ACS = Amazing Cultivation Simulator.

My current understanding of ACS is that it's more of a collection of mini-games than a game, and part of what makes it fun is combining the different elements into, somehow, a coherent whole. But, that means you can skip a significant part of game mechanics and succeed anyway. However, there is a doom clock in the form of reputation bringing you stronger enemies as time go by, so, you're not exactly completely free... but that's not a huge pressure.

I intend for each section to cover subjects rather than "early, mid, late" game, as I think it will be more useful to people reading it. PS : this reflects my current knowledge of the game and is intended to reflect my current knowledge of the game, not a complete view of the game.


Current game discord / info:
https://steamproxy.com/app/955900/discussions/0/2967272318179202743/
https://discord.gg/7AzmV5TWxR

The game tutorial. For real, do it.

The game has a few types of characters that the player can interact with. In order of "required in early game" to "required late game", those are:

- outer disciples
- inner disciples
- animals
- awakened animals
- monster animals
- illuminated thingy
- (dragon / phenix ? mentioned, not met yet).

Early game: pre-golden core.
Mid game: golden core.
Late game: beyond golden core.


Outer disciples are your source of :
- wood (early to late)
- food (early to late) => check food section
- ore (early), it doesn't grow back apparently. But your inners can run missions to get more, also, outposts for the basic stone.
- meat (early to "somewhat" during late game) => check food section
- building => check building section
- combat (early)
- craft a lot of stuff: including weapons, tools, talismans, clothing (early to late)
- move stuff around and clean room (early to late)
- interact with characters on the main map (early to late)
- used to man "sub-shrines", outposts and cities either as governor (abbot) or as disciples (lost forever) (mid to late)

They are weak fighters, but, properly equipped, can still pack quite the punch against enemies below golden core level (early to mid game probably).


Inner disciples basically do anything else that outer disciples cannot do. The "goal" of the game, at least, their goal, is to make them achieve higher level of cultivation, up and to divinity / immortality level.

That includes:
- unlock the sect tab (MANDATORY).
- combat (early to late)
- interact with characters on any map (early to late)
- conduct "adventure" missions (early to late)
- conduct "camp" missions (early to late)
- explore external maps (early to late)
- craft talismans (early to late)
- craft artefacts (early to late)
- craft potions (mid? to late)

Those are your main fighters.

In ACS, disciples, no matter where they're from, have LOTS of attributes and statistics. But all basically fall on the same principles. The higher it is, the better it is.

As a guideline, I find it useful to have specific crafters (with high crafting and artisanry) as the stuff your outer can make are a reliable source of money and basic materials. "Regular" outers can do all other stuff, farming, cleaning, moving stuff around. Don't forget that with a bit of micro, you can use ensoulment to make vessels (one per inner, so plenty) to take care of all peon level work. But there are different strategies there... so whatever you like.


Attributes (PERception, CONstitution, CHArisma, INTelligence, LUcK) cap at 10 and can be raised.
Skills (Mining, Social and so on) cap at 20, and are then modified by your attributes and possibly other factors to make a final ability score. As far as I can tell, ability score is the one used when actually using the skill.

Example: the social ability score is a function of your social skill and charisma, to which you add some hidden base stat or modifier. But, outside of the character editor, the things you can do in game to raise the ability score basically is raising charisma to 10 and training the skill to 20.


Attributes can are raised by using spells from your inners on your outers, with talisma-boosting stats, and elixirs.

"Basic" and easy to get permanent boosts include:
- eternity pill (+10% to all stats, and +500 max life)
- bane pill (+10% to all stats, and -60 max life)
- primordial spells (+20% to attributes, one spell for charisma, intel, perception, constitution), can be gotten from learning laws.

Easy to get temporary boosts include:
- forming pill
- heavenly, earthly, ether, wisdom, blessed pill, +30% to an attribute and +3 lifespan

There are other ways to learn stats but mostly later in game and for min-maxing (sub spirit artifacts for example).


Skills are mostly lost when you become an inner, with some of them, depending on the type of law you're studying, transforming into your inner base skills.

Skills on the left and central column can be raised by using them:
- Mining raises mining.
- Social raises when speaking to other people (spreech bubbles) => that means having everyone in the same room all the time raises social to high level faster, so IMO it's better to have as few recreation rooms / training rooms / eatery / barracks for outers)
- Farming raises by... farming. Making huge farm is a good idea anyway.
- Artisanry raises sometimes when using crafting, tailor or smithing. It's fairly slow to get higher and it is a statistic that is used for crafting artifacts as an inner, so if you intend to make an artifact crafter, it should be as high as possible.
- Construction is raised by building stuff. Making shallow water and dirt tiles costs nothing and will train your people easily.
- Crafting is raised by using associated crafting skills. Crafting stuff is useful anyway because an easy way to make money at the start of the game basically is to sell crap that cost 1 each to the merchant. Example: brownstone sell at 1 each, brownstone bricks sell at 1 each, and you can make 4 bricks with 1 stone. Do keep some 2000 brownstone for buildings in villages / cities. Same with wood -> timber (harder to grow fast but easy to get in large amount from villages / cities) or wheat -> flour. Offcut, however, doesn't have a cost. Later, when your crafters are high enough, you can make a profit by selling them stuff made from the ingredients you bought from them.
- medecine is raised by practicing medecine. Doesn't matter much, later in game you'll be able to use inner skills / elixirs to completely reboot a character.

Raising stats on the right side is more complicated.
- Battle can be raised by having outer disciple train in fighting sect branchs (check sect branch guides for this)
- the other 3 can't, AFAIK, be raised as an outer. However, they transform into skills for inners, and the higher they are, the higher the corresponding starting stat, which reduces attainment for your inners (that's a concern for advanced min maxing mostly).

PS : Characters have "default" stats, which you can't affect directly, and modifiers: childhood, adult life, age, temporary buffs... and basically, as far as I can tell they mostly got a lot of different formulas to make the final score. To verify this is easy. Make 2 different characters in the reincarnator editor with the same backstory, age, sex and race. You WILL get different stats.

In game terms, laws are a collection of skills, which you're good at if your attributes match the law. Unlocking new laws enable new paths for your inners. There are 3 types of laws you can learn:

- Xiandao cultivation (golden core path)
- Shendao cultivation (divinity path)
- Physical cultivation (body laws)

There are a lot of different laws in the game. Especially Xiandao ones... The ones that matters the most are "Supreme laws", as they're the ones with the best effects in game. All shendao and physical cultivation are supreme. Xiandao... have lots of "weaker" laws.


Ascension, primordial, golden core and wordly law basically are NPC laws, mostly useful to get unorthodox manuals, stat boosts, spells... but mostly they shouldn't be cultivated outside of a self imposed challenge.


Manual pavillion enables your inners to learn skills from other laws... however that's only level 1 skills.

That means that the difference between laws are:
- the base stats necessary to boost the law
- the law element
- breakthoughs are different and they give different bonus once passed
- all level 2 or more skills are exclusive (with the exception of sub-spirit crafting).

