English Full Guide

[Hentaika]

Since english guides are non existant and the chinese guides are all over the place in chinese wiki - I wanted to make something that would help the english players start out.

This guide will consist of having a 'perfect start' and give you some of the best options for talents.
Also offers you one of the best 'casual' builds that will overpower all enemies in the game in a pretty braindead way.

First of all here are some chinese wiki links with loads of useful stuff if you want to look up pretty much anything if you are willing to machine translate them:
https://wiki.biligame.com/mcs/%E6%94%BB%E7%95%A5 - guide section with links to loads of different guides.

https://wiki.biligame.com/mcs/%E7%82%BC%E5%99%A8%E6%A8%A1%E6%8B%9F%E5%99%A8 - artifact creation simulator.

https://wiki.biligame.com/mcs/%E4%B9%9D%E8%BD%AC%E5%86%8D%E9%80%A0%E4%B8%B9 - a link to one of elixirs you can craft in alchemy, it's a menu from which you can navigate to any pill comfortably and view possible recipes for it.

Starting out/First Character creation:

The first character will be created solely for 'unlocking' some of the most powerful traits and making 2nd character super powerful. Feel free to create it on slot 2 as we will be deleting this character very soon.

The goal of this character is simply to reach middle of the golden core stage which unlocks some of the most powerful starter selections. We will be doing nothing other than cultivating and none of your decisions matter much.

Character creation selections:
For now I won't explain what those do as you don't need to understand anything yet, simply select them.
Normal difficulty > Otherworldly > Scholarly Family > Heaven Spirit Roots > Fire Element > Innate Dao Body > Body and Mind cultivation + Firm Heart + Tears of Stars + Unforgettable > Martial Artist + Glimpse of Dao

Start the game now and choose to 'skip guide'. Now do the following:
1) Follow tutorial until you reach the east valley area.
2) Go into marketplace > inn.
3) Rest/Practice for 2 months to skip the quest sequence.
4) Leave and go towards Wuling City.
5) Inside wuling city - simply go to teleportation and tell 'you have other matters'
6) Teleport to Starsky city and go north from it towards the Fire gate.
7) In the fire gate choose to 'join the sect'.
8) Once you joined the sect - go to hidden manual pavillion and talk with deacon.
IMPORTANT: select the 'demon flame technique'.
This is a technique with highest possible cutlivation speed that steals your lifespan as a price for it. But that does not matter for us.
9) Go to 'Disciple residence' and select 'cultivate'.
Choose 'learn' and select the technique you just got - magic flame(demon flame)
10) Now go into 'character menu' and insert the technique you just learned into 'primary slot'
Primary slot is what decides speed of your 'cultivation'(think of it as exp gain)
In this game you get exp(cultivation) mainly simply for months passing by.
11) Back to cultivate and select 'cultivate tab' to upgrade the 'magic flame'.
You can upgrade it directly to level 3.
12) Level 3 is cap in current realm so simply keep 'practicing' to reach breakthroughs.
There are 4 major breakthroughs in this game(not counting game end one):
Qi Refining(default) > Foundation > Golden Core > Nascent Soul

Each has 3 'steps':
1 - default one you start realm at
2 - 'middle' breakthrough is automatic upon filling exp
3 - 'late' breakthrough is automatic upon filling exp
Once you reach full exp on the 'late' - you can break through into next major realm. Each is a 'unique' minigame.

13) Keep going until you can break through to foundation.

14) Now in the very same room select 'breakout' instead of cultivation and select 'direct breakthrough'.
Technically 'normally' you can prepare with pills and techniques for each breakthrough for 'best results'.
But we will be accepting any result since we are scrapping character anyway. And simply completing should not be hard. But save game just in case.

Foundation minigame:
Your goal here is to reach 100 cultivation to succeed.
To do that you mainly want to do skills 5/6 as they are most efficient.
Skill 5 needs 3 of 2 different elements and skill 6 needs 6 of same element.

The bottom skills are your 'RNG manipulators'.
'Luck' allows you to remove 3 different elements and randomly get 3 yet again.
'Qi Gather' allows you to remove 2 different elements to get 2 extra next turn.
The 'good/bad' tip doesn't matter for those skills. Only a few skills in the game depend on having good element synergy, those do not.

Basically aim to use the skills 5-6 and do the rerolls to help you get there.
You can manually select the elements you want to use after you click any skill.

Your Qi Limit is displayed near your element count. 8 should be your current limit.
As long as you are under your limit - you can safely skip turn without wasting anything. Qi can go over limit but only during that turn.

Keep track of rounds you have left. On last round you will need to use up all the stuff you have left. It should be trivial to reach 100-110 if you did advice above.

Any excess point is +2 extra HP. But this does not matter for us as we will delete this character.

15) You are now foundation realm - level up the flame technique to level 4 for another boost in cultiavtion speed and then reach enough exp for golden core by practicing.

