Techniques

Techniques are the active arts a cultivator performs - the things you do rather than the stats you accumulate. They sit on top of the Dao system, cost banked Qi, run on real-time cooldowns, and unlock by realm. Since 0.7.2 each one also carries its own mastery rung, so how strong an art is depends on how much you have used it, not only on how far you have climbed.

Performing One

There are two triggers, and they behave identically:

Run /cultivation technique with no argument to list every enabled art with its unlock realm, its Qi cost, and whether you can currently use it.

The Gates

An activation is checked in this order, and the first failure is what you are told:

On success the Qi is deducted, the cooldown is stamped, and the effect runs. Cooldowns are per-technique and measured in real time, so they keep running while you're doing something else.

Unlocking an Art

Every art carries a Requires-Unlock flag, and since 0.7.4 it is true for every built-in by default. Meeting an art's realm makes you able to hold it; coming by it is a separate event. There are five routes, and an art learned by any of them is learned for good.

Fifteen arts are not on any of these routes, because each has a single door of its own that nothing else can open: the four fused arts must be made, the two Twin Spirit Pact arts are comprehended by a married, beast-bonded pair, the three signature arts are won by a milestone, and the six Merit arts are granted when your Merit crosses a threshold.

Not knowing an art outranks every other refusal — you are told you have never learned it, not that your realm is too low. /cultivation technique divides its listing into what you hold, what is within reach, and what is still beyond you, and the keybind menu only offers arts you actually know, so no key is ever bound to something that cannot fire.

This flag is about whether you may use the art at all. It is separate from mastery, which always wants manuals: a second copy of a manual you can already read is still studied into that art's mastery, so manuals matter for every art you own however you came by it.

The Built-In Arts

50 arts ship with the mod. Thirty-five can be come by through the routes above — nine open to anyone, a gathered repair art, ten locked to a single Dao, six to a bloodline, two beast forms, one rite for married couples, three gathered and three fist arts. The other fifteen each have a single door of their own: four exist only as the results of fusion, two belong to the Twin Spirit Pact, three are signature arts and six are Merit arts. Every number below is the shipped default and can be retuned per-technique in the config. Damage and healing figures are the Entry-rung values — mastery multiplies them.

The Dao Arts

Ten arts, one for every element, and each usable only by a cultivator who walks that Dao. Choosing an element is no longer only a question of which damage type your strikes convert to — it decides which art you get.

Eight of the ten are area bursts centered on you and carry their element's own damage type, so they take the Wu Xing counter bonuses for free. Two are not strikes at all: Wood mends and Water wards, which is rather the point of those elements.

The Bloodline Arts

Six arts, two for each of the three races, gated on a RequiredRace rather than an element. They are why a race choice is now about what you can do rather than only about your multipliers.

Demon and Deity each get one art that hits and one that does something else. Blood Devour drinks what it wounds and Corpse Miasma is a plain poison; Divine Descent mends whether or not it connected and Immortal Radiance spends the whole art on other people. The Human pair is the quiet one: Boundless Potential is a long, cheap damage buff on the longest cooldown of the lot, and Hundred Trials Body turns every injury you have survived into a sturdier body — see how it looks on the HUD.

Borrowed bloodlines

A race lock is not always a wall. Five of the six bloodline arts above, and Demon Ape Body below, let a cultivator of another race borrow the art at a real price. Hundred Trials Body is the one true hard lock, and White Tiger Body asks for no bloodline at all.

A fizzle still spends the Qi and stamps the cooldown, but runs no effect and banks no mastery. Two arts depart from the table: Blood Devour fizzles 35% of the time, and Divine Descent costs ×2.5 Qi rather than ×2.

Nothing about it comes free. Enlightenment and a breakthrough will never hand an outsider one of these arts, and of the six that allow borrowing only Blood Devour, Divine Descent and Boundless Potential have a manual to learn from. Off-Race-Access-Enabled switches the whole path off, which makes every race-locked art a hard lock again. A server whose saved TechniqueConfig.json already carries its own entry for one of the older three arts keeps that entry as a hard lock until Off-Race-Allowed is added to it.