As far as I know, there is no level 2 or more skills in laws outside supreme laws, so laws that ain't supreme laws are worthless compared to a supreme law : you'll be able to learn anything in it anyway.

You can equip some level 2 or more skills via sub-spirit crafting, but that's a late game mechanic. I invite you to check guides on sub spirits for details.


Supreme laws form 5 groups:

- Basic Taiyi Law => they're the one that you can choose at the beginning of a game with a human at 1 cost.
- Advanced laws => they're the Xiandao laws that cost 5 when starting as a human.
- Shengdao laws.
- Body laws.
- Talisman law.

You will get all 5 basic Taiyi laws with an event in the first month of the game or so. For others:


You can get advanced laws by farming "manifesting mandate" event. The success rate for this event is apparently influenced by having attributes high enough to learn the law. You can (and should) farm those laws as soon as possible. If you don't get them "naturally", the Derivative calculation skill can (and should) be spammed. It creates an event and has a rather high chance to spawn manifesting mandate.

Other map events can also drop advanced laws (golden casket I think ?), but honestly, you should get them from manifesting event.

Ancient casket (drop from mining boulders) can also drop advanced laws and manuals, but it's pretty time consuming and limited. I wouldn't rely on it that much.


"Lesser" Xiandao laws can be gotten in the following ways:
- using sould inquiry on a dying cultivator => It increases condemnation by 1 and your evil reputation, and has a high chance of learning you a law. For better results, move the bodies to a very ominous room, and bury the corpse afterwards to balance your sect reputation (burying gives good reputation).
- buying law manuals from other sects (requires 1000 reputation and 1 connection for each). Those manuals can also be gotten by using soul inquiry when "people from XYZ sect attacked you on a secret mission" so I'm not really sure it's worth it. There's a limited supply of those, apparently 6 per sect (except demonia)
- stealing them from sects (risky but sometimes doable)
- taking them when you conquered a sect (by then it's mostly unneeded though, but still)
- convince visitors to stay in the sect and have them teach you the laws / their skills.


You should place as many lesser laws as you can in manual pavillions. Besides adding a lot of unorthodox skills to learn (stat boosts in particular), every 1000 point of laws in your manual pavillion reduces inspiration cost by 1% for every disciple, which adds up pretty fast.

Talisman law can be gotten from He Zudao (check diplomacy guide below).


You'll get the first law in this category with an event, when you raise south village to level 2. Explore them and enjoy.

I don't know how to unlock the other ones yet.


You'll unlock the first law as an event around day 100, the event that unlocks demonia temple.

You can learn another one by raising your reputation to maximum with demonia temple and adventuring them, eventually you'll get an "gift" event from the leader and he'll give you this law.

You can learn another on by using soul inquiry on invading demonia cultivators.

I don't know if / where are the other ones.

Xiandao cultivation is the main focus of the game.

It's also the type of cultivation that has the most min/max complexities, despite being the basic one. Its core is the golden core / new laws / learning skill from manuals mechanics. Xiandao are the ones that build artifacts, draw talisman, can launch most misc skills (even if Shendao have a lot of useful stuff too), make formations and so on.

You will NOT be able to make a "perfect" min max Xiandao cultivator as a starting character. To make one he will need assistance from other elders. You can, however, realistically aim for GC 1-3 as your first cultivator and work your way from there. A lot of the boosting can only be done in the outer phase of the disciple's life. Check the appropriate section for this.

Apart from demi-god (which limits your character) and golden core (which must be done at a precise season), there is usually no reason not to raise cultivation and pass breakthroughs.



Inner statistics for Xiandao are pretty straightforward.

Battle determines your hit rate and can't be boosted, AFAIK, once you're an inner. It can be raised as an outer with a sect branch but that's kind of a late game mechanic. But, even if it's "low", it's like 75% instead of 95%. Not that much of a difference.
Social is boosted by charisma and raises via speaking passively (spreech bubbles) to other people on your sect. That's why having common tables with outer and inners is good and making inner run around outers also is, it'll raise social.
Artisanry is kept from when being an outer. As far as I can tell it sometimes goes up when crafting. It has a large influence on crafting artifacts though. I'd advise making a crafter out of someone with a decent stat in this.
Qi sense is can't be trained, but can be boosted by attributes (charisma and constitution) and specific skills (from laws).

The 6 other skills can be trained directly, on the inner skill screen:


Having high level of magic and magic crafting will make your start higher value of those 6 skills but it barely makes a difference IMO. What makes a difference here is the max level you can learn. Humans basically are capped to 20. Some skills from manual raise it a bit, but most of the raising is from being a yaoguai, they can be capped as high as 32 from "birth" (and then boosted by manuals).


To get stronger:
- inners cultivate to get XP to reach the next breakthrough (same principle as fundation really).
- inners can learn skills
- inners can equip boosting items
- inners can drink potions / eat stuff

Cultivation:

Cultivation is faster with higher mental state, qi, element, whether you have a master or not, law compatibility, weather and season. Wait. That's nearly the same things as the stats we need to breakthrough, which means that inners should have the same cultivation room for GC. Both should be the same if possible (you might lack materials to build enough room for everyone in the early stages of the game) and basically follow the same building principes. You can raise cultivation speed further with the sect branch cultivation type, and items / talisman / skills that increase cultivation speed.

Skills

You can learn a level 1 skill from any law. To do this, build manual pavillions (multiple of them) and write all available laws in it. Also, whenever you get a manual, write the skill that's on it in the pavillion. Then, use the study task from the pavillion (for each disciple that needs to be taught) to learn them.

There are different ways of learning skills, but there are better methods. Best one is learning from its master, as it gives you 50% inspiration cost reduction. Second best is from manual pavillion (25% reduction cost). Other methods should be avoided if possible (directly from the skill screen / from manuals in inventory) as they have no inspiration reduction cost. Learning level 2 skills or more can only be done full price.

Beware that skills have an element, and therefore skills from opposing elements cost a lot more (usually, 3 times or so). Avoid learning them if possible, it's probably better to have 3 different skill that the one from the opposing element. Not always though. I learn all max qi skills except the heart injury (heal with panacea pill only) before GC (golden core) because the quality of GC is so important. Yes, learning the "yin" max qi skill that makes your guy a gal is ok. Reconstruction skill costs 30k and will make him whole again. And his not long lost "treasure" is worth hundreds to the merchant. After GC I tend to learn mostly non-opposing skills, even if they are max qi.

TIP: the more manuals are in manual pavillion, the less all skill cost (1% for each 1000 manuals in pavillions). That's about it. Build huge bookcases.

Boosting items

A lot of items have hidden stats. For example, an umbrella protects you from the mood debuff from rain and snow. Scented sachet boost mood. Bear Demon's fur (200 cost at a merchant) enables you to support temperatures up to 100°C colder. Read the description of items. Also, later in the game you can with the sub-spirit mechanic create magic items with new skills / stats and give them to your other disciples.