16) Golden Core breakthrough.
It's yet again possible to breakthrough without any pills/techniques.
Save game just in case and start breakthrough.
This one should be super trivial since we don't care about min maxing it right now.

The golden core has 3 phases:
You might notice how you have no reroll techniques. For golden core those need to be learned. But we don't care.

Phase 1 - three flower gather. Simply use all 3 skills once.
The 3rd one is hardest, so try to do it first. Likely easy finish in 2-3 turns.

Phase 2 - 5 qi condensation. Simply use all 5 skills yet again.
Likely easy finish with 2-4 rounds left.

Phase 3 - liquid array. This one is where 'golden core is formed'.
As long as you fill at least 1 - you will breakthrough. You don't need to know more for now as I will explain it later. Should be super trivial to fill at least 1.

17) You are golden core now, congrats! Learn flame level 5 and reach the 'middle golden core' stage(one exp fill) after which you can save game(just to be certain your result is saved in game memory) quit back to menu title as you have unlocked all important stuff for our main character creation.

Main Character Creation(with explanations):

Now that we unlocked all talents we need for an 'optimal' character - we can start the game.

Difficulty:
You might notice how you unlocked difficulties. My recommendation for first playthrough(even if it's your only planned one) is normal difficulty.

It's best to learn the game casually first without getting frustrated by it IMO. My build/recommendations do make normal difficulty a cakewalk but if you like to tackle optional content and do some 'challenging' stuff like winning competitions you aren't intended to then it's best do it on normal difficulty.

Starter stat explanations:
Stats:
Aptitude - your cultivation exp gain improves with this stat. Very important stat with our talent selections.
Hard to increase it early on.
Absolute maximum is 200. 1 aptitude = 1% cultivation speed boost. So a 0 aptitude character will gain exp 3 times slower than 200 aptitude one.
Can relatively easily reach 200 on year 300+ since you get some infinite sources for it.

Wisdom(comprehension) - speed of your 'technique' learning/level upgrading. Can't really improve it easily either.
Absolute maximum is 200 but you realistically can't ever reach it.
Shortens time it takes to learn techniques/skills.
Up to 100 it gives 0.5% boost. 101-200 gives 0.25%. Final value at 200 is 75%.
Let's say a technique takes 400 days to learn at 0 comprehension.
It would take 200 days with 100. It would take 100 days with 200.

Soul Sense - a stat which is needed for some early optional content and which can also be used to help with some strategies based on 'stealing' to get cash.
Also affects your fights with soul sense skill cultivators(if they have more soul sense than you then they usually get bonuses against you) but those are very easy opponents anyway since their skills scale really badly.
Also affects vision distance at sea - this is probably the best of it's uses aside of some early soul sense checks.
It's pretty hard to improve it(albeit technically infinitely farmable via dual cultivation) but aside of being useful in some optional stories it's not too useful stat on practice.
The stat mainly raises passively from simple breakthrough.

Speed - a stat that's not too hard to gain loads of. Pills for it are super easy to make and there are even techniques which use up special slot and improve it that are super cheap/fast to learn.
It affects who attacks first in battle. Very easy to reach speed values where you outspeed even higher realm people.
It affects your ability to run away from fights.
It affects your move speed on map.
On map minimum move speed is 1 day per tile. However you will eventually learn a flying sword movement technique which allowing you to fly to a tile you select directly. You don't even need that much speed for it to take 1 day to fly from 1 corner of the map to the other.
Speed has no cap but by late golden core you can easily outspeed everything in the game.

Lifespan - doesn't matter much in this game. Impossible to reach end of lifespan unless you are doing some stupid things like skipping time with no cultivation techniques equipped.
You will likely end game at year ~1k at worst... and at that point you will have much more life span than that.
It does have some uses in end game where you can use it to simplify last breakthrough + game end tribulation. But it's kinda pointless since those are relatively easy anyway.

HP(health) - just your health pool. Most of those are flat bonuses which only matter during initial portion of the game. They are relatively minor since your pre last breakthrough will have your HP at ~3-6k and last one will have ~15-30k.
The ones that boost % of health per breakthrough do somewhat help though.

Mood(mind)/Roots will be explained in talent choice selections.

Talent Choices:
Otherworldly(40 talent points) - taking other options is just for making game more difficult for you. And 99 one can't be rush unlocked easily, hence for most people the 40 talent point start is what they will experience game as.

I will explain what to select and what those do tab by tab.

1) Scholarly Family(2) - the best choice, comprehension is neat.

2) Heavenly Root(14) - aptitutde is one of most important stats, especially early on and the amount you get from this is insane.

3) Selecting element here does not cost any points.
My recommended build is mono element EARTH. So make sure to select earth if you plan to follow my advice. Read further if you want explanation of how root system works.

Element/Root explanation - I first have to explain what the 'roots' mean.
The chances you see are the chances to generate the type of energy in battle or breakthrough when generating a 'random' Qi type.
Most builds in this game are either mono element or dual element, so it's important you improve said element.

