Spiritual Root

Open your Spiritual Root page with /cultivation way. Your Spiritual Root (灵根) is the element your strikes carry — one of the Five Phases everyone can walk, or one of five rarer mutant roots if your server allows them.

It unlocks at Foundation Establishment (Dao-Unlock-Realm). Your first choice is free.

The Ten Roots

Five classic Wu Xing elements form the Five Phases, and five rarer elements form their own Shadow Roots. Each element overcomes the next in its own ring, wrapping around. Cross-ring matchups are neutral - a Fire cultivator has no elemental edge over a Poison one either way.

An arrow reads "overcomes". Wood overcomes Earth, Earth overcomes Water, and so on around the ring; Ice overcomes Wind, Wind overcomes Poison, and so on around the shadow ring.

Every element maps to a real damage type. Fire, Ice and Poison use vanilla causes; Wood, Earth, Water, Metal, Wind, Lightning and Void are damage assets this mod ships, all inheriting the engine's Elemental cause.

Mutant Roots

The five Shadow Root elements — Ice, Wind, Poison, Lightning, Void — are mutant roots: rarer than the Five Phases, and off by default. A server switches them on with Dao-Mutant-Roots-Enabled.

If a server disables mutant roots after a cultivator already walked one, that cultivator is drawn back once to its fixed classic counterpart the next time they join — no Qi cost, no cooldown spent, and their affinity toward the new root is seeded the same way an ordinary switch seeds one, so they don't immediately drift back off it:

The migration is permanent and only ever runs once per cultivator — re-enabling mutant roots later doesn't undo it, but a server that keeps flipping the switch back and forth never re-migrates someone twice.

Damage Conversion and the Counter Cycle

Once you walk a dao, your outgoing melee damage is converted to that element's damage type and adjusted:

A cultivator with no dao at all is not left out: a refined weapon supplies its own element for conversion and the counter cycle, and when that element matches its wielder's own dao it adds a resonance bonus on top. Techniques that deal damage route through the same filter, so Sword Qi Slash and Nine Heavens Thunder Palm are recoloured by your dao for free.

Switching, and Drift

Switching dao deliberately costs banked Qi and honours a real-time cooldown:

Your dao can also drift on its own. Every elemental kill feeds Dao-Affinity-Per-Elemental-Kill (1) into the hidden affinity of the killing blow's element, and your race's alignment bias feeds it too. When another element's affinity exceeds your chosen dao's by Dao-Drift-Margin (25) you get a warning; if it keeps growing past twice the margin, your dao converts on its own - no Qi cost, no cooldown. Set Dao-Drift-Enabled false to freeze daos to deliberate choices only.

The Ground You Sit On

Weather has always pushed your element. Since 0.7.2 so does the land itself. Meditate in a volcano and your affinity drifts toward Fire; in a glacier, toward Ice; in a bog, toward Poison — whether or not you meant it to.

The element of a place is resolved from its biome’s own name. Terrain-Element-Keywords is a list of keyword:ELEMENT pairs matched as case-insensitive substrings, first hit wins, and it ships with 60 keywords covering all ten elements:

Matching on the name rather than on a fixed biome list is what lets this work on any world — including one whose biomes come from a generator mod. A biome that matches nothing is simply inert ground.

What sitting on it does

Two things, and the second matters more:

• Qi comes faster. Meditating where the land matches the Dao you already walk multiplies what you draw by 1.25. Merely elemental ground — any of the ten, not necessarily yours — gives 1.08. Where you choose to sit is now a real decision rather than scenery.
• Your affinity drifts. Every 10 seconds of meditation adds 1.5 affinity toward the land’s element, feeding the ordinary drift rules. Sit in a volcano long enough and your Dao will turn to Fire on its own.

Terrain is not the strongest pull on your element. Sect ground is stronger still, because a sect’s grounds are cultivated deliberately — and unlike terrain, that one you opt into by joining.

Every value on this page lives in the Dao config - see Config - and the commands are on the Commands page.