Beast Forms

Two arts do not strike at all: they change your shape. Each swaps your model for a beast's for a while, and carries stat riders of its own.

• No hands. While a form holds, you cannot break or place blocks or open a chest, door or workstation, and you are told why.
• An occupied body. If something else already holds your shape, another mod's transformation say, the form refuses and tells you so.
• Logging out drops the form; it does not follow you into your next session.
• Each can also carry a damage bonus or a damage reduction, DamageBonusPercent and DamageReductionPercent among the art's params. They ship at 0, so by default a form is only its stat riders.

The Dao Fusion Rite

Not to be confused with technique fusion. The Dao Fusion Rite (道法双融) is for two married cultivators who have each chosen a Dao element and stand near one another: your two elements blend into a matching Iron Body and Qi Infusion buff for both of you.

Either spouse may cast it, and one cast is enough — nobody has to answer. It works only while your spouse is online, in the same world, within Dao-Fusion-Radius-Blocks (8) of you and has also chosen a Dao element; otherwise the rite refuses to start. It needs the Marriage mod installed, because the bond is the marriage — the same one Partnered Cultivation uses, minus the sitting still. Dao-Fusion-Enabled in Society/PartnerConfig.json turns it off (see Society configs). Unlike the Twin Spirit Pact arts, it is comprehended like any other open art.

The Gathered Arts

Three great arts are not loosed the moment you call them, and neither are the fist ultimate Heaven-Shaking Fist and the Meridian-Opening Art. Use one and you begin gathering Qi; use it again to loose it. The longer you hold, the more it carries.

A charge meter on the HUD tracks it, and the gathering visibly tightens and rises in pitch as it deepens. Only one may be gathering at a time.

The Meridian-Opening Art

The Meridian-Opening Art (通脉术) is the gathered art that heals rather than harms. It is open to any cultivator from Foundation Establishment, with no element or race behind it, and it cures the one thing nothing else on this page can touch: a Meridian Injury.

A tap at the floor cures nothing, and an art released with nothing to mend still spends its Qi. It is deliberately exempt from the technique backfire: a cure should never inflict the thing it treats.

Overcharge

Hold a gathering past its ceiling and, if the art allows it, it does not loose on its own. The first Overcharge-Grace-Seconds (0.75) past the ceiling are a grace window, so a clean full-power release is still easy to land. After that the art begins to overcharge: its power climbs from the full-gathering figure toward a higher one, the Qi drain ramps up to ×3 by the end of the band (Overcharge-Qi-Drain-Multiplier-At-Max), and the effect swells and pulses faster so you can feel it. If the band runs out the art looses on its own at full depth.

It is not free. Releasing while overcharged rolls for a technique backfire — a Meridian Injury. The chance starts at 3% (Backfire-Chance-Full) and climbs toward 45% (Backfire-Chance-Overcharged-At-Max) at the very end of the band, and from three-quarters of the way through (Backfire-Overcharge-Double-Threshold) a backfire that lands draws a second injury as well. Practice softens the odds: an art you have not yet climbed carries up to twice the listed chance, a fully mastered one the listed figure. Release before the ceiling or inside the grace window and there is no overcharge risk at all.

Overcharge-Enabled in TechniqueConfig.json is the master switch, and an art only overcharges at all if its own rule declares an OverchargeMaxSeconds — every gathered art above does except the Merit Aegis of Boundless Compassion, and switching it off puts them all back to loosing on their own at the ceiling.

The Fist Arts

Three arts refuse while a weapon is in hand. They are the visible half of a third progression ladder, climbed by fighting bare-handed.

The unarmed ladder

Every blow you land with a free hand banks fist-art experience, and your bare hands hit harder for it.