By selecting earth element here you will have 10 of each spiritual root aside of earth which will be 30.
There are also easy to get consumables which can increase all elements by another +10(if you only use earth one all others will remain 10) and golden core mono element(5+ of core formations are same element) will give another 20.

4) Abnormal Veins(-8) - this is an important negative trait we can take.
This trait disables the cultivation exp gain from special pills which give those. Generally speaking unless you are min maxing cash gain/alchemy to the limit then those give pitiful amounts anyway and are not worth at all. Basically this is almost 0 penalty for a casual player while giving you loads of talent points.

Innate Tao Body(3) - a very good bonus for minor points.

Demon Bloodline(5) OR Dragon Bloodline(6) - demon one is arguably the most optional talent but it's neat to have more HP to play with. Especially if you decided to go for higher difficulties.
Dragon bloodline is required for one exclusive achievement(dragon pond one), so I recommend it if you are achieve hunter, especially if you are on normal difficulty where the HP hardly matters anyway.

Reborn Immortal(16) - this is main reason we made our first scrap character.
Not only this gives insane amount of comprehension but you also get more 'enlightenment' points, a limited currency which allows you to unlock some of the most powerful 'Dao' traits in the game.
Also slightly helps in final breakthrough.

5) Seriously Ill(-3) - we don't care much about lifespan and the -30 is entirely negligible. Free talent points. Your endgame lifespan will be in multiple 1000s with game likely lasting ~1k years only.

Tear of the Stars(2) - this is an accessory you will be able to sell for good price and get insane amount of early cash, important for becoming overpowered early on.

Mysterious Green Bottle(2) - once you unlock your own 'cave'(as you upgrade it - it becomes optimal cultivation place with all facilities inside it)
One of facilities is unique to cave. A 'herb growth' place. You place a herb and it will grow passively.
If you got this bottle - you can speed up the growth speed by spending 'cash'.
It's a convenient way to get herbs at reasonable speed without bothering with trades and such.
Roughly speaking this can become an ~50-75x speed up. Yeah, that's not a typo. It takes infinitely long to grow anything good without this.
It's the most convenient way to multiply the high tier herbs IMO as those are always 'overpriced' when bought from other sources.

Unforgettable(4) - huge amount of comprehension for only 4 points, nuff said.

6) Glimpse of Dao(3) - this allows you to start with 1k exp in each 'Dao'(enough for level 1) aside of alchemy/forging.
Dao is an in game talent system which is also one of restrictions for learning skills/techniques.
Dao is improved by learning and leveling up techniques associated with the attribute.
Battles can also sometimes give thoughts and improve dao exp.
For the alchemy/forge it needs you to forge/craft pills instead.
Altermatively all aside of alchemy/forge can also be gained by improving it via 'dao talk'. You first do dao talk with an NPC and then you get a temporary consumable 'thought' which you can spend time on to 'study' and get dao exp based on time spent and quality of thought.

Highly recommended(mandatory if you selected dragon bloodline) but kinda optional:
Broken marriage(-1)
If you chose 'dragon bloodline' for achievement then you need this to actually have enough points to create a character.

If you chose demon bloodline - taking this allows you to take soul sense +3(transmigrator for 1 point) in tab where you selected family. This is the only option there which does NOT remove the family bonus.
Do not worry - your choices are 'remembered' so you can go back freely and keep all selected stuff.
This is quite convenient since early into the game there are quite a few things where having more soul sense helps. And it's pretty hard to improve it aside of.. just breaking through. The pill creation of the

Mood -30 will penalize you temporarily until you get back to 0 in early cultivation gains but it's easy to restore it back via pills + some early available events(you will get +25 via events really easily by following my easy starting steps) and the numbers you gain on it will become 100s and then even 1000s, so long term negative mood start is negligible.
It's very easy to always have the 'positive' mood bonus by just purchasing relatively cheap pills from other cultivators and doing some events which increase mood.

With that we have concluded our 'perfect' starter build using up all 40 of our points ultra efficiently.
Honestly even if you were to create a 99 point full positive character - he wouldn't be much better since we already picked all important stuff.

Game Start/Mini initial walkthrough for power starting:

So you just started the game normally and this time with your 'real' character.

This section is a step by step walkthrough for a very short period of the game which will cover you with basic steps to allow you to beat anyone with ease(at least on normal difficulty), even if they are a realm above you most of the time.

1) I recommend accepting the guide so some things are explained to you.
Once you are about to fight a snake - make sure you click 'combat preparation' to equip the sword + accessory. Those will help in this+next battle.

Snake battle is trivial. Always use weapon, it's free. Follow tutorial advice otherwise.
You will recover some HP from accessory so you will end up with a lot of HP after.

2) In next choice immediately pick 'take initiative' for an optional fight.
Winning this fight is extra relations with your new friend.

