Cultivation: Xianxia Leveling & Realm Progression

v0.10.3 - A Steady Brush, a Shorter Road, and Nine Terraces

Talismans are drawn by hand now: you trace the glyph stroke by stroke, and how well you trace it decides how it turns out. A Transmission Array network takes the walk out of getting back to places you have already earned. The Heavenly Realm is rebuilt as nine climbing terraces with dew worth gathering. The three factions finally have something to sell. Two quiet pastimes arrive as well: a Tea Ceremony for two, and a full game of Weiqi (Go). And your menus now grow with you instead of showing everything on your first day.

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. One deliberate behavior change: talisman inscription switches to the new drawing ritual by default. See "For Server Owners" below if you'd rather keep the old timer.

Server compatibility notice: v0.10.3 targets the same Hytale Update 6 server as v0.10.2 (ServerVersion: >=0.6.0-pre.0 <0.7.0). No change to the server-version floor.

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Talisman Drawing - Trace the Glyph Yourself

• Inscribing at a Talisman Desk is no longer just a wait. Once you're seated, a grid opens with that talisman's own glyph, and you trace it by clicking each cell in the exact order its strokes fall.
• Three things are judged: accuracy (how few wrong cells you strike), pace (how close you stay to a natural drawing speed) and cadence (how even your rhythm is between strokes). The score adds a third term to the grade roll, next to mastery and affinity, and it moves your failure and botch chances both ways. A clean hand is rewarded. A shaky one pays for it.
• Every talisman has its own base glyph. Talisman mastery unlocks up to three harder flourish versions of it, with more strokes and tighter timing. Drawing a flourish adds a real score bonus to the grade roll, plus extra mastery experience.
• The stall and session clocks only start when you press Begin, so reading the glyph and choosing a flourish never costs you anything. If a drawing is interrupted (you wandered off, ran dry of Qi, stalled or timed out), the page tells you which one it was, right away.
• Multi-charge talismans now show how many charges are really left in their tooltip, not the grade's full count.

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Transmission Array - The Long Walk Home, Shortened

• Fast travel between ground you have already earned. It never takes you anywhere new. The network can reach your Cave Abode's Spirit Spring, your sect's hall, any Secret Realm site open to you, your Sea of Consciousness and, once you have Ascended, the Heavenly Realm. It lists only the destinations you actually have.
• You can open it with /cultivation array, from a placed Transmission Platform, or with a reusable Transmission Compass. Standing at your own Platform costs less and has a shorter cooldown. Traveling any other way costs more. The cheaper rate always applies automatically.
• Each hop costs Qi, and the cost rises with your realm. The network unlocks at Qi Condensation, refuses to open when your Qi runs too low, and stays shut for a few seconds after combat. Every destination is checked again at the moment you confirm, so a site that seals between your two clicks refuses the hop and keeps your Qi.
• Arrival looks for a safe place to stand rather than dropping you blind into a chunk. /cultivation array anchor sets exactly where your Abode or sect hall lands you. Travel cooldowns now survive a server restart.

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The Heavenly Realm - Nine Terraces

• The Heavenly Realm now has a real layout: nine terraces rising from the hub on a climbing spiral, linked by bridges. The first seven are named for the realms of mortal cultivation. The last two are reserved for those who have already Ascended.
• Jade Sentinels, Cloud Serpents and Golden Luan are posted across the terraces instead of wandering at random.
• Heavenly Dew: twenty-seven Dew Blooms grow across the terraces. Right-click one to draw a bead without harming the bloom, then drink the bead for Heavenly Dao insight. Each bloom takes time to refill, and there is a daily limit on both gathering and drinking.
• No building or breaking is allowed anywhere in the Heavenly Realm.

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Factions - Standing You Can Finally Use

• Azure Dawn Sect, Crimson Abyss Cult and Cloudmere Concord each have a vendor now. Wares open up as your standing climbs through Friendly, Honored and Exalted, and you pay in spirit stones. Standing itself is never spent.
• You earn standing by playing: Azure Dawn for Merit and for slaying rogue cultivators, Crimson Abyss for harvesting Devil Qi, and Cloudmere for spirit-stone sales at the Auction House and for finishing the Cloud Ferry quest chain.
• Azure Dawn and Crimson Abyss are rivals, so standing gained with one drains a share from the other. Climbing the side opposed to your Path gets slower at the higher tiers. Daily standing is capped per faction, and repeat sales between the same two cultivators only count once a day, so standing can't be farmed.

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Tea Ceremony - A Duet, Not a Solo Craft

• /cultivation tea invite <player> offers to share tea. Like a duel or an oath, nothing happens until the other side accepts. You both need to be nearby, and the host spends a couple of Spirit Herbs.
• Boil, steep, pour, serve: three rounds of the same four steps, cued to both of you at once. Land them together and your shared Harmony climbs. Miss, and it falls. Reach One Mind (心意相通) and you both leave with a real, if modest, boost to how fast Qi comes to you for a while.
• The reward pays out only once per pair of partners. This is a quiet moment between two people, not a Qi farm. If someone walks away, you drift too far apart, or anyone takes a hit, the ceremony ends. There's no reward, and nothing is refunded or duplicated.
• Ten shared ceremonies earn the title Guest of One Mind.