Talismans have their stat shown, but also contribute here. Inners mostly shouldn't not run errands without an invibility scroll, talisman travelling and departing shadow. When cultivating, having a talisman that boost cultivation is good... and so on and on.

Potions

Same as for items, except most boosts are limited in time. Specter refinment boost them (items too BTW).


Apart from golden core, change states requires a breakthrough.
- Regular breakthrough costs mana and basically is a percentage chance to pass. sometimes lifespan and pills. Failing usually does nothing, but at higher level it might give you an injury (mostly cureable) or outright kill you (more annoying). That said, with a standard breakthrough room, you shouldn't fail.
- adventuring breakthrough require you to... adventure. Sometimes a lot of times.
- one alchemy law breakthrough transforms your inner into an outer again, for days. Usually without effect, but it can be dangerous for yaoguai (as they have no qi then and the tribulation timer still runs)
- tribulation breakthough... is a kind of heavenly cloud charged with qi that attacks your inner.


There are detailed guides for how to fight them, I'll go only for basic rules here. By default tribulation attacks your qi and you're mostly safe if you have more qi than it has strength and decent shield strength.

Things that add to tribulation strength (bad for you):
- condemnation of your inner
- bad element
- qi on the tile (tribulation absorb qi from around it)
- bad artifacts, artifacts don't have damage resistance and once they don't have qi they take qi from the inner. With bad artifact users it's better to remove artifacts than to use one.
- element resistances

Things that add to your resistance to the tribulation (good for you):
- qi regen
- shield strength (boost it with spells / item / equipment / potions)
- good element on surrounding tiles (if you counteract the qi)
- virtue
- luck attribute
- good artifacts killing the tribulation faster than they lose artifact qi (require good artifact user)
- some spells from other inners can affect

AFAIK, you can use pills during tribulations.

Some base tribulation strength for reference:
- supreme law tribulations just after GC : around 10k
- 7 sword tribulations: 30k, 100k, 300k.
- yaoguai tribulations: 5 times 75k (each elements is represented once)
- attainment tribulation: 700k qi, doubles each time.

To get a high golden core, you need :
- to tick as much green pluses in all boxes in the breakthrough pop-up windows. It's important to know that those don't actually cap at 5 green + icons. Even if you don't see them, they actually can (should) get higher for a better results.
- have the highest "max qi" stat possible

Contrary to what is written mostly everywhere, apparently qi regen has no effect at all during golden core. Don't stuff qi regen and spirit stones into your inner before a breakthrough.

Golden core is basically a step that eats your qi, the more it eats, the better it gets.

Best seasons:

Element Weather Window 1 Window 2
Fire Toxic Miasma Spring 9-13 x
Metal Dust Devil Winter 23-27 Spring 23 - 27
Water Thunderstorm Autumn 10-12 x
Wood Rainstorm Winter 9-13 x
Earth Foehn Wind Summer 7-15 x

Yin Yang

Yin / yang depends on hour of day. For reference, Golden core 1 is reached around quality 150 000 and the breakthrough lasts for about a day. A quality 400 000 GC1 lasts for multiple days. For metal cultivator they have bonus at night, so I find it better to start at the start of the night (before 5 pluses) so golden core ends during the next night, to maximise night time. Special weather can also boost this (polar night is night for 6 days).
Later in the game you can get even better weather from immortal statues apparently.

Qi and Element

Qi and element can be gotten by building cultivation room (lots of guide on this on the net). At start you only have elements with range 4, limiting what you can do, but later in game you'll be able to get elements with range up to 6 or 7.

Example of a dual qi room (for temperatures):


This is a pretty early game room. There are complete guides on how to improve cultivation rooms, but basic rules are simple to know about.

Most items radiate elements at distance 3 (in game terms), so 2 squares away. Distance are with trigonometry, so on the example above, the cushion is distance 1, essences just next to cushion (not diagonals) are distance 2, other essences are distance 3, and all wood are distance 4.


You should place items with the maximum Gather Qi stat (not Qi, gather qi) depending on whether the distance is in reach or not for best results. At the start, items with higher gather qi have lower range, but later in game it's not true. As an example, I could improve the design above by placing crimson fruits and prism lotus next to the cushion, as their gather qi distance is 2.

Special building: altar of magic. This is a special item that can be copied from Kunlun sect HQ (camp a character there after getting access, enter the map to explore, and select one of them, click on observe or whatever the button is called). They have an impressive base 600 gather qi, but take 15 tiles. Pattern changes a bit :


Left pattern is for altar of magic. Right pattern is for cushions. The disciple is actually seated on the middle top square of the altar (yellow), which means that to boost him you can put displays around him (red = distance 2, blue = 3, black = 4). Obviously, only use altar of magic if you can't get more than 600 gather qi from the 15 squares that it occupies (that's an average of 40 qi gather per tile). If you've got distance 5 gather qi item, it continues to extend in a circle (please check other guides for that).

Max qi

For max qi, the base stat is QI sense (needs to be as high as possible), and you can then boost it with :
- supreme laws (that's why you need as many supreme law ASAP). You should learn as much of them as you can.
- items that adds to max qi (early game: earth flux, red ginseng, ganoderma, wicked flux). Beware than those have diminishing returns (eating more than 2 earth flux is a waste, for example) and wicked flux reduces mood (which hurts your breakthrough, so boost mental state with talisman, items, or skills)

Later in the game there are other max qi items you can use like dragon / phenix flesh and junk pills. Don't forget that qi sense is actually boosted by intelligence and constitution. So a guy with 8/8 base stat and 60 qi sense is worse than a guy with 2/2 intel / constitution and 60 qi sense... only if you can raise attributes to 10 (which is doable but pretty late game).

RELATED TO ITEM: VERY IMPORTANT: you CAN and should boost item by using the specter refinement skill. You can raise items up to level 12. This is mandatory if you want higher results. As an example, earth flux give significantly more qi, eternity pills give up to 800 life rather than 500, and so on. For talismans, talismans need to be boosted before the painting for increased stats: a lvl 12 mood talisman adds 21 to mental state instead of 12 with a "standard" sacred talisman.

Law compatibility

For max law compatibility you basically need to raise your attributes as high as possible (check outer raising section).

Ummm. Basically, shendao cultivation laws are self contained.

I invite you to check the guides there for details.


The idea for these laws is to have your character become a literal god as time go by. To do this you create a celestial realm and raise not one, but 2 breakthrough mechanics (mood and regular one). Also, you need to get followers (first by adventuring) and then via the divine realm, and get core followers by speaking to them (variant of diplomacy game)

The idea is basically :
- raise mood to 200 & regular breakthough once
- create your celestial realm (48 locations) => to do this you need to temporarily raise your divinity to 50 and create a nicely done breakthrough room). This is the equivalent to getting golden core 1, mostly. If you don't have 48 locations to build you should restart.
- raise moods & breakthroughs & build stuff in the celestial realm to higher levels to power up your guy.