3) After the fight - talk with the guy you are with. Since you got relations bonus we might as well profit from it.
Learn 'Yu Yun Gong'(shield at battle start) from him. This gives you a scroll containing it.

4) Now proceed to east stone valley.
Visit Marketplace.
In marketplace feel free to browse trades and start purchasing 'ice heart pill' if you see any. Those raise mood by +1. We want to return to 0 mood ASAP.
Those are super cheap and won't pose a problem on our cash, don't worry.
Do NOT sell anything yet and try to keep at least ~20 soul stones for teleportation.
While we are here - I will explain how pills work.
Any pill can be used 'resistance' amount of times.

5) Visit Inn.
Once inside - take inn for 2 months and improve your 'default' technique to level 2. This skips the auction but there is nothing important to gain from visiting auction.
Default technique is neat since it gives decent cultivation speed while being learnt at amazing speed. So you can use it temporarily as best in slot.

6) Leave town and go towards Wuling city. If you want to - feel free to go step by step as you can encounter NPCs on each tile who might have mood pills for you to purchase.

7) Once inside the city - do NOT do anything, simply use teleport and teleport to 'Yifeng City'.
Visit arena here for +1k exp.

Now unequip the accessory and visit weapon shop.
Stuff sells for more in their respective shops.

Important info about shopping:
Red price means NPC wants more money from you than the item is worth.
Shops usually sell and buy(what they sell) for more.
Equipment sells for more in the Yifeng City weapon shop.

Useless 'monster parts' sell for more in 'Guangling City' material shop.
However you can also use the stuff to get crafting exp instead.

Starsky palace has shop with manuals but you will rarely get them randomly and they are dirt cheap usually so hardly matters.

Yun Shi City has shop with herbs BUT you usually only purchase them.

Sell the accessory and buy the 'golden light'(blue quality) weapon. This is absurdly powerful weapon type until you get multipliers to amplify your 'main combat style' damage massively.

It deals up to 30 damage after enemy moves but if enemy deals HP damage to you then that amount of damage is removed. But if you absorbed damage with shield then it's not removed.
You will probably be using this weapon type all the way to golden core at least.

8) Teleport to Yun Shi city now. Buy 10 'skymend shrooms'(blue quality) from herb pavillion.

9) Teleport to Guangling City.
Long quest dialogue triggers automatically.

Once it's done - talk with the NPC who has quest mark near him.

Go to Inn and talk to NPC with quest mark yet again..
Choose 'Keep Listening' for a bit extra relations.

Back to port and talk with quest NPC yet again.
'Trade Skymend Shroom' - that's the ones we bought.

Back to inn and talk with quest NPC.
Give it as gift. This gives a decent'ish newbie armor + loads of relations with her.
You can later sell it for 4682 in weapon shop later, so there is no loss even once you get better armor.

10) Teleport to Starsky City.
Go to Taoist Inquisition building. Talk with top NPC who sell technique scrolls.
You might also want to optionally buy:
'Telekinesis' green scroll(should be next to some green skills you already learned). This one is super cheap and ultra fast to learn. It is used in one of the sect dungeons as requirement for optional reward.
'Breath Control Skill' purple scroll(right next to the only 'book' in the shop) this skill is often required for some optional quests.
This one is expensive and takes long to learn but at the same time it has very good 'cultivation exp' ratio, so it has temporary uses since our sect is unavailable anyway for a long while.

Scroll all the way to the bottom and purchase 'Wind' technique.
This is a special movement slot technique. It's very fast to learn it and it will remain useful for a relatively long period of time.
All the way until you unlock sword flying technique. That's the 2nd technique you get from your 'sword spirit' memory recovery. Which is quite a lot of quests with him, likely somewhere deep into foundation realm is when you will get it if you are doing optional content.

11) Teleport to Wuling city.

Equip the armor you got and weapon you bought and go into the 'ascension terrace'.
On normal difficulty that's more than enough to win this easily but save just in case.
Technically it's doable even on hardest difficulty but it's RNG and probably wants some better skills for shielding.
All your damage for now will come from weapon until you join sect and get some skills from it.

Hence the only thing you want to do with Qi is to spam shield. Default shield skill has 'synergy' which means good/bad thing matters on it. Having 'good' synergy means you get 1 shield more.

Once you win all matches - you will get invitation to white emperor palace regardless of choice.

After that's done - more story cutscenes start.
Choice there matters:
Law of Jungle - +10 mood
One day I will go higher - +1 comprehension

I recommend comprehension but difference is minimal for both. Mood is something that's never really needed as long as you are keeping up with using pills for mood.
1 comprehension is not much when you already got like 75 from creating character optimally.

Regardless of what you chose - you get an extra +5 mood too.

11) Go to inn, rent it for 1 month and learn 'wind' technique we bought.
Set it on the 'mobility' slot in the technique menu.

Now leave the city and go to 'Yong An' town nearby.

