Bay 12 Games Forum

Pretty sure someone else mentioned this earlier in the thread, but just to re-state it:

If you come across evil cultivators doing evil shit in a town, the option of "pretend to help them" is - if you can believe it - actually MORE evil than just helping them. Instead of just causing regular evil mayhem, your cultivator follows that up by backstabbing the evil sect and stealing their shit.

Evil points galore and hatred from the sect you just screwed over.

In related news, my evil reputation just got high enough to trigger the next achievement: 'Notorious'.

Also, it bears repeating that the entire event is worded like "you see some evil cultivators slaughtering innocent people for power" and one of the options is "help them."

This option means you will help the evil cultivators with their slaughtering.

Thank you for the reply and multiple options!

Really enjoying the game so far, but often feel like I'm wandering around in the dark

Next just got to figure out why my first inner disciple is so slow at getting... foundation? (Is it still called foundation once you reach Inner Disciple?)
I'm assuming it's because his stats and the starter law don't mess well at all (-5)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yeah, ----- for Law match is completely brutal.  You can make up for it a little bit by having him learn techniques that boost his stats - if you build a manual pavilion you can have people transcribe your laws into it and he can even learn techniques from other laws.  Look at his stats, figure out which are too low, and focus on boosting them.

That said, he's never going to be an amazing cultivator, so what you should also do is send him out to adventure and advance the plot so you can learn more laws to teach others.

More importantly, have him camp and enter areas with people, talk to them and learn / share information to raise their opinion of you to 60, then invite those people back to your sect so you can recruit them.  Target people with good stats, obviously, and Qi Sense is by far the most important skill for a cultivator (even more important than stats in the long term, though you want both), but beggars can't be choosers, and there's no real disadvantage to filling your sect out to the initial cap of 12.  That will give you more people to choose from and let you create a better second inner disciple once one of them builds their foundation.  Of course, you also want to recruit some people who will make good outer disciples.

In general your first few inner disciples are going to be throwaways meant to lay the foundation for making better people later on (your first Gold Core is probably going to suck too; same deal.  You use their power to pave the way for a better one later on.)

Eventually, if you want to cultivate fast, the thing to do is to build a Cultivation Room, which should look a bit like this.


The outer ring of items should be Spirit Wood; there isn't really any replacement for it.  You can get spirit wood by cutting down the glowing trees.  The inner items should ideally be stuff that both feeds the element of your cultivator and has qi gathering, but if you don't have anything like that you can just put stuff that feeds their element there instead.  At the exact center you should place a cushion, and assign it to the cultivator who you want to use that room.  The lanterns and door position aren't important from a feng shui perspective, but it's good to keep the room lit to avoid bad thoughts.

Eventually, building a room like that is absolutely essential to getting a high-quality (or even decent-quality) gold core.  You don't strictly need it before then, but it helps, and it's good to have it ready in advance because when someone forms their gold core you will want to seize the perfect window of time when the season feeds their cultivation, which (for everyone but metal cultivators) only lasts a few days out of the year.

You can find other examples of cultivation rooms by visiting the big sects later on.

welp, shortly after sheng finally managed to bury starter guy, map special effects kicked in and starter guy's corpse dug its way back out

Unlike Dwarf Fortress this isn't a result of the map as a whole, but a result of choosing an inauspicious burial place.  Unless you want them to come back as a zombie, always bury people auspiciously.

22 days in and my starter guy just died from a haunted house induced heart attack after I accidentally blocked off the one other critter I pressganged convinced to join into a building

This is similar.  Never create inauspicious bedrooms (unless you're trying to kill someone for some reason); they cause heart attacks.  The key to an auspicious bedroom is to have only one door, facing southwards, and to have the material of the bed (and any other feng shui items you put in the room) be fed by the element of the surrounding room.  Most of the time your rooms will be made of stone or earth and, therefore, most of the time your beds should be made of metal, which is fed by earth.

Don't worry about bedrooms feeding a cultivator's element (it's a pain in the ass because the only materials that work for this for some elements will create uncomfortable temperatures for sleeping.)  Just give cultivators a cultivation room instead and they won't cultivate in their bedroom.

... speaking of cursed wells, is there anything special you can do if you go about just absolutely ruining the general area's feng shui? Actually make like a cursed sect or somethin'?

There are some specific actions that benefit from bad feng shui (soulsearching enemies to rip out their secret techniques, in particular.)

Has anyone found any useful effects? I know that sun-dried bananas give temporary psychometry; so bullet-based-builds are no longer stuck behind a luck-wall.

There's a lot on the wiki (see here for detailed effects.)  Several things of note:

Banana chips can be used to get Psychometry, which lets you learn tinker recipes permanently.

If you want to play a cooking-focused character, Spinnerets is extremely useful, since it lets you get unlimited Phase Silk.  There's two ways to take advantage of it:

1.  Don't take Phasing.  Instead, use a Shade Oil Injector or something similar to phase for the first time and produce some phase silk.  Then, use Carbide Chef to turn this into a recipe that reliably grants you the phasing mutation, which you can now get for free via cooking - just use it and harvest the phase webs you produce for more phase silk, so you have an unlimited supply.

2.  Do take phasing.  Produce phase silk and use it to produce cooking effects that trigger when you phase, or which make your phasing last longer, or which phase you automatically.  In this case, max out your Willpower - you can stay phased permanently, or can trigger free effects very frequently, eg. rapid healing when combined with Starapple Preserves.

Always carry a lot of:

Jerky, for HP-based effects.  The 30%-40% HP increase in particular is valuable with anything that can trigger it, as is the one that triggers when you drop below 20% HP and the trigger-on-damage effect.

Starapple Preserves are good for the healing effect (eg. with the phasing trick above, you can heal 15-20 HP every time you phase.)

Salt is easy to get and is good to add when you want to get a solo effect from the other ingredient, as is Cider.

If you have a way to carry it, Lava can be used to get fire-related effects (eg. flaming hands.)

Convalessence can be used for cold-based effects and can be gathered in huge amounts at Bethesda Susa.

Slime Glands can be gotten basically for free by cooking slime (naturally, using it produces more slime, so you can get it again whenever you want.)

Open XCOM and Wizard of Legend.

So...basically XCOM, but with Wizards and Magic instead of Soldiers & Guns, and fighting against some invading Chaos force instead of Aliens.

Would be a pretty awesome Total Conversion mod, actually.

Tactical Breach Wizards.

Yeah, perhaps a new mission type, akin to "exploration" but for occupied sites, which determines what they have to trade (or steal) and other general information.

if you've been keeping up on the devlogs, you'd know that having more options for followers and equipment choices is coming... next version.

No, that's mostly unrelated to what I'm saying.  Your combat options will still largely be bumping into things, wrestling, shooting, and throwing; most followers will be slight variations on that.  And a character, once generated, will mostly play exactly the same for their entire existence, with little room to develop or customize them mechanically.  The current adventure mode system mostly doesn't support mechanically-interesting play over an extended period of time because of this.

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adding talents and secrets and techniques characters can learn on top of their skills

this is way more than just an adventure mode suggestion

It is something that is mostly important for Adventurer Mode, though.  While dwarves might learn, practice, and teach them in Dwarf mode, and while you might face sieges led by heroes wielding deadly techniques, none of that is core to Dwarf Mode.  The customization and mechanical depth of Dwarf Mode already exists due to the broader scope of what you control - different forts end up playing differently.

Whereas without that sort of individual customization, Adventurer Mode quickly gets repetitive because the basic actions available to each adventurer (especially in combat) are fundamentally identical, with no meaningful room to develop them through play beyond increasing their numbers a bit.