Sect Wars

A sect war is a siege of a rival Sect's claimed hall. There is no score, no kill count and no capture points - an attacking sect simply has to stand on the contested chunk long enough, uncontested, before the window runs out. There are two kinds. The ordinary siege suppresses the hall: its Spirit Vein plays a tier lower for two days, and the hall stays where it is. A War of Conquest is the harder declaration that takes the hall outright.

The whole system is gated behind Wars-Enabled (default true).

Declaring War

/sect war declare <sect> declares a siege on that sect's hall; /sect war conquer <sect> declares a War of Conquest. Only your sect's leader may declare. The declaration is refused if:

Any siege whose window has already run out is swept and failed before these checks, so a forgotten siege can never lock either side out of declaring.

On success, both sects are told at once - the attackers that the siege is open, the defenders that their mountain is under threat.

The Siege

A siege moves through four phases, all config-driven:

The defender-presence checks in Muster and Contest are the offline protection War-Requires-Defender-Online (default true): a sect with nobody in its hall's world cannot lose its hall. Turn it off for a fully unprotected server.

The rules of the Contest:

• 120 seconds of accrued hold wins it (War-Required-Hold-Seconds; a War of Conquest needs longer).
• Presence is sampled every 2 seconds. Hold only accrues while a member of the attacking sect is standing on the hall's own chunk, and no more than 5 seconds of real time may be credited from any single sample - so a gap with nobody there never counts retroactively.
• A member of the defending sect seen on that chunk stalls accrual for 8 seconds afterwards (War-Defender-Grace-Seconds). Defenders do not have to kill anyone; simply being there is enough to hold the line.
• If no defender is left in the hall's world for War-Contest-Grace-On-Absence-Seconds (120), the siege ends in the defender's favor with no loss.
• Both sides fight under whatever the world's normal PvP rules are. The defenders' own Formations help here: a Mountain-Guarding array chokes an outsider's Qi regen on their ground and slows the attacker's hold clock, and an Immortal-Binding array roots and wounds intruders outright.

Sieges are persisted. A restart mid-siege resumes it with the time it had left rather than handing the defender a free win, and hold progress is flushed to disk at least every 15 seconds. A siege whose window ran out while the server was down is treated as having run its course - the defender gets their post-war immunity anyway.

Guardians and array eyes

v0.11.0 A defender's Sect Guardians are there to be fought, and their array eyes are there to be broken. The server's default land protection (Protect-During-Siege on) shielded both, which left the attackers no counterplay. In a live Contest, a member of the attacking sect can now strike the defender's Sect Guardians and break the defender's array eyes and anchor stones near the hall - and still nothing else on the defender's ground. Guardians slow the hold clock too, together with the Warding slow under one shared ceiling of War-Total-Slow-Max-Percent (50); a guardian never counts as a defender standing on the chunk. See Formations 2.0.

What a Win Does

An ordinary siege does not move the hall. When the hold completes, the hall is suppressed:

• For War-Suppression-Duration-Hours (48) the hall's effective Spirit Vein tier reads War-Suppression-Vein-Tier-Steps (1) lower, never below a normal chunk. The sect Qi bonus, the hall spring and the fields all see the lower tier. The tier stored on the sect is never changed, so when the window ends the hall is exactly what it was.
• Every member of the defending sect loses War-Suppression-Contribution-Penalty-Per-Member (10) contribution.
• Every member of the attacking sect is paid War-Capture-Contribution-Per-Member (15) contribution - the whole roster, not only whoever stood on the chunk. A siege is won by the people who held the line as much as by the ones who walked onto it.
• The defender becomes immune to further sieges, below.

If the defending sect disbanded or gave up its hall before the hold completed, there is nothing to suppress: the siege fails instead, so the attacker is at least told it is over.

Cooldowns

Two separate cooldowns follow a siege:

• Defender immunity. However a siege ends in a result - won, lapsed, the defender's hall gone, or the defense abandoned - the defending sect is immune to every attacker for War-Cooldown-Hours (24) real-world hours, or War-Conquest-Cooldown-Hours (96) after a War of Conquest. A siege that never got past Muster grants none.
• Pair cooldown. After any siege this attacker starts against this defender, win, lose or no-op, the same attacker cannot declare on the same defender for War-Attacker-Cooldown-Hours (24). Each repeat inside War-Pair-Escalation-Window-Days (7) multiplies it by War-Pair-Escalation-Multiplier (2), up to War-Pair-Escalation-Cap-Hours (168). Attacking a different sect is unaffected.

The attacker also cannot declare a second siege while the first is still live.

v0.11.0 Cooldowns belong to the sect, not to its name. Disbanding a sect now wipes its war cooldowns, its recorded suppression and every pair cooldown keyed to it, so an unrelated sect later founded under the same name starts clean. Before this it silently inherited them.

/sect war status

Bare /sect war and /sect war status both report - and any member may ask, not just the leader:

• Whether your sect is attacking or defending, and against whom.
• Hold accrued so far against the required hold.
• Seconds left in the window.
• Whether defenders are currently contesting the chunk, so attackers know why their hold has stopped moving.

With no siege in flight it says so, and adds the hours and minutes left on your sect's own war cooldown if it has one. Asking for status also reaps a siege whose window has quietly run out.

War of Conquest

v0.10.1 The siege above can weaken a rival hall. /sect war conquer <sect> can take it outright - a second, deliberately harder declaration that sits above the ordinary siege rather than replacing it. It has its own switch, War-Conquest-Enabled.

The ordinary suppression siege is unchanged and stays the cheaper, more common tool. Conquest is the escalation, not the replacement - a sect reaches for it only once it can genuinely back the harder terms. It shares the ordinary siege's phases, its one-siege-per-defender slot and its pair cooldown.

When a Conquest hold completes, the defender's hall - the exact chunk and its vein tier - transfers to the attacking sect, and the defender is left hall-less. That single transfer carries a lot with it:

• The sect Qi bonus the hall paid (+5% on a rich vein, +8% on a dragon vein) moves to the victors. The losers lose theirs entirely until they claim somewhere new.
• The hall's shared Spirit Spring, including everything it had banked, follows the ground to the victor on the next sweep. See Cave Abodes.
• The loser's hall inscription goes dark. The art it taught is revoked from every one of their members the moment the hall is gone. The inscription is not captured - it stays recorded on the losing sect and starts teaching again if they ever claim a new hall, and the victor's own inscription is untouched.
• Formations do not change hands. They are controlled by the sect that placed them, wherever they sit.

Allies Who Show Up

v0.10.1 An allied sect can now stand with a defender under siege, not just watch from outside.

• Reinforcing members hold the attacker's clock the same way the defender's own members do — an ally's presence on the contested chunk stalls hold accrual exactly like the defender's own presence already does.
• The alliance has to be old enough to mean something: a relation struck the moment the gate is under attack does not qualify (War-Reinforcement-Min-Alliance-Age-Hours, 24), closing off a same-day alliance of convenience.
• If the siege is genuinely contested and the defender holds out, every allied sect that showed up earns its members War-Reinforcement-Contribution-Per-Member (15) contribution — not just the defending sect itself.

See Sect Diplomacy for how an Alliance is formed in the first place.

Commands

Every War-* value named here lives in WarConfig.json - see Society Config for the reference, and Commands for every command in the mod. A defender's own Formations are active participants in every siege above, ordinary or Conquest alike.