Exploring inside majority of dungeons does NOT take time so feel free to explore every tile everywhere. Just save beforehand as those often have some mini events with choices.

This dungeon however is mostly empty but one tile up north gives a boost of +20 mood.
This along with some mood pills should easily bump you back to 0 mood so you stop getting cultivation speed loss.

12) Return to Wuling City.
Go to white emperor pavillion. If you won the tournament of year 1 - you should have gotten invitation.
Accept to join this sect.
This is NOT the sect we are joining but you can be outer disciple here while still being in another 'main sect'. Just make sure not to ask about becoming inner disciple afterwards.
Joining this sect is mostly just extra optional content.

One of the NPCs sells techniques here.
You can buy 'weapon creation introduction for 300. Other places sell it for more and you will need it if you want to get rid of the weapon craft quest from your menu.

13) As long as you got 0 mood or higher - you can proceed with my further advice.
If you don't - explore cities for NPCs. NPCs change every month albeit some stay.
Try to find mood pills to buy. The lower the quality the better price ratio is, so try to either get grade 1 or at worst grade 2. Assuming you did everything above - you need only 5 mood pills to get back to 0.

Biggest 'places' where NPCs gather are:
Wuling city - Spirit Herb Hall
Starsky city - Marketplace
Guangling city - the port sometimes has NPCs who can have some very good things.
The other cities and places are mostly empty and not worth the time to check IMO.
Marketplace of starsky city gives a tiny discount for anything bought there. So if you plan to buy something really 'costy' then trying to find it there is ideal.

14) For most sects we would be joining the sect now.
But Earth sect is the one that is closed until year 5. Trust me it's worth the wait however.
This is pretty much when 'core' walkthrough of mine ends. But I still got loads of advice left and the recommended build + different mechanic explanations are further into the guide.

Now that your mood is over 0 and you no longer have a penalty to exp you can proceed to learn techniques.
As far as techniques go - you want to learn:
Breath Control > set it as primary technique > Breath control Level 2 > all other scrolls you got and their levels.

However before you do that - I highly recommend you to read on things you should do between studying techniques since those will skip huge amounts of time and hence refresh quests/NPCs.

Things to do between learning techniques:

1) Unique optional quests/events. If you are completionist and don't want to miss anything - you want to use a guide. A lot are very easy to miss and a lot have choices which are often not obvious in deciding best outcome.

Here is a wiki link which lists them all:
https://wiki.biligame.com/mcs/%E5%85%A8%E6%94%AF%E7%BA%BF%E6%94%BB%E7%95%A5%E6%8C%87%E5%8D%97#%E5%A4%B1%E8%B8%AA%E7%9A%84%E6%95%A3%E4%BF%AE

Most things appear in the order they appear at but a few odd events are at sub section end for some reason, so it's worth reading through sub section of your realm just in case.

Sect related events have separate sub section too.
Each sect also has some 'dungeon' events which you can do regardless of sect.
However to safely explore dungeons of other sects you need to be Golden Core + have a 'famous' reputation(500 rep) by completing quests in towns.
Simply getting 500 rep won't work.

2) 4 cities(all aside of Starsky city) have 'city halls' you can enter. Each has 'quest' menu.
Those are very profitable even if you buy things from NPCs for white price.
Quests refresh roughly every 6 months, so twice per year.
Sometimes a few of the requests are urgent - those are usually worth bothering with actively to see if you can complete them as they give roughly ~50% more cash and hence massive profits compared to price you spend.

Those mostly consist of alchemy ingredients and pills.

3) With advice above in mind your usual 'routine' every AT LEAST(can be more if techniques take longer) 6 month gap will look like this:
1 - Check all quests and memorize what you can potentially complete.
This will eventually include the sect quests too.
Quests you can complete by buying from NPC are:
Blue/Purple pills - those are quite rarely sold without a red price but it happens.
Green/Blue/Purple herbs - all those herbs should only be bought from other NPCs, not shop.

2 - At the same time check the places in cities where loads of people usually gather(I listed those places slightly above) for their resources

4) Things you want to buy from NPCs:
Pills:
Aptitude Pills, Comprehension Pills, Soul Sense Pills, Longevity Pills(not the blue 'demonic' 20k one though).
Only if price you buy it for is not 'red'.
Those can appear as requirement in quests.
For your own use you want the cheaper Mood pills as well. Gradually increasing rank you use up to blue.

Tools:
Alchemy Furnace grade 4+5 - you probably want one of each but only once you start having some cash to spare.
Those are not too expensive but early on you want to spend more so you have bigger cash pool to always carry some pills/herbs for quests so you can instant complete them
Basically try to use the minimum possible furnace, only using higher ones if it's needed.
Those are pretty rare but sold by NPCs even in initial towns.