There are complete guides on the discord or as link in the forum here. Please check them.

Physical cultivation is currently widely considered as the strongest laws there is.

To me, the main reason why this is extremely strong is that, while there is a HUGE brick wall in order to know what you're doing, there is little to no prerequisite to making a cultivator that can solo anything. Taking a random dude and making him into a monster that can solo immortal mode is completely doable with next to no one helping him but some outers.

I will not go into details here, there are guides out there with hundreds of pages of explainations that I can't hope to match, ever. I will explain the basic principles to make a good cultivator though.


It's simpler than it looks like.

1 - learn the law.

2 - raise your xp, breakthrough once or twice to unlock new secret parts

3 - Create / raise the "secret body part" you want on this screen by modling stuff (with / without essence) :


4 - Equip them on this one :


5 - ...

6 - Profit !

IMPORTANT : body law ascend somewhat automatically at the end of chaos phase, so you should raise your character as much as you need before going to this state, and use this last step to only raise the secret body part that are unlock at this stage. Body cults don't have obsessions anyway.


Selecting a body part and clicking "remold" will add a remolding action to the list of actions your cultivator must do. Once finished, coming back on this screen will show a huge yellow plus sign. Clicking on it will open a pop-up which will enable you to select "molds", which will be added to the body part.

Tip: the higher the level of the body part, the higher xp you get, but the higher stamina it consumes. To get to higher level of cultivation fast, it's better to raise 1 body part to 50 than lots to 5. Generally, you want to raise 2 breakthroughs to unlock the parts that enable you to breath / eat better, then start creating secret body parts.


Ok, maybe it's not so easy. Basically, secret body parts are all tabs (except the first one). You will unlock new ones when passing limits. The goal to make a cultivator stronger is to basically boost those secret body parts and equip them via those screens:



To "unlock" a body part to equip, you need to fill the all conditions on the second screen at the bottom left. Example in my screen: so you need 9/9 sharpened bone on left upper arm for the fifth layer, and 81 tempered flesh and 9 enhanced flesh for left upper arm muscle, and so on.

The secret body parts you can get depend on what race you are, and what law you follow. There are too many for me to list here, but others have made guides for this.

The total stats of the secret part, however, are made from the total molds of the body parts in the screen. This guy is pretty bad (I made it to test mechanics before going to more advanced guides because I found the other guide incomprehensible, but now that I've tested it myself, it's ok).

So, what you need to do is just mold until you unlock the highest layers, and choose up to 6 (maximum types of mold possible in a body part) to raise as much as possible to get good stats for your cultivator. Stats are at the top left corner of the screen. Stats are basically straightforward ? If not leave a comment, I'll try to do what I can.


YOU CAN MOLD WITH NO ESSENCE. Early basic secret parts don't require essence-specific essence anyway. Molding with essence should be used when possible, but in early stages cultivating essence can be too rare to waste.

Molds depend on the body parts, body law and race, and available parts all have a different list, and essence type changes the chance of getting specific molds.

In order to make an efficient body cultivator, you need to max breathing efficiency or eating efficiency (depending on whether you want to breath to get essence or eat stuff, or both), to get essence faster. To do so, get to a cultivation level where you have access to those body parts (as a rule, breakthrough twice). Then max out tempered nose, tempered lungs for breathing or raise stomach / intestine high enough to be able to devour what you want (apparently if you boost eating too much, your guy won't stop eating ? I'm not sure about that part).

That will enable you to get lots of essence. The only thing that's left is to mold the essence you got to activate the secret body parts you want / need and add the molds you want / need to them, until your stats are high enough to beat up anything you want.


As stated above, there are more complete guides out there with complete builds, list of molds and so on. Usually they start on the assumption that you know how body cult works (which is why I made this page), and I invite you to check them out.

This section will cover how to build... buildings. Therefore it aims to cover feng shui basics, attractiveness, room size and type, and a few more things. Why should you care ? Because bad things happen in inauspicious rooms, and good rooms give mood bonus.

You should use the illusion realm mode to test stuff. You can create blueprint there, and since blueprints are shared, you can then use them into whatever your game is.


A room, in the game, is made of at least one Feng Shui building within walls, and door(s) to access it. Once that is done, rooms are considered as having roofs in game (characters shouldn't fly in it, for example).


Important point: temperature on a room is (check temperature section) constant in the room. That is not the case in the wild. A Fire Essence Bar will heat where it is and around it by dozen of degrees, which can burn people and set fires. However, it would only heat a room by a few degrees (since its effect is mitigated by the size of the room). This can cause problems during buidings or if room get damaged (advanced cultivation / breaktrhough rooms of the fire element will spontaneously burn if damaged, see cultivation section).


Elements boost each other, and you've probably seen guides stating that you should build most of everything from earth and metal elements. That's easier to start the game with, but not actually necessary. However, there are multiple reasons for this to be the start line, however:

• Marble blocks and iron are plentiful in Taiyi sect map and can be used, if you rush, as soon as day 1 (check adventure section)
  
• Any other combinaison that boosts an element requires water element or fire element. With low level elements, it's not a problem, but high level elements drastically change the temperature, and will frequently light things on fire / freeze people to death. So... don't do that at start. Later.
  
• Outer disciples and outer disciples buildings don't care about qi elements at all
  
• Soil has earth element and boosts iron, so it's easier to get very auspicious rooms

Why is this room very Auspicious ?

• Door is on the right side for this type of room
  
• Crampedness is ok (not too much, not too few)
  
• Most Feng Shui buildings in the room are very Auspicious (AFAIK, 80% or more are needed)

Why is the bed very auspicious ? Auspiciousness is affected (in this case, boosted) by elements near the Feng Shui building, floor and soil... and weather. During rain for example, all squares of the map have some water elements added to it, which can mass with auspiciousness.


The game considers distance 1 the case on which an item is, distance 2 adjacent squares (no diagonals), distance 3 squares adjacents to the distance 2 squares (no diagonals) and so on. Everything you build, own, drop on ground which has an element affects other buildings at a distance 3 (so, their own squares, and squares 1 and 2 away from the center). Exception: soil affect only its own square, as do floors.

Back to our example, the metal (iron) bed is close enough to many earth (brownstore) walls, on earth soil. You can put decorations to replace walls, but, as a rule, walls tend to give more than decorations and items on display... it depends (check display below).

NOTE: floor reduces the effect of soil and replaces it by the element it's build with. It also boosts room attractiveness (check floor below).


You can put any object in the game on a display. This has 2 advantages: it freezes the item life (for items that decays), and it enables you to place any item you want and treat it like a decoration. When you put an item on a display, its element radiates at 3 distance (own square and 2 square away).



Here, I have the mouse over the bar that is above the cushion (in the center), this square sees a few SpiritWood (hence the wood element) and mostly... fire bars, which bring the fire elements into the mix.
BEWARE: water freezes, fire burns. That means that a display in a room will enable you to heat / cool a room (can be useful during winter or summer, check section on temperature management).

