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 all 28 built-ins by default. Meeting an art's realm makes you able to hold it; coming by it is a separate event. There are four routes, and an art learned by any of them is learned for good.

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

28 arts ship with the mod: nine open to anyone, ten locked to a single Dao, three to a bloodline, three gathered and three fist 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 centred 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

Three arts, one per race, gated on a Required-Race 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 are the two aggressive ones, and both give something back — Blood Devour drinks what it wounds, Divine Descent mends whether or not it connected. Boundless Potential is the Human answer to having no innate element: a long, cheap damage buff with the longest cooldown of the three, on the race that reaches it earliest.

The Gathered Arts

Three arts are not loosed the moment you call them. 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 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.

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 colours 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.