Herbs:
Green Quality - Sword Reed. Those don't reward much, so up to you if you want to bother.
Blue Quality - Bamboo + Gloomglade Wood
Purple Quality - Jadecore Shroom(later on available in earth sect for sect currency so don't buy those later on) + Netherborn Grass + Lupus Peach + Silvergleam Shroom + Skysword Shoot + Phoenix Bloodberry + Chaosborn Fruit

Introducing recommended sect

:The earth sect(Shifting Sand sect) opens up at exactly year 5. So that's when you should be ready to go there.
If you go there before that - it will say that sect is closed temporarily.

You will need to complete a fight after which you will be asked to choose a master.
Choose the 'Lord Eternal Harmony'.
This master uses 'gravity' build which is arguably strongest and easiest to use build in the game.

Most of the 'masters' in this game use a build which can be replicated by player.
Some are weaker and some are absurdly strong like the gravity one we chose.

You get some loot as reward for joining sect and will also get a small yearly salary from exterior deacon NPC in the gate square area. The money you got in total is 'remembered' but you still need to visit the NPC to claim it.

You can sell pretty much everything as it's trash.

You can buy some herbs from alchemy building and some gear from the weapon shop.
Those cost special currency. You should get this currency by doing quests easily.
Weapon shop has nothing noteworthy for you specifically I would say.
Herb shop has 2 noteworthy herbs:
1 - purple shroom. You should only buy those with sect currency from now on for whatever quest purposes you have. It's more efficient this way.
2 - blue quality dragonscale cones. Those alone can be used for full recipe of 'purple quality' health pill if you got alchemist furnace tier 6. Considering that you can get infinite amount of those via sect(you can donate 150 soul stones per sect currency) - you can pretty much directly convert time to money with no limitations by buying those and then crafting the health pill then selling it to some NPCs who have it as red price. Should be plenty of those around.
Alchemy Furnace tier 6 won't appear until much later into the game though, so that's just something to keep in mind for future.

Sect quests are in the town square. You want to be doing the following quests regularly:
30 green resources - those are always worth doing for some easy sect rep. Those cost only 1k so it's quite good value for reputation too.
20 blue resources - early on only do them if they are 'urgent'. Once you slowly start approaching golden core make sure you start doing those for all purchasable ones assuming you can keep affording them.
5 purple resources - early on only do those if it's the purple mushroom which you can buy for sect currency. Later on you want to do this for all urgents and for any purples you don't lack too much.

The big goal is to reach 8k sect currency by golden core(if you lack some - you can exchange via soul stones, but that's the least efficient method) for the top tier technique.

Recommended Build:

My recommended build is earth sect gravity.

Before we start - I will mention that it's possible to further improve this build with some top tier techniques but even the basic barebones version of this build that I recommend is more than enough for anything in the game on normal difficulty.

The 'default'(copy of master) build consists of his top 5 techniques + top 3 active skills(+ the gravity skill).

Techniques:
All highest ranked 5 of your master.

Active Skills:
All highest ranked 3 of your master + gravitation skill.

How build works:
Build only really starts partially working once you reach foundation and get the 'earth' tier skills unlocked in manual pavillion.
You can probably unlock one technique(most expensive one) from your master if you were doing his quests.
The rest you have to purchase from sect.

Foundation makeshift build:
Gravitation + Rockfall active skills for damage dealing.
You first stack ~5-10 gravitation then start using rockfall.
Enough gravitation ensures enemy can only use 1 skill basically. You can only use 1 skill too but you also got weapons and rockfall depends on gravity.

In terms of combat helpful techniques it's most important to learn Dust generation when using earth Qi(can remain level 1) + shield generation when you got gravity and dust. That one is pretty big extra shield value.
Elephant armor helps with survival too.
Those 2 + decent'ish armor should make you immortal past a few turns of gravity stacking.

The damage % increase technique should be your 'primary' as it's the biggest cultivation speed one so give it most attention.

Finale version of 'default' build:
You unlock final useful technique which also becomes your primary one.
This one massively improves dust generation which helps with new active skills.

2 new active skills are added.
One is a damage increase on next skill you use based on enemy gravity stacks.

Another one is converting all your dust stacks into earth damage of next skill.
This one allows you to fast kill some easier opponents if you have dust generation weapons by directly building up dust via weapons and exploding into a rockfall.
However I don't recommend this one if you plan to eventually replace rockfall as a nuke with the other main nuke I suggest in changes I recommend below.

Ways to improve the build beyond master build variation:
All techniques aside of 'final' one(Citation from four heavens) which gives dust via gravity and 'earth damage %' one can be replaced.

Replacement techniques basically replace the shield ones(those become too negligible compared to equipment shield gains) and dust generation(the low dust gain one per earth qi spent) techniques.
All of those are heaven grade:
'Baili Qi' NPC is by far best as you only need his affection to get essentially almost all techniques. He has 4 core choices of what to teach by time he reaches nascent soul:
1) Phantom God(~480k) - speed bonus and chance to dodge if your speed is higher than enemy. It's pretty easy for player speed to be higher than enemy since alchemy and techniques give a lot which enemies usually lack.
Chance to dodge means that with enough save/loading you technically can beat anyone.\
THIS ONE GOES INTO NASCENT SOUL SLOT.
Unlike most other techniques which give a pretty useless(for our build) qi generation - this one gives a 20% damage reduction. Not as critical on normal mode but very nice for very hard.