• 100 levels, worth up to +220% unarmed damage at the top, plus a further +12% per realm you have broken into.
• XP is measured by the damage that actually got through — 0.5 per point dealt. Hitting something armored teaches less than hitting something soft, and a punch a shield ate whole teaches nothing.
• The bonus applies to your fists and to the three fist arts, and never to a weapon. It also never leaks onto your other techniques: a Sword Qi Slash thrown with empty hands is still a Sword Qi Slash.

By default anything that is not a weapon counts as a free hand, so a torch or a stack of stone still lets a fist art fly. Server owners who want it strict can set Unarmed-Requires-Empty-Hand, and the whole ladder is switched by Fist-Arts-Enabled.

All three scale on the fist ladder as well as your realm, so the levels you spent punching things are what make them worth throwing.

Mastery

Before 0.7.2 an art was exactly as strong as your realm made it. Learn Sword Qi Slash at Foundation Establishment and it did what a Foundation Establishment art does — and it kept doing precisely that until you broke through, however many thousand times you had thrown it. Mastery is the mod measuring practice instead.

Every technique climbs its own five-rung ladder, separately from every other art you know. Two cultivators of identical realm can be nowhere near each other on the same technique.

All three, at once

A rung is not bought and is not a ritual. It needs every one of its three requirements satisfied together:

• A realm you have reached. The only part of the old model that survives.
• Practice XP the art itself earned, and only from successful uses — a refused activation teaches nothing. Each use is worth 2 XP plus 0.05 per point of the art's Qi cost, so an expensive art climbs faster per cast and a cheap one climbs by being used often.
• Copies of its manual studied into it. Reading a manual for an art you already know no longer tells you that you knew it — it studies the art deeper.

Whichever of the three lands last is what promotes the art, and you are told the moment it happens. That includes a breakthrough: clear the realm gate on an art that already had the XP and the books and it advances there and then — possibly several rungs at once, if it had been waiting a long time.

What a rung is worth

Mastery pays in three directions at once, and all three matter. At Pinnacle an art hits 2.2× as hard, costs 25% less Qi, and returns 30% faster. That is a genuine reordering: a well-worn art from three realms ago can be worth more in a fight than one you unlocked this morning.

The multiplier applies to every magnitude the art produces — damage, healing, absorption pools, buff percentages. The cost and cooldown discounts are applied everywhere the raw numbers used to be read, including the affordability check and the “you need N Qi” message, so what /cultivation technique lists is what you will actually pay.

/cultivation technique shows the rung each art stands on and what its next one still needs. Realm now decides only whether you may hold an art; what makes it strong is having actually used it.

Technique Fusion (合道)

New in 0.8.0, and the answer to what the top of the mastery ladder is for. Two arts you have carried to Pinnacle can be fused into a single stronger art that did not exist before.

/cultivation technique fusions        # every recipe, and how close you are
/cultivation technique fuse <id>      # attempt one

The four shipped recipes

Each fusion takes something the two parents could not do apart:

• Thunderous Blade Requiem — the palm's lightning carried on the blade's edge. Sword Qi Slash was a cone; the Requiem breaks outward in every direction at once, radius 8 (+0.6/realm), 45 damage (+9/realm). Fusing away the "aim it" half is the point.
• Diamond Sovereign Ward — one activation that hardens the flesh and weaves the absorbing shield, on the same 18-second duration: 55% reduction (+2%/realm) and a 110-point pool (+20/realm). Both stronger and longer than either defense managed alone.
• Vital Ascendance — a heal of 55 (+12/realm) that, rather than fading once the wound closes, carries straight into 14 seconds of +40% outgoing damage (+3%/realm).
• Frost-Flame Cataclysm — the Ice and Fire daos torn together. Two elements from opposite rings, never meant to share one hand, break outward in every direction at once: radius 8 (+0.7/realm), 55 damage (+10/realm) as Fire, with a ring of alternating fire and ice at its edge. Both parents are Dao-locked arts, so you will normally have walked the Ice Dao and the Fire Dao to carry each to Pinnacle. The result itself costs 95 Qi per cast on a 13-second cooldown, and unlocks at Nascent Soul.