As seen in the picture (bottom), displays have no elements. They still have a material though. Which means that while a display made of Fire Essence bars has no element, it still heats the room (potentially, a lot..). so... I humbly suggest to mostly avoid doing this.



I just replaced the brownstone in the above example by Holy stone and instead of an iron bed, it's made of darksteel.

Noticed the change in Quality and Attractiveness ? Neither of those if necessary for outer disciple, but they give a bonus to mood to people in the room, making it easier to manage your characters (and will be necessary for visitors, check visitor section later).


First, it's useful to put floors because it adds to the room attractiveness. But, it also serves as a "Soil Feng Shui element reducer".


See the effect of the wood floor below:


By the way, you can't build buildings on water... but, you can build floors on water. And buildings on floors. Example just above.


It's not necessary. You can easily build bigger rooms. However, they'll need decorations and a bit more stuff in it:


This introduces crampedness: all room requires a certain percentage of stuff in it. Which is why you shouldn't build Feng Shui buildings into a storeroom, and why storeroom shouldn't have an element.

New : you can mix Feng Shui elements of the same group. There are 4 groups of buildings:

- Workshops require a door East.
- Beds require a door South.
- Kitchens (Stove) require a door West.
- Others which don't care where the door is (tables, cushions...)

You cannot mix building types if they require different doors orientations:



Again, it's not necessary to have only one element in a room since only elements affect only at 3 distance radius (them + 2 around). However, walls / decorations / items on displays during construction will radiate heat / cold and potentialy could hurt your disciples.


Left: Marble woodcraft.
Right: Wood woodcraft.
X-ray view:



Noticed that one of the woodcraft has only 2 green plus signs ? It's because the woodcraft on the right is only auspicious and not very auspicious. Why is this ? Well, on the left, there are fire essence walls. On the right, there are Ice crystal element walls, so a lower quality item. Higher level elements have more "Elements" in them.

However, that particular design has a flaw: walls temperature is perfectly average in the room, but wall still radiate enough heat to burn / freeze people outside.


Again it's not needed... A picture is better than 10000 words here. This is very Auspicious:



Rooms with door requirement require one door on the side they want and whatever door to "inside" as you want. Room with no Feng shui elements are considered outside. Here, I "tricked" the game with the training room to get exists where I want them.

Food basically has 5 tiers in game. From lowest to highest:

Dirt / Feces

Feces is autogenerated by animals from time to time. It decays extremely fast in hot temperatures. It makes your characters sick and will probably kill them in time.
Dirt is autogenerated by characters when they starve enough. It makes your characters sick and will probably kill them in time.

Bread / dried meat

Dried meat can be crafted from meat at a bonfire or a stove. However, a stove creates more dried meat. Basically, making dried meat early game if you don't have a freezer might be useful, else... just don't use those.

Meals (simple, fine, lavish)

They essentially work the same way, just cost more ingredients, feed more, and give bigger mood bonus to whoever eats them. They can be cooked manually or you can use the sect interface to automate it (disciples will automatically order food as time go by). You should use the sect interface to tell your people to automate meal production.


To cook, you need an outer disciple with a cooking skill.

Specializing an outer disciple in cooking is a good idea. Bonfire have no side effects, but, stove occasionally catch fire, and as your sect grows you might require a second cook if you have a lot of outer disciples / inners require food too. There are 3 ways to avoid cooking related fire hazards :

• bonfires can't have side effects but has low efficiency (bad idea)
  
• more than 30 cooking skill seems to prevent fires when cooking up to fine meals
  
• stove should be as auspicious as possible (=> check feng shui / building section)
  
• fire heats the room when it occurs. So having a somewhat large kitchen somewhat cooled (see temperature section / building section) will alleviate burns that will occur with fire happens

Cereals and fruits can be grown by your outer disciples, and there is no reason why there should be some shortage of it ever. You're not limited as to how much you plant.

How much food do you need ? Basically... lots. Wheat takes about 6-8 in game month to grow, or something like this. It doesn't really matter what you grow, but you need to grow many variety of stuff as you need. Don't hesitate to fill screen with it. Ensure you have the manpower (outers) to work it.

Stuff takes a loooong time to grow, so after the planting phase (which is kinda long) 4-5 guys are enough for thousands of squares of plantations. They don't need to be specialized people. They can be your crafters and just care for crops when needed.

To plant, the only thing you require is some outer disciple with the farming skill, it doesn't really need to be high, but they do plant faster with higher numbers. No idea if they get better crops with higher skills though.

You can set up your fields in rooms, and that's a rather good idea, as you can then use demon blood to heat the room during winter, enabling whole-year growth. Remember to place the corpse of your enemies on fields (and to tell your doggy, if you have him, to crap on fields) as soil fertility eventually depletes and corpse and crap renews it.


Meats primary source is hunting animals. They dry up in the mid game and you then need to have an inner disciple run adventures at meat-producing villages around your city.

You will get, later in the game (second year) some events where a group of aggressive animals spawn on the map and you get to kill them. The biggest issue with those is that animals are mortals, so you shouldn't use your inners to kill them as they'll rack up bad karma. Your pet will do fine however, or your outers if you micro manage them.

Hunting works basically like this: either attack it manually and then, once the animal is dead / unconscious, click on the "hunt button" or "butcher" and one of your outers will finish it. Or, you can just click on "hunt" and hope that the outer will win. Mostly, he won't against anything bigger than a rabbit. What you can do is attack with an outer with a bow, and, when the animal is in range of your guy, just tell your guy to move out. He'll do a weird evasion move and that will reset the animal's aggro... so your guy can shoot again, and so on. That little bit of micro enables you to hunt anything, basically.

Tip: on default weather conditions, during the first winter, most if not all animals in sections you have explored will die. Having your pet on "butcher animals" will make him butcher anything in sections you have explored, whether you have set the "butcher animals" flag on or not. Unexplored sections won't be affected by cold, apparently. This is usually a good thing, assuming that you have not explored where the monster is during winter or have killed it by then.

Respawn: some animals do respawn at the start of spring.


You can tame animals ! Even if there is little point doing it except as a starter factory for demons later on. To do so: attack the animal or somehow make it unconscious. Once it's unconscious, feed it (there is a button for it when you click on the unconscious animal). The guy feeding it will tell you if the animal likes this food or not (pay attention to it), even if it's fairly straightforward. The higher level the meat / herb / food, the better chance of taming.

Once the animal is tamed, just pack females and makes in the same area (via pastures) and every few (in-game) seasons you'll get new ones.

Please beware that feeding animals takes time from your outers and also requires real food (apparently, wheat for herbivore, meat for others, and they'll take other stuff if they need). That's mostly not an issue.

Beware: tamed animals occasionally transform into monsters.