2) Vajra Mountain(~480k)- damage multiplier when above 70% HP
This one is most 'skippable'. Technically speaking if you got 70% HP left then you likely would win anyway. So this is only for speeding up battle further pretty much.

3) Sun Swallow God Ape(~650k) - first damage skill used gets damage multiplier.
However this is MUCH better than it sounds. As long as you don't do any damage this is actually stacking damage % additively each turn. So after ~20 turns this is a 500% multiplier.
In our build that's preparing for entire battle to one shot the enemy this is the most important technique.

4) Dragon Transformation Technique(~650k) - big HP boost + % HP regen.
This one is optional. It is kinda neat if you did not select the dragon bloodline to have some form of HP regen.
If you have dragon bloodline it's debatable vs Vajra mountain skill. If you don't - I would say it's mandatory.

The values are what it costs in 'affection' to learn it. Affection you gain is amount an item would sell for that NPC.
For Baili Qi it's best to craft the health +7 pills via our sect infinite dragon cones. That gifts for double it's normal value.
The first 2 of those are available starting from golden core Baili Qi.
Last 2 need him to reach Nascent Soul. This happens at worst on year ~315 of the game with 0 help from you.

5th replacement technique - Nine Transformations of True Dragon:
This one comes along with active skill we will want to use. You can get this if you had dragon bloodline in the east sea via the once per 100 year dungeon on the 2nd visit.
Otherwise alternatively you have to buy those separately from dragon sect. In that case you need to donate a total of 2 dragon scales(you can get 1 each 100 year refresh of the special dungeon in 'east sea', so earliest you can learn those would be year 200)

This technique simply adds HP + a buff that removes debuffs. Main reason however is that this buff is required for an active skill that we want to use.

Active skills:
There are 2 key active skills:
1) 'Heavenly Star Like Rain' - A replacement to main nuke. It allows us to use dust for damage directly instead of having to use a skill in between wasting our turn.
Huge synergy with earth dao talents.

You can either learn it from Grand Elder of the sect Venerable Yegeng OR simply buy it for sect currency as golden core cultivator.

2) True Dragon Blood Rage active skill.
Associated with the true dragon technique. This one converts the debuff removal buff from technique into a +100% damage for next damaging skill you use. Along with all other multiplier it's a neat final polish.

How end build looks/plays
Depending on the difficulty you kinda decide how defensive you are. On normal you can mostly live with just one shield armor piece and without even touching survival much.

Gear is generally dust generation on 2 weapons, shield gain on armor and either shield gain or dust generation on accessory(shield on very hard for sure or if your goal is clearing harder stuff)

Technique details are mentioned above, but quick summary is:
Citations of heavens(gravity to dust) - primary slot.
Alternatively if you get 'Dragon Transformation' then it reaches absolute highest cultivation speed potential.
Well, technically there is one technique which has even higher one that you can learn from 'main quest' of year 500. But it's not that great for our build and learning it purely for cultivation speed is probably not worth at that point.

Phantom God(dodge %) - nascent soul slot
Yuanrong Feisha(earth damage %), Sun Ape(first skill each turn dmg % boost), 9 Transformation True Dragon(mainly for the buff it gives) - 3 of the secondary slots

4th one is Vajra Mountain if you don't use Dragon Transformation.
Citations of heavens if you do since 'Dragon Transformation' takes primary slot then.

Out of active skills your core gameplay is:
Turn 1: use weapons > spam gravity. Maybe cast true dragon rage first if you usually have spare energy after turn 1 otherwise.
Turn 2+: Spam gravity and use weapons after Qi is used up.
Battle finish:
Use star rain active skill to finish the battle once you got enough dust. Generally try to remember the multipliers of damage you generally get so you know what damage you can expect at what dust.

Basically the only real way to lose is in first few rounds. Theoretically taking too long against DoT build enemies too, but practically speaking that should almost never happen.

The above is all you really need to know for normal mode.

For very hard you might want add a few active skills purely for survival.
I would say there are 3 somewhat profitable ones:
1) Dust coat - floor 1 manual pavillion skill. Converts all dust into shield. Use both weapons > use this before you start gravity spam if you have problem surviving turn 1.

2) Some Gongsun family(Yun Shi City) cultivators can have mid tier array which gives 15% dodge chance - Little Mystic Array.
This one is your RNG solution to harder fights along with phantom god. Just gotta luck out and even very hard fights will become a breeze. Afterall you only need to survive for first few turns after which you are nigh immortal.
Triggers as separate chance from the dodge technique.

3) 1st floor of sand sect has an array skill which gives shield every turn. It's not much, but it's something.

