Cultivation: Xianxia Leveling & Realm Progression

v0.9.1 - The Heavens, The Depths, and the Sea Within

Two new endgame dimensions, an escalating solo roguelike, and a full forging system - plus a run of world systems built up around them. Heavenly Realm is a permanent, shared plane that opens above Ascension itself. Sea of Consciousness is a private world that's yours alone, hand-carved and growing as you do. Secret Realm Depths pushes floor by floor for an escrowed reward you can walk away from - or risk for more. Forging stands beside Weapon Refinement as its own crafting ladder, fed by materials from new Wandering Rival Cultivators and Treasure and Ruin Exploration. An addon-facing Admin API addition, and a run of Solo Play quality-of-life on top.

Beta disclaimer: Worlds, progress, sects, abodes, beasts, arts and Life-Bound Treasures all carry over, and your config files are left exactly as they are - every new setting appears with a working default the first time the file is written. Nothing an existing cultivator has earned is taken away.

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Heavenly Realm

• A permanent, shared endgame dimension gated behind Ascension. Reachable with /cultivation heaven ascend; /cultivation heaven descend returns you to exactly where you left off. Every Ascended cultivator on the server shares the same Realm.
• Hand-carved from scratch, not generated: a central plaza tapering into its own underside, twelve standing pillars, a scatter of satellite islands, and an arched bridge tying them together, all lit under a white-gold sky found nowhere else in the mod.
• Dying inside the Realm respawns you inside it, at its own spawn point - never ejected back out through the world you Ascended from.
• Block breaking and gathering are disabled - a hand-carved dimension, not a resource to mine.
• Fixed: there was no visible way to tell how to leave once inside. The entry and status messages now say the exit command outright.

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Secret Realm Depths

• A solo, escalating floor-by-floor push inside a Secret Realm you've already opened - beast count, the minimum species realm allowed to spawn, and elite scaling all rise with depth, plateauing at a configurable cap so a long run stays fair rather than unbounded.
• Every floor clear banks a reward into an escrow that isn't yours until you claim it. Extract any time to keep it for real; Push Deeper (armed, then confirmed - never a stray click) risks it all for the next floor's bigger prize.
• Dying with an active floor forfeits the escrow. Disconnecting is never punished while you're between floors deciding - it auto-extracts what you've earned - but disconnecting mid-fight forfeits it exactly like dying would, so there's no dodging a losing floor by logging out.
• A new themed Depths panel shows your current floor, escrow, and a preview of what the next floor actually brings before you commit to it.

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Forging

• A new standalone crafting system, distinct from Weapon Refinement. Tier 1 uses a vanilla crafting-bench Recipe to craft base forged weapons and armor from raw materials: Spirit-Forged Blade and Spirit-Woven Robe.
• Tier 2 and higher consume a three-rung forging-material ladder (Common, Refined, Pristine) via a placed Forge anchor and the /cultivation forge combine ritual — a locked sequence mirroring the Alchemy and Talisman ritual shape. An item is upgraded in place (same item, no new tier per grade), stamped with ForgeMetadata, and granted a random grade (LOW, MID, HIGH, PERFECT).
• Forging materials drop from the new Wandering Rival Cultivators (below) and Ruin Vaults (below), creating a loop: hunt rivals and ruins to gather materials, then forge your completed sword.

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Wandering Rival Cultivators

• A new roaming NPC that wanders the world peacefully, spawned randomly near populated areas. Right-click to challenge: a 1v1 duel fought with native combat AI, winner takes flat Qi, a technique manual drop chance, and a forging-material drop chance. Losing costs nothing — pure upside to engagement.
• Built as its own system rather than extending the existing player-only Duel framework, because the NPC uses the engine's native combat tree (not technique keybinds) and needs standalone spawning logic independent of the PvP arena.

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Treasure and Ruin Exploration

• Discovered and accessed only at the highest stage of Spirit Sense (PRECISE): two tiers of treasure. Buried Caches sit in place (claimed via /cultivation treasure claim from range, one-time consumed) and hold direct loot. Ruin Vaults are rare, teleport you solo into a private instance with real carved geometry and 0–2 native-combat guardian NPCs, then let you leave at will.
• Instances reuse the InstancesPlugin pattern the Dungeon system already uses, so the architecture is proven. Guardians in Vaults grant forging materials when defeated.
• The Spirit Sense itself got a HUD hint line, a distinct particle beacon on the world map, and a world-map pin so you can see at a glance where treasure sites are.

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Admin API: Player Actions

• A small, addon-facing API addition: PlayerAdminAction. An addon that owns a concept entirely its own - a Heavenly Flame, a bloodline, anything Cultivation has no built-in row for - can now register a row on /cultivation admin's Players tab, targeting whichever player the admin has selected, without Cultivation needing to know what that concept is. Mirrors the existing AdminConfigSection registry, which does the same for server-wide settings.
• Admins can now set a player's Ascension count directly from the Players tab, alongside the other admin-editable fields.

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Sea of Consciousness

• A permanent, per-player private world unlocked at Qi Condensation realm, entered via /cultivation sea enter or a new Sea Page dashboard. Your Sea is persistent across logins — terrain carved once at first entry and saved per-player, with an explorable horizontal radius that grows as your realm advances (256 + 256×realm-steps-since-unlock blocks), keeping pace with your strength.
• Six landmark stages unlock as you progress: Home Islet, Coral Reef, Drowned Shrine, Moon Terrace, Abyssal Gate, and The Still Point, each hand-carved with real geometry and tied to a realm milestone from Qi Condensation up through Void Refinement. A vertical soft floor keeps you at the surface (water acts as a bounce-back, not a drowning hazard) unless you deliberately visit a landmark built below the waterline.
• The Sea's sky is Dao-colored: shaped by your chosen elemental Dao, with one neutral sky if Dao is not yet bound. A new set of 11 Weather assets — one per Dao element plus a default — render a thematically tinted atmosphere.
• PvP is disabled, spawners are suppressed, and it is a solo space — only you see your own Sea. No sect territory overlap, no formations can be claimed. It is a true sanctuary.
• Block breaking and gathering are disabled here too - a personal dimension you've carved for yourself, not a resource to mine.
• Fixed: the Sea Page dashboard could throw a markup error and disconnect you when opened. Fixed.
• Fixed: entering your Sea could, under some connection timings, immediately redirect you back out the moment you arrived. Fixed.
• Fixed: a rare case could place you facing the wrong way on first arrival. You now always arrive facing correctly.

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Solo Play

• A near-empty server now gets a Personal Bests view instead of an empty leaderboard: your fastest realm breakthrough and longest unbroken meditation streak, in the Rankings page and /cultivation top alike.
• A one-member sect now earns sect XP several times faster, so the stronger halls (like the Ancestral Shrine) stay reachable solo instead of at a full sect's pace with none of a full sect's members.
• Starting a realm breakthrough now tells you, up front, roughly how many tribulation strikes to expect and what share of your health they'll cost - the same estimate is in the Codex's Tribulation entry for planning ahead of time.
• Fixed: a summoned Guardian or Warden spirit beast could treat its own owner as a target. It no longer can. Kept close, it now also strikes back the instant you're hit.

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A cultivator is not only what they have broken through. They are also what they have practiced. Feedback welcome!

Want to see all of this running on a live server? Nine Heavens is the official Cultivation server - play.xianxia.dev:9120.

Cultivation is free and always will be. Add-ons like Cultivation: Jade Slip and Cultivation: Sacred Bodies are what pay for the free half - they live in the Treasure Pavilion at https://xianxia.dev/store. Guides, the full API reference and the wiki are at https://xianxia.dev/.