As soon as you can, you should start to grow those. They make excellent food for your spirit pets later on, and herb garden plants have a chance to drop an "evolved" version of themselves when gathered. Example: ginseng sometime drops red ginseng, and so on. They require qi, which doesn't mean much. Growing them on fertile soil works.

What items with Qi gathering actually do isn't gather qi. It gives a bonus to everything in its radius so it gathers qi better. That means that one or multiple displays in the middile of an herb garden will help the grown herbs provide themselves with enough qi to grow.


Food, and meat in particular, decays rather fast. You can build a freezer early game by just making a room, displays and place mid-powerful water items on it. A 60 space room will require about a dozen displays with Ice crystal bars (for example) to reduce temperature by 30 °C. Or a single soul gem to reduce temperature by about 80 °C.

As soul gems are rather common loot (it seems to drop drops from huge animal monsters at core shaping or golden core level, and also loots from fei and lushu, which are weak), I generally pack all medecine and food into the same room and let the soul gem cool everything in it (including fire medecines) to safe level. Fei and lushu will be appearing on the map every few seasons... but that's not very reliable.

Important: Rooms (a set of wall enclosing an area) have uniform temperature in the room. So storages should be in rooms. Else, high level fire / water element will freeze / burn stuff running on them.

Tip: When starting a game, you can choose via the "environment button" to start with a lushu or a fei on the map. The only effect I've seen about those is to ensure that one fei or one lushu does spawn on the map. Fei locks the weather to "rain / snow", so I don't recommend it. Starting with a lushu, however, locks the weather to "sunny" which is nice at start, and you can then kill it when you feel like it and make your freezer.

You have outer disciples, inner disciples and so on. Well, bad news, your enemies have that... and more.

This guide aims to cover the basics of combat. Check the combat section for more information. Basics to know:

• most fights will end with someone unconscious or dying rather than dead, as your character are on "non-lethal" mode. You can switch this to "kill mode" by clicking the top left icon in the character bar.
  
• normal qi protects you from attacks.
  
• attacks unprotected from qi need to heal - outers will automatically heal regular injuries and use medecine from wherever it is (not qi injuries, see section for advanced combat).
  
• healing can lead to scars. They can be healed... but that's a mid game thing. It's better to not be harmed. And it's not hard to nearly never be harmed. Inners (yours and enemies) have ridiculously high regeneration rate even at low level and can accumulate dozens of scars in a single fight if their qi is depleted.
  
• enemies don't seem to switch their aggro ever. So if one of your guys tanks, the other are free to shoot.
  
• enemies have 4 states: alive, unconscious, dying, dead.
  
• Battle stat decides hunting strength but isn't something that can be trained.

CAREFUL: the game doesn't advertise it, but killing a mortal with an inner gives you negative karma points, which is an important defense for late game tribulation. Don't use inners to kill mortals. Animals (with no qi) are considered mortals. However, your pets don't care. From day 30 onward, your pets should give the killing blow to everything that requires an early death.


Alive => well, alive.
Unconscious => depending on the character level and injuries, it means you have a few seconds / few minutes before the injuries heal themselves (might leave a scar) and gets up again (monsters, most inners), or dies (mortals).
Unconscious (dying) => sub section of the above, you'll see it mostly for animals and mortals.
Dying => This starts a 300 second timer before the character dies. That's your last resort, and it's for inners mostly. Mortals don't see to have this timer.
Corpse => Character is dead. Corpse stays for 1800 seconds. Higher temperatures can reduce this. Use this to put the corpse on a field for soil fertility renewal.

IMPORTANT: in "non lethal mode", a single attack on an unconscious enemy will, without fail, put him into dying state.. So you NEED, in the middle of combat, especially when fighting multiple enemies, to micro one of your characters to give the last hit, else, especially when you start fighting inner-level enemies, they'll just get up again and again and again.

It's the same between Dying and Corpse, but there is no point where accelerating the process is useful.


Quite a lot of reasons for this: there are situations and spells that require your enemy to be unconscious to capture him, get a gem from him. A dying enemy killed in a very ominous room will 100% drop an Anguish soul gem, which is a necessary ingredient mid game onward to upgrade items.


As you may have noticed if you started the game, animals don't pull punches. Your outers ain't mere mortals - even the weakest of them are in my opinion at superhuman level in our world - but in their world, they're weak, as a simple cat can completely maim them despite their prowess.

Outer disciples can be ordered to hunt by using the interface, but that means that... Your people will go hunting with whatever weapon they have, including their fist, and face harm. So... you basically shouldn't do that. What you should do is either to :
- equip your outers with bows, and manually tell your guys to attack animals you want dead.
- send your pet and attack the animal. Once dead, set the "butcher" icon on the animal to have your hunter take care of it. Alternatively you can select the "hunt" tag and send an inner of your pet to kill it.

Don't use your inners, they'll get negative karma points from it, which will bite you later in the game.


There is very little difference (combat-wise) between animal you hunt and mortals that attack you. The main difference is that enemy waves they loiter a bit and then attack random buildings / people. Once they have finished, they start to steal something and go away happy. If they get unconscious and wake up, they try to steal some stuff and just leave after that.


If you've started the game... you might have noticed that animals are fairly aggressive. Cats, tigers, bulls, bears, boars will automatically attack any building / outer disciple of your sect. They will, however, NEVER attack someone that's not from your sect. They don't seem to be attacking your inners either. So... short answer is... don't bother exploring the map with outer disciples at all, nor use the explore flag. Explore with an inner disciple manually, you can order him / her to move with the V button.

The starting map has, on a corner, a monster infused with qi. It should more or less be the first one that you have to manage in a standard game. It's certainly possible to do faster or better, and I don't care much. This guide is here to answer new people struggling with a reliable and simple strategy that explains the game, not to get end-game before endgame. There is a nice warning message provided by the game telling you to flee the area. Listen to it. Your disciples thank you.

This strategy isn't by any means "good" or "optimized" or whatever, it's simple and reliable, and doable by people with no grasp of the game. You shouldn't do so once you know the game enough.

For the first 30 days of the game: IGNORE THE MONSTER.

Focus on building your base and getting more disciples. The more the better. It doesn't matter if they stink. During those 30 days, beside other tasks, build a bow for each of your disciples. A basic wood bow will suffice. It's important to have quite a few disciple by then. If you're missing disciples, send your first inner to a city to get more (you should have one by then).

At day 30 you will get hashuan, your little doggy, and his / her 27000 qi pool.

Wait a bit until doggy gets all his mana filled (few days at most). Then, when you feel ready, move doggy toward the monster on the corner of the map, and once he's aggroed, select all your other disciples and attack the monster. Watch as his qi, then HP pool disappears. Notice than the monster's aggro doesn't change. As soon as the monster is downed, check his status, and kill it if it's only unconscious by attacking it again. Then, butcher it.


