Manuals
A cultivation manual is a lootable book that permanently teaches you something. Use it to read it. A manual teaches either a technique or a skill tree node - never both - and it is the only thing in the mod that hands out progression you did not pay for.
The system is on by default (Manuals-Enabled).
What They Teach
A technique manual adds that art to your learned set, permanently.
Technique manuals used to be a curiosity: Requires-Manual was false on every built-in art, so nothing was actually gated behind one. Since 0.7.4 the flag is Requires-Unlock and it is true on all 28 built-ins, which makes a manual one of the four ways an art is come by at all — and the only one you can go looking for, trade, or take off a body.
A second copy of a manual you can already read is never wasted: it is studied into that art's mastery instead, so manuals stay worth picking up long after the art itself is learned.
A skill-node manual unlocks that node for free. It still honours the node's prerequisites - a manual cannot hand you a tier-5 fork whose tier-4 parent you never took - but it ignores the point cost entirely.
Nodes taught this way are recorded as granted rather than merely unlocked, which matters for /cultivation respec: a respec refunds points per node you paid for, so a free node is excluded from the refund and survives the reset intact. Reading manuals cannot mint skill points, and respeccing cannot destroy a manual you already consumed.
The Shipped Manuals
34 ship with the mod as of 0.7.4: one technique manual for each of the 28 arts, five teaching a first-tier skill node, and the Tattered Manual.
Their item quality rises with the art's tier — 25 are Rare, 8 Epic and one Legendary — so a book glows the color of what it holds and you can weigh it before you pick it up.
Names no art on its cover. Reading it teaches one at random from those you have already grown into — never something beyond your realm, and never something you already know. It is the safety net for a cultivator whose luck with named manuals has run dry.
The five node manuals:
| Manual | Teaches | Drop Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Manual of Iron Sinew | Vitality, tier 1 (max health) | 1.0 |
| Manual of the Hidden Edge | Might, tier 1 (damage %) | 1.0 |
| Manual of the Clear Spring | Insight, tier 1 (Qi gain %) | 1.0 |
| Manual of the Unmoving Mountain | Warding, tier 1 (damage reduction %) | 0.6 |
| Manual of the Windchaser's Stride | Swiftness, tier 1 (movement speed %) | 0.6 |
Which manual drops is chosen from this table by Weight. A weight of 0 means an entry never drops on its own and can only be handed out deliberately. The table is config-driven, and another mod can register its own manuals in Java.
Where They Drop
| Variable Name | Default Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
Manual-Tribulation-Drop-Chance | 0.04 | Rolled every time you survive a tribulation strike. |
Manual-Demonic-Cultivator-Drop-Chance | 0.12 | Rolled when you slay an NPC whose role id is listed in Manual-Demonic-Cultivator-Npc-Roles. |
Manual-Player-Kill-Drop-Chance | 0.02 | Rolled when you slay another player. |
Manual-Demonic-Cultivator-Npc-Roles is empty by default - a server owner fills it with the NPC role ids their world treats as demonic cultivators, which is what makes that drop source live.
The player-kill roll is deliberately tiny, and it is special: what falls is a manual for something the victim themselves knew, drawn from their own learned techniques and unlocked nodes. Cutting down a cultivator can genuinely shake an art loose from them. Like every other PvP spoil it is gated by the anti-farm rules - a farmed kill rolls nothing at all. See Karma.
A manual that has nowhere to go is not awarded. If your hotbar and storage are both full, the roll is reported honestly: no item, no message, no claim of a find.
Reading One
Use the manual in hand. It is consumed on a successful read when Manual-Consumed-On-Use is true (the default).
A manual you cannot use refuses and consumes nothing either way:
- Already known - you already have that technique or node.
- Prerequisite missing - the node it teaches sits behind a node you have not taken.
- Unknown - it names a technique or node that does not exist.
Manual behaviour, drop chances and the drop table all live in the arts configs - see Config - and the related commands are on the Commands page.