far beyond your render distance, and it sits on the middle of the vein's chunk.

Its label reads Rich Spirit Vein - 640 blocks or Dragon Spirit Vein - 640 blocks, and the number follows you as you walk (rounded to 10, refreshed about once a second).

• The lock pulse. When the compass locks on a vein, and again each time you draw it, the pin brightens and animates on the compass bar for Vein-Compass-Alert-Seconds (6 seconds). An out-of-view pulsing pin is held at the edge of the bar instead of vanishing. During the pulse the label keeps the distance as of the lock; afterward it switches to the live number. 0 turns the pulse off.
• Only while held. Put the compass away and the pin hides, within about a second. Draw it again and the pin returns, pulsing, with no new search. The target is only remembered in memory: log out, or have the plugin reload, and you start fresh, so divine again.
• The compass walks with you. After you move Vein-Compass-Retarget-Chunks chunks (4) from where the last search ran, it quietly searches again. If a nearer vein turns up, the pin re-locks on it and pulses, with no chat line and no trail. If nothing is in range from your new spot, the old target stays.
• If a sect claims your target, the compass looks again by itself. When it finds another vein, it re-locks on that one. When it finds nothing else in range, the pin clears and you are told: A sect has claimed the vein your compass was following. Divine again to find another.
• Arrival. Standing in the vein's own chunk clears the pin, with the line The needle falls still - you have reached the vein. Sit and meditate here. and the discovery chime. The compass checks once a second, so the line can arrive a moment after you cross the border. A held compass does not search again until you divine.
• Another world hides it. The pin only shows in the world where the vein is; enter another world and it hides until you return.

Who sees what

Only you see your pin and your chat line. The pin is built per player from your own target, so party and sect mates do not share it. Players within 32 blocks of you do see the mote trail, and the shimmer is a positional sound that nearby players can hear when you divine; both show them the direction you are pointing but not the distance or the kind of vein. The pin is per player by design.

What it cannot tell you

• It reads where a vein was born, not how full it is. The tier of a vein is a function of the world seed and the chunk alone, so the search never touches a chunk and costs the server nothing. It also finds veins in land nobody has visited. But a vein another cultivator has drained still counts, and so does a rich vein that is empty this minute: a drained one refills, and is still worth walking to. To learn what a vein holds right now, use Spirit Sense, /cultivation debug vein, or sit down on it.
• The temporary rich veins of a Meteor Shower are not counted.
• It reads the roll the server would give today. A chunk that was visited earlier keeps the vein it was first seeded with. If an admin has since changed the vein odds or Qi ranges, the compass can disagree with those older chunks. This follows from how the search reads the vein; it has not been tested in game.
• It points across the ground only, and says nothing about height.

The Heaven-Seeking Luopan

v0.11.1 The Heaven-Seeking Luopan (寻天罗盘) is the Sinan's upgrade: a round heaven dial on a lacquered handle with four dials, tuned past the veins to what moves above them. Its Codex article is titled Heaven-Seeking Luopan. It costs no Qi and is never used up.

Making one

Craft it at a Workbench, on the Tinkering tab, in 5 seconds, with no recipe to learn. It is Epic quality and does not stack.

The four dials

The dial the luopan points to is stored on the item itself, so it survives a chest, a trade and a restart. The item's name and description tell you where it points, for instance Heaven-Seeking Luopan (Secret Realms); a luopan on Spirit Veins just reads Heaven-Seeking Luopan.

A dial whose own switch is off, or whose underlying feature is off (no Secret Realms, no Spirit Dens, no Calamity Beast system), is skipped by the turn and refused by the command. If only one dial is left, the turn tells you the dial will not turn.

Using it

• Left-click turns the dial to the next enabled one, in the order Spirit Veins, Secret Realms, Spirit Dens, Calamities. A line, a gem-drag sound and a small burst confirm it, the old dial's pin hides at once, and the new dial's remembered target (if it has one) shows, pulsing, a moment later. Clicks closer together than 400 milliseconds are ignored. A held luopan cannot punch or break blocks: its left-click is the dial.
• Right-click divines whatever the dial points at: a chat line with the distance (rounded to 10) and the direction, a sound that matches the dial, a trail of motes, and a pin on the HUD compass bar and the world map for as long as the luopan stays in your hand.
• /cultivation luopan with a luopan in hand prints which dial it points at. /cultivation luopan veins, realms, dens and boss set the dial directly, for those who prefer the keyboard. They are positional commands, with no flags.

One cooldown, Luopan-Divine-Cooldown-Seconds (3), spans all four dials; the vein dial also shares the Sinan's own per-player clock. The pin pulse reuses Vein-Compass-Alert-Seconds (so setting that to 0 turns off every pulse, not just the vein one) and the trail reuses Vein-Compass-Trail-Points. A pin shows only while the luopan is in your hand and only in the world it was found in; draw it again and the remembered target returns with no new search, and a quit or reload clears it, though the dial itself stays where you left it.

Vein-Tapping: when the vein it finds is already tapped by someone else's Vein-Tapping Array, the line and the arrival message say so ("...and another cultivator's array already draws on it").

What it cannot do

It points across the ground only, within the world you stand in. It does not find other cultivators' dens or sealed realms, it cannot follow a Calamity into another world (it only tells you one stirs there), and it does nothing in the Heavenly Realm, a Sea of Consciousness or an instanced dungeon. A realm held to its opener's sect gets no eligibility line. Realm eligibility is read when you divine, not re-announced as your realm changes.

Running it

• Commands. The Sinan has no commands or permission nodes. The Luopan has /cultivation luopan and its four dial subcommands, which need only the base cultivation permission.
• The switch. Vein-Compass-Enabled turns the Sinan on or off, and with it the Luopan's Spirit Veins dial. Luopan-Enabled is the Luopan's own master switch. When it is off, a right-click answers with the "does not answer" line, every pin disappears, and the Codex article shrinks to one line saying the compass is switched off. The item can still be crafted, because its recipe is an asset the config cannot remove; it just does nothing.
• The Codex article. The article has the id cultivation:veinCompass, sits in The World section directly after Spirit Veins and before Spirit Sense, and is not part of Progressive Reveal: it shows for every cultivator. It quotes this server's search radius, cooldown, vein ceilings and breakthrough bar, and the live recipe.
• The in-game editor. A Spirit Vein Compass section on the Config tab of /cultivation admin carries all 17 settings: the eight above and, since the Luopan, the nine Luopan-* ones. A value typed outside its range snaps back into range at once.
• Applying changes. An editor change takes effect on the next use. If you edit the file by hand, restart the server so it is read; out-of-range values are corrected when the file loads.

Configuration

The file is mods/Siren_Cultivation/Cultivation/VeinCompassConfig.json. Its ConfigName is "Vein Compass Config", its ConfigVersion is 2 (the Luopan keys were added; every earlier value is kept), and Description-Vein-Compass and Description-Luopan are documentation that the mod rewrites on load, so editing them does nothing. Missing keys fall back to the defaults below.