This strategy works for most early, mid game enemies, basically, your inner tanking the shots while half a dozen outers with bows provide DPS will decimate most enemies, until they start having more than 20k qi. You can, of course, provide your outers with better bows if you have material, but avoid processing spirit wood => it's WAAAYYY to expensive to waste in such a fashion early game.

Temperature is fairly strange in this game.

Items / building of the fire element heats stuff. Water element (including ice) cools. Rules for it differ if outside or inside.


Temperature outside depends on the item's power, and difficulty level. Rare items like "soul gem" for example can reduce temperature to -170 degrees easily. By default, outside, heat / cold radiates a few squares, or more in case of a specially powerful element. By going over it, your characters will potentially burn / freeze to death in instants.


Inside a room (doesn't matter if it's feng shui or not), temperature is uniform, and whatever heats / cools the room is neatly averaged. You can use this to grow stuff in winter for example. The easiest way to do this is to put fire / water items on displays.

You can create an "even temperature" room by placing equal, or similar amount of fire and water elements in a room. This is an important mechanic to know about as later in the game hot rooms could reach thousands of degrees if uncontested.


Walls are a special case. They count as outside if outside and inside if inside. Walls made of Fire Essence, for example, will heat the "outside" part of the wall enough to burn people to death and start fires.


Whatever object is on display / inventory (or on ground) basically has the same effect on temperature. That means that one of the best way to provide heat / cold to your disciples can be to put display and "micro manage" what's on it. Micro manage is kind of a big word as once a season usually does the trick.


Clothing have 1 or 2 stats that relates to temperature, and the better quality they are (materials and skill used to make them), the better they protect you. If you click on "Mindful Dresser" in the equipment tag, they'll pick up appropriate clothing when they feel they need it. It might not be enough sometimes but mostly it works.

To be honest, I don't find any usefulness building anything else than winter clothes (for cold) and summer clothes (the only ones that currently have stats that enables you to get to higher temperatures). Of the "starting" available elements, demon hide is the best you can get. Animal hide / fabric will be enough for your outers for most of the game, barring you choosing deliberately places hostile to life as a map.

Why would inners want them ? They do get bonus to temperature management as they level up after all... Well, your inners will appreciate demon hide winter clothing for those -150° events, for example, or the +500° one.

Fei and Lushu hide are good, but worse than demon hide, and way rarer. Demon hide can be farmed easily, a core shaping spellcaster and the pet will beat low to mid level animal demons on exploration map for 15-50 each (and a few demon blood) with next to no specialisation. With some specialisation or a golden core you can farm mostly all of them.


Talisman can be equipped to protect your people from cold / heat. This requires a bit of micro to build stuff for everyone and equip them though.


Raising your inner disciple level will, in most cases, add to his temperature resistance.

Once your characters become inner disciples, they can go on adventures.

The tutorial explains how to do this.

Important tip: Yaoguai on adventure / camping have their tribulation timer frozen. Actually, every timer is frozen, as far as I can tell. So you can avoid the "waited too much at breaktrough level" obsession by making the inner spam adventures. Or just wait until the right time to level your yaoguai.

Tip: the Derivative calculation skill will spawn an event, at the cost of 10 years of life (cheap). Use it to get the events you want (manifesting mandate...)


Adventure result differs depending on the target you're exploring.

Exploring capitals / unexplored towns of rival sects will explore the map and expose minor sites (there is a percentage written in the corner, if lower than 100% you'll explore stuff).
Exploring minor sites will trigger an event depending on the minor site properties.

If there is an event in progress, you might be proposed to participate in the event instead of participating in the usual exploration result you might have.

If you send your guys to a rival sect capitol or just its territory (once you've got the right to enter) you'll often trigger an event asking you to greet or insult the rival sect. Use it at your discretion to raise your reputation with them (or lower it). Avoid sending your people to evil sects early on, visiting them before you're friend will often result in a trap (lowers massively your reputation, relation with them), and whether you're friend or not, you'll often trigger an event where your bad sect reputation raises (a lot). Avoid this event until you have 96% or more invibility talisman or, for some reason, require Evil sect rep. Going to visit sect HQ once your sect is recognized as a "Just" is suicidal too. Events will then trigger that will massively reduce reputation with them, add even more good rep for the sect, and hurt your visiting disciple. Visiting "sub-sites" is fine however, as long as you have access to the territory.

If you send your guys to neutral towns, you've have 5 different options:
- market (free low-level stuff), the text says you buy it but you don't
- try to recruit disciple (might fail)
- try to raise your reputation there
- collect belief => belief is accumulated on towns you have an outpost from and can be used as belief for divine cultivator or inspiration points for "regular" inner disciples.

If you send your guys to a "resource" location (a location with the little icon indicating the location), they'll most often fetch a few dozen of the stuff. It's the only reliable source of meat mid- late game as far as I know. Of course, the rarer the ressource, the less you'll be able to take home. And, there might be other conditions. Earth flux (and most rare resources, like roots for spirit trees, lumina cores and similar stuff), for example, drop when your character has a compatible element and with high luck : an earth cultivator has 50% chance of getting earth flux with 10 luck, a fire one has 100% with 10 luck, metal can get there but I'm not sure how much they can get it, and AFAIK others can't get one, ever.

Adventure is one of your main and reliable source of materials late game. Cherish it. The downside is that doing any adventure will raise your reputation. And reputation directly influences the game's difficulty, the more, the harder the game gets. As the tutorial indicates, you should give invisibility talismans to your errand guys to reduce the reputation gain.


Camping is used to station some of your guys at a position. He will have an event, like if he was adventuring, every few days. It's supposed to be training him too, but I have not noticed exactly what or how that works. This can last 28 days, so if you don't want to see someone for a long time you can do this.

To me the main use of camping is to enter the location with one or more disciples.

You should enter every location at least once to scout and loot it.
Come back multiple times if needed. Loots are the same for every game so don't hesitate to look at guides that people made that have compiled data on it.

Every rival sect capital has buildings you can copy. Most are decorations... but the most important of them is the altar of magic in Kunlun. When cultivating, it gives a bonus of 600 to qi gathering and requires a rather low level of materials. You will get better qi gathering with displays late in the game, but early, it's a huge boon. It's about the only way to get mid-high level of iron element qi gathering elements (for water laws) early in game as lumina cores are fairly rare at start. You can copy the design or take samples of anything... BUT don't take the wonder or steal stuff on the ground / displays until ready for war.

When speaking to people, you will get prompts about He Zudao all the time. You need to speak to him and get him to give his scroll, as it's a new law with what are the most useful talismans in the game. Check diplomacy for how to do this.

Most maps have "demons animals" on it, so ensure, before you go, that you can kill them. Doggy + a decent core shaping disciple with a few spells usually is enough, even if it might take some time at lower levels. Golden core disciple walk on the map. This is an easy and reliable source of demon blood and hide, you should profit from it as soon as you can.

As far as I've been able to tell, stuff doesn't seem to replenish. However, for items that have "quantities", like a stack of bricks, their number vary each time you enter the map and basically go from a few dozen to 250. I'd suggest grabbing anything that has a lot more than 200 if possible.