Basically the build is offensive enough to burst a 'debuff DoT' stacker enemies before they can do much harm.
And all the other build types are invalidated outright since you literally become immortal when only taking one skill damage with just your passive shield stacking and loads of damage reduction/first hit reduced damage survival dao talents(if on very hard)

Dao/Enlightenment Build:

Dao build means how you spend your 'englihtenment points which you get upon breakthrough and upon discussions(30 points can be gotten from that alone)

You can only level enlightenment if you leveled ANY other previous tier one. You can level multiple ones in same tier.

Let us start with all the enlightenment sources possible:
Chatting with NPCs about Dao has a special 'exp bar' upon reaching which you get 1 enlightenment up to +30 total.
Pills have a total of +6. If you 'double' the pill resistance then you will get +12 total.(42)
'A good understanding' of each Dao(reaching 30k exp) gives 1 enlightenment. There are 12 daos total(54)
Reborn Immortal character creation trait gives up to 10 extra total. The extra points are 1/2/3/4 for breaking through major realms(64)

The rest comes from normal realm breakthroughs.
With all the above maxed - you will have:
Late Nascent Soul:
89(29 purely for all breakthroughs up to late nascent soul)

Late Deity:
108(15 purely for breakthrough from late nascent to late deity)

Deity can technically also get 2 extra points in dragon tomb(only if you didn't visit it as nascent soul for +4 immortality) for a grand total 110 possible points.

My example of minimalistic full build point cost:
Full refinery via black tortoise(21) + Full earth top row(21) + 4 Pill skills via false pill/fire control(13) + 4 top row Qi skills(13)
This is 68. By late nascent you will almost certainly get this much.

Remotely worthy additions for normal mode:
Qi tier 4 bottom row(6) + Pill level 5(8)

This would bring cost up to 82.
Everything else is survival oriented which is not needed for normal.

Required additions for very hard mode:
Body Line through 60/200 HP > Ice Muscle > tier 5(21)

Earth tier 3 bottom(4)

This is 93(from 68 build) - you probably want to reprioritize things. Likely more body at the cost of less Qi.

Optionally further add body for +600 HP(6) and Qi tier 4 bottom row(6) for a total of 105 cost of the 'perfect' build.
Instead of 600 HP body you can also add wood/water tier 3 bottom(shared skill, will cost you 7 in total)
This skill is best learned through wood seal the throat tier 2(the only tier 2 that does at least something)

What are remotely useful 'dao sections' for any build?
'Own combat element' + Body + Qi + Pill + Refinery.

Own combat element is no brainer.
In our case it's Earth:
Earth is very high priority.
In earth we want absolutely all top line ones.
Optional if you got points on higher difficulty - tier 3 bottom(damage reduction 15%)

Body:
Body talents are only worth on highest difficulty IMO.
If you play on normal then feel free to ignore it or give it very low priority, you won't ever have problem with survival.

Cleansing or Mending(if you can do cleansing before foundation then do it) > 60 HP > 200 HP > ice muscle(damage reduction from first damage per turn is halved) amazing for gravity build where enemy can only attack once > damage reduce 30%

Qi:
Qi is low to medium priority. Low on harder difficulties. Medium on normal since you can kinda skip body.
You only want first 4 tiers. All top row. Ignore 5th, it's not worth.

Can also get 'Calm' tier 4, it's essentially permanent damage improvement of this build.

Pill:
Pills are very useful if you want to bother max crafting all pills of all rarities.
Technically speaking for min maxers this is ultra high priority. Reason being you will compensate big part of your investment into it with enlightenment point pills anyway, so you won't be wasting too much.
To be specific out of 13 enlightenment required you will gain back 6 you wouldn't be able to get otherwise once you are done full eating the enlightenment pills.
Very High priority if you plan to bother with pills.

You want 4 tiers at least in that case.

Tier 2 is 'False Pill', just make sure you get it before the golden core.
Tier 3 is 'Fire Control' which will allow you to infinite craft up to tier 5 pills by simply using tier 6 furnace. And you don't need to create much tier 6 pills hence you will be able to infinitely craft.
Tier 4 is your main goal to double the amount of pills you can use, including permanent stat increase ones.

Tier 5 is what I would only take in normal mode(since you don't really need survival talents in normal mode) to remove cash grind effort requirement.
Doubling pills crafted is an insane boost to cash gain(~500-1000% end profit boost) BUT you want to get this rather early(as early as ~golden core) to actually maximize profit from it. The second pill is basically full price worth of profit.
It also makes it twice as easy to max out your pill usage.
On very hard you want to skip this since you need many more survival dao powers and money is something you can grind slower even without this.

Refinery:
Maxing this one is almost mandatory.
Priority is based on your cash reserves. You generally want to have the Dao levels of materials you can craft with. But final level can be gotten earlier than you plan to craft with tier 6 mats.
Traits are powerful - you get