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Weiqi - A Real Board, No Shortcuts

• /cultivation weiqi invite <player> offers a match on a real 9x9 board, with actual capture, ko and scoring. Accept and you play Black, moving first.
• There are no stakes, no herb cost, and you don't need to stand near each other. Play from the board page: click to place a stone, pass, or resign. Resigning takes a second click to confirm, so you can't do it by accident.
• Two passes in a row end the game, which is scored by territory with komi. If a player is away too long, their turn passes automatically. If they leave for good, the match is abandoned and no result is recorded.
• The first time you beat a given opponent in a real, played-out match, both players get a small Merit reward and the winner gets a little extra. Ten wins earn the title Hand of Black and White (黑白手). The Codex teaches the full ruleset for anyone new to Go.

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Menus That Grow With You

• A new cultivator no longer faces every system in the mod on day one. Menus and Codex articles for a system stay hidden until your highest realm makes it relevant, or until you've already used it.
• When a system opens, you get a short notice, and the Progression Compass lists it under a new Newly Opened section. Your highest realm is a permanent mark that only earned progress raises, so a profile switch or an admin edit never unlocks or re-locks anything for you.
• Prefer to see everything? Turn on Show every system in menus in your Settings.

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Smaller Additions

• Twin Spirit Pact arts can be learned now. Twin Spirit Descent (Foundation Establishment) and Yin-Yang Reversion (Golden Core) used to require an admin grant. Now, long partnered meditation with your spouse carries a chance of insight into each one, rolled separately for each partner.
• Shared Spirit Dens. A den's brood can now be claimed by anyone trusted at the Cave Abode it sits in, or by a fellow member of the sect that holds its land, not only by the keeper. The keeper is told who claimed it.
• New Codex articles: Transmission Array, Factions, Tea Ceremony, Weiqi, Path War and the Depths.
• Treasure Pavilion titles. Owning Cultivation's subscription or one of its paid addons now unlocks a matching selectable title: Dao Protector (护道者), Jade Slip Scribe (玉简执笔), Sacred Body Seeker (圣体求索者), Heavenflame Chaser (逐天火者) or Reverse Walker (逆行者). Titles are grouped by section in your Identity menu. Store titles you don't own stay out of the Gallery, and they're hidden entirely on servers that turn the web store off.

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For Server Owners

• Admin Inspect and Restore. /cultivation admin inspect <player> (and a new "Inspect & Restore" tab in the admin menu) shows a cultivator's full progress. It reads online players live and offline players from their save file, without changing anything. Every admin change to someone's progress, from a command or from the menu, now takes an automatic backup first. /cultivation admin backups lists them, and /cultivation admin restore (then restore confirm) reverses exactly what that one change did. Restores work on online players only.
• Balance ledger. /cultivation admin balance shows how much each system is being used on your server, which helps you decide what to tune.
• Heavenly Realm on existing worlds: new worlds get the Nine Terraces automatically. An existing world keeps its old Heavenly Realm until you run /cultivation admin heaven rebuild and then confirm. This clears and rebuilds the realm and takes no backup, so make one yourself first.
• Talisman ritual: Ritual-Mode in TalismanConfig defaults to DRAWING, even on servers upgrading from an older version. That changes how grades are rolled. Set Ritual-Mode: TIMER to keep the old passive ritual, with no change to any roll.
• Menu reveal while testing: admins see every system by default (Reveal-Admins-See-All). Turn that off in RevealConfig, or use a non-admin account, to see what a new player sees. Reveal-Enabled: false turns progressive reveal off for everyone.
• The tribulation boss bar (Tribulation-Encounter-Boss-Bar-Enabled) now defaults to off while a possible client-crash link is investigated. This only affects freshly written configs. If your existing file already has it on, set it to false yourself.

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Fixed

• Saving is safer. About fifty places that wrote server data straight to disk now go through one shared saver, which also makes a final flush on shutdown. Before, two saves landing at nearly the same moment could race each other, and the later one could be lost.
• Arriving by Transmission Array in another world could run part of the landing on the wrong world's thread. Fixed.

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Support Cultivation -- the Treasure Pavilion

Cultivation is free and will stay free. Every system in this changelog, and everything before it, works without spending a cent. The Treasure Pavilion at https://xianxia.dev/store pays for the time that goes into the free mod, and everything sold there is purely cosmetic: no stats, no power, nothing a non-buyer is locked out of. What you buy reaches you in game on any server running Cultivation, with no file to install. As of this update, it also comes with a title of its own.

Pick up Cultivation: Jade Slip for hand-made palettes, shareable technique slips, champion-only looks and a sect house palette. Or get Cultivation: Sacred Bodies for a body no amount of practice could have earned, and a seasonal shot at being crowned Heaven's Favored. Prefer to support development directly? https://patreon.mermaids.dev/ gets you Jade Slip as a backer reward.

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