There isn't many different types of events and... you can ignore most of the map events. You shouldn't ignore manifesting mandates as they give new laws, and new laws are too important. Unique events and story events should also be done.

There are "unique", or once a year events, like the immortal fair (lots of disciples to recruit), demon emperor tomb opening (unique miracle), or the storyline ones (ultra mandatory). Mostly, you need to do them all. Kunlun competition is an exception, winning it does give a supreme law and can be done first year, but it also gives you 4000 reputation which is a doom sentence it you don't have primordials or high GC at least.

Out of the "repeating" ones, manifesting mandate is undoubtly the most important. Sending people there will give you a chance to learn a new supreme law (not a random NPC law), and those are kind of mandatory for late game. You can send people until it works too ! So when it spawns, just send everyone not needed for base defense and hope that one of them gets it.

Other repeating events will be :
- about disasters in cities (go for positive karma / to help a city you control beat a disaster), so you
should do those.
- stuff about artefact / manual / potion / lost book. You can do them, but, it's the less important thing to do. Most will drop low level artefacts. Manuals / potions are more interesting but utterly random. The "artefact will appear at site" with no condition is kind of a trap IMO, as it will require you to fight other sects and you don't want that early / mid game. And, even after fighting, you might get crap. All of those can be ignored if you have important stuff to do, there is no repercussion for ignoring them.
- sect war prompts. Just... don't. Those give huge amount of reputation and you don't want that early game. Later, whatever you like, but, early, you don't want those.

I could write stuff here but... this guide has all the info you need. Kurt you don't know me or anything, but, you're awesome. Thanks !

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bso2z4o_u70Sh5d3Gq5YSiwwX4tI0ppDf2o6mpRlj7I/edit# Mysteries and Clue by Kurt

Basically, the only thing I can add from it is that if you don't wanna play the storyline minigame, you still need to talk to a few people to get favorites from leaders. Why would you do that ? Because giving favorites to a leader via the "gift" interface will give you 200 reputation and 1 connection (useful to exchange late game items). Just starting the trade interface once on the map for each leader will add him to your secret list, and then just speak to a few guys to unlock favorites, and that's it !

Remember to use a guy with high level social to do so. It works way better. 85+ is required to get everything.


I'll settle on an example : how to get the law from He Zudao from Skydome Palace. If you have spoken to litterally anyone in the game you should have him mentioned and have this prompt or something similar in your secret tab. I'll start a new game, but that's not anything near necessary.

Here is my diplomat:


First step: making a base. Wu Yaqin takes the forming pill, becomes an inner, hunts the lushu on the map, and my two outers place the loot on a newly created trade area.

Second step: having contacts. Just click on sect capitals. Admire the secret tab.



Now that you have everyone on board, get access to Skydome Palace (this can only be done if you have 0 relation or more, which is the case at game start).

So open the diplomacy menu for Skydome palace, give the leader one of anything (doesn't matter), then reopen it and use the trade interface to exchange access with loot (in our case, 50 lushu hide). I tend to use Lushu hide, demon beast hide or fei hide to get access early game but whatever you want to exchange is fine really. You could also exchange demon blood, it's not that useful early and easy to farm.


Wu Yaqin will then just fly there with "camp" and explore the place. To prepare for the trip, she will equip a talisman because it's He Zudao's favorite thing (you usually don't know about this in advance though), but He Zudao is a special character so... we know about what He likes.


Third: find He Zudao and get his info.

I got lucky and randomly clicked on her (yes, He is a girl). Click on "chat" a few times ot raise relations to 30, then get to "discuss", then "character" to have him tell you about his likes, dislikes and personal treasures. This is what you can get from people directly.


We then need to find what we can get indirectly, so we speak to other people:


Basically there is 3 kind of answers you cant get: either they know and tell you, or they don't and don't want to tell you (raise your favor with them, or get more social skills), or they don't know. If they don't know, just switch to another fellow sect member, one will eventually know.

If you don't have enough favor, you can get to 30 by clicking on the chat button repeatedly.

You can get to 60 (or more, if not blocked) by telling him about stuff you know on other people (gossip). Anything can work, favorites, dirty secrets, locations... but only if the character you're speaking to cares about the character you're gossiping about. If you listen to what the guy says when clicking on "chat", he'll tell you which people he wants to know gossip about and what knowledge he has. Just... read the answers I guess and use the discuss button to find about what they know and give them what they want.

With a character at 85+ social, getting to 60 is enough for people to tell you about other people's weaknesses. Getting to 30 is enough for most other informations. What we want here is weakness and special skill, but the more information you get is the best as the more information you have, the more stuff you can tell the person you speak to to raise favor.

To get beyond 60, you need either the character to be naive (it removes the block when speaking), or to know about the weakness of the person. If you're at 60 favor and blocked, speaking at your target with your target's weakness will remove the block. Enabling you to raise favor to 100 (like you did to go from 30 to 60. To know about the weakness of a target, however, you need to speak to another character as it's "private" information, so you can only get it by other people gossip on your target. Last case, if the character is withdrawn (personality), you need Hashuan's special skill that will remove the block from withdrawn characters (check kurt's guide for this), basically it requires a lvl 100 intel doggy, which you won't have. Luckily He Zudao is set to Dull, so it will always work for her.

We finally got the info we need after a few persons interrogated ! We have the weakness and the secret knowledge from other people, we'll be able to raise favor to 100 and exchange stuff.


4th step: Back to He Zudao

We speak to her again, get her to 60 by speaking about stuff we know from other people. Then, important, we remove the block by click speaking to her about her weakness. You get a prompt like this :


We then get her to 100 by telling her about more stuff we know about other people.

That's it, we're set for free loot !

Last step: loot.

Once all of that is done, click on secret knowledge to have a special manual for special knowledge (can be done once for every character in the game, but it's not that useful).


Last, you can get her special treasures. Back to the chat wheel, click on act, then gift her one of her favorites (which happens to be the talisman I took from the base earlier). The favorites NEEDS to be in the inventory of the character that speaks to the person you want the loot from. That's why I took talismans.


The items you've just gotten will drop on the ground, don't forget to take them (be careful to only take what the character dropped though) with the F1 button.


If the character has multiple special loot, you can give him / her the same favorite multiple times.
If you don't have the favorite on you to give him / her and want the loot, what you can do is invite the target to your sect with the invite button, he'll be there in a few days (needs 60 favor). To speak to someone in particular, you can also use the "traces" button to know where the character will be in the next days (changes occurs when leaving the map you're currently on, as far as I know). Then leave this map ! Back to your sect HQ.

Conclusion:

Back at the guild, select your new loot and click examine law. Congratz ! You've got the Talisman law !


Following the same principles, you can get mystery information (a few more things have to be known, get kurt's guide) and / or sect leader favorites (useful as giving them their favorite gives 200 sect favor and 1 connection for diplomacy).