Qi Gathering
Qi is the currency of the whole mod — it buys every advancement and every breakthrough. There are two ways to earn it, and they are deliberately better together than apart.
Everything that feeds your Qi pool
Meditation & Spirit Veins
/cultivation meditate sits your character cross-legged and slowly draws ambient energy from the Spirit Vein of the chunk you are standing in. A Spirit Vein is a real per-chunk energy pool: it has a capacity, it depletes as you draw from it, and it regenerates over time. Camp on one chunk long enough and it will run dry, and your Qi-per-second falls with it until it recovers.
Because veins deplete locally and regenerate on their own clock, the fastest way to gather is to rotate between a few good chunks rather than sit on one forever. Use /cultivation debug vein to read the current chunk's remaining Qi.
The Land Has Shape
A vein's strength is not rolled fresh for each chunk. It is laid out as a landscape: the Qi rises and falls across the world like terrain, so neighbouring chunks form slopes and ridges over roughly eight chunks at a time. Walk one way and it climbs; walk back and it falls.
That is what makes the ground worth reading. A run of chunks looks like 459 → 432 → 445 → 428 → 409 → 369 — a slope you can follow — rather than the 417 → 175 → 216 → 324 of an independent roll per chunk, where the only strategy was to keep hopping and hope.
Rich and dragon veins gather into spirit-rich regions rather than being sprinkled evenly, so finding one is a reason to search the surrounding land. Their rarity is unchanged — still exactly the odds the config asks for, only redistributed toward potent ground. Spirit Sense is how you read the slope without walking it.
Server owners: Spirit-Vein-Terrain-Jitter-Percent (default 6) is how far one chunk may stray from that surface, as a percent of its band. A few percent keeps the numbers from looking mathematical; a large value brings back the old spiky field. Existing worlds keep the veins they already seeded — only ground no cultivator has visited is laid out the new way.
Vein Tiers
Not every chunk is equal. Most are ordinary, but some are richer, and a rare few sit on a dragon vein — the chunks worth fighting a sect war over.
Common Vein
The baseline. Regenerates at the standard rate.
Rich Vein
A noticeably faster regeneration multiplier — worth returning to.
Dragon Vein
The best land in the world. Sect halls and cave abodes are claimed on these.
A vein's regeneration multiplied by its tier bonus must stay below the meditation drain rate. If regen × multiplier ever exceeds drain, that chunk becomes an infinite Qi fountain and the entire progression curve stops mattering.
Where the Qi Comes From
Meditating does not empty the square you are sitting on. The draw is split across five chunks: half from the one beneath you, and an eighth from each of the four around it.
50% — Beneath you
The chunk you are sitting in carries half the draw on its own.
12.5% each — The four around
North, south, east and west each give an eighth.
A reason to move on
A share the ground cannot supply is simply not drawn — it does not spill into the others.
Your rate is unchanged by this — only where it comes from. But a favourite spot no longer hollows out one square while its neighbours sit full, and what a place yields now depends on the whole neighbourhood rather than on a single chunk. Sit where four exhausted chunks meet and you draw only the centre's half.
The Vein Drain Radius skill lengthens each of the four arms, so an arm whose nearest chunk is spent reaches further out for its own share. It is not a way to draw more — it is what keeps a high cultivator at their full rate in land that has already been worked over.
The Qi Gathering Talisman
Hold a Qi Gathering Talisman anywhere in your hotbar while meditating and your Spirit Vein absorption rate goes up. It does not need to be in your hand — carrying it is enough. Rate and behaviour are set in SpiritVeinConfig.json.
Cultivation Cores
Killing creatures has a chance to drop a cultivation core. Right-click one to absorb it for an instant chunk of Qi — no meditation required, which makes cores the answer when you want to progress while doing something else.
| Core | Rarity | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Spirit Core | Common | The everyday drop. Small, steady Qi. |
| Profound Core | Uncommon | A meaningful jump — worth saving for a ritual. |
| Divine Core | Rare | Large enough to carry a stubborn breakthrough on its own. |
Absorbing a core while you are already meditating grants a bonus on top of the core's normal Qi value. Save your cores for a meditation session rather than absorbing them on sight.
Drop chances and Qi values for all three cores live in SpiritCoreConfig.json.
Weather Resonance
The sky matters. Meditating during active weather grants a Qi multiplier, and the multiplier is larger when the weather matches the element of the Dao you walk.
| Condition | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| Weather matching your chosen dao element | ×1.5 |
| Any other active weather | ×1.15 |
| Clear skies | ×1.0 |
Which weather maps to which element is itself configurable, by keyword, in DaoConfig.json — so a server using custom weather assets can wire them in without any code.
Putting It Together
An efficient early loop looks like this:
- Hunt until you have a handful of cores and a Qi Gathering Talisman.
- Find a rich chunk with
/cultivation debug veinand sit down. - Meditate through the weather if there is any — rain pays better than clear sky.
- Absorb your saved cores during the session for the stacking bonus.
- When the vein thins out, move a few chunks over and repeat.
| File | Covers |
|---|---|
SpiritVeinConfig.json | Vein capacity, regeneration, tiers, meditation timing, talisman |
SpiritCoreConfig.json | Core drop chances and Qi values |
DaoConfig.json | Weather → element keyword mapping and resonance multipliers |
Config.json | The Qi curve every one of these feeds into |