The rules

A fused art is a real art

It is keybindable, listed in /cultivation technique, and starts its own five-rung mastery ladder fresh at Entry — the parents' mastery does not carry across.

And fusing is the only way to get one. Fused arts are flagged Fusion-Only, which removes them from the pools that enlightenment, breakthrough, manuals and granttechnique all draw from. There is no manual for a fused art, and no master can teach you one. Once granted it stays fully performable, even if the server later sets Fusion-Enabled to false.

Recipes live in Arts/TechniqueConfig.json under Fusions — see Arts config. Adding a recipe of your own is pure config, provided the result art has its own entry.

Signature Arts

Three arts are won by a milestone and by nothing else. They are not comprehended, not looted, not taught by a master and not inscribed by a sect — and once you have one it is yours for good. All three are a radial burst of Void damage that returns part of what it deals as health.

None of them cares about your dao or your race, and each deals the Void damage type whatever your own Dao is. Voidscar Reclamation drains a shade less than the Void Dao's own Void Devour (20% against 25%), so a reward open to every Dao never simply outclasses the art that Dao is built around. A burst passes over a campaign boss that belongs to another player and over any NPC it cannot hurt, and neither earns you a heal.

Merit Arts

Six arts are granted when your Merit crosses a threshold. Merit is a virtue ledger, the mirror of Karma, and nothing else teaches these six: not a manual, not enlightenment, not a master.

• Guiding Lantern (引路灯) — marks a lower-realm cultivator with a timed bonus to the Qi they gain.
• Merciful Hand (慈悲手) — heals a wounded lower-realm ally, more the wider the realm gap.
• Aegis of Boundless Compassion (慈航护体) — a gathered ward that shields every other player nearby, never you.
• Bestow Virtuous Qi (渡气诀) — passes Qi to a lower-realm cultivator, who receives more than you spend.
• Karmic Absolution (消业咒) — clears a fixed amount of your own Karma, on a long cooldown.
• Body of Accumulated Merit (功德金身) — a self-heal and a timed damage reduction, both growing with your Merit rank.

The thresholds that grant each one, and what Merit is, are on the Merit page.

Notes on a few of them

One Step, a Thousand Li only uses the horizontal component of where you are looking - pitch is ignored - and the path is stepped one block at a time. The dash stops one column short of a wall (a rise of more than 2 blocks), a chasm (a drop of more than 8), a column with no headroom, or an unloaded chunk. Its reach was widened in 0.7.2 — 6 blocks base rather than 4, +3 per realm rather than +2, and a ceiling of 60 rather than 40. You always land standing on solid ground; in the worst case you simply don't move.

Sword Flying costs nothing to toggle. The real price is an ongoing drain of 6 Qi/second while airborne, reduced by 5% per realm reached. Flight speed is 12 horizontal and 10 vertical, +1.5 per realm. Activating it again lands you, and it is refused outright while a breakthrough or advancement ritual is under way. It also spawns a rideable flying sword next to you - right-click it to mount, the ordinary interact-to-mount flow. Flight works whether or not you ever mount it, so a failed spawn costs you nothing.

Sword Qi Slash and Nine Heavens Thunder Palm deal their damage through the same entry point melee combat uses, which means they pass through every damage filter the mod registers. If you walk a dao, your strike converts to your element and takes its counter bonuses for free - your cultivation path colors all your techniques.

An Open Registry

Techniques are not a closed list. Another mod registers one with CultivationAPI.registerTechnique, supplying its own effect and its own default rule, and it appears in /cultivation technique's listing, obeys the same gates, and can be bound to an item exactly like a built-in. A third-party art runs off its own registered default rule with no config entry at all; a server owner can still add an override by hand with a matching Id. See Registries.

A third-party effect that throws is logged and shrugged off - a broken art cannot take the mod down with it.

Per-technique rules, costs, cooldowns and params live in the arts configs — see Config, where the five mastery rungs are also defined — and the commands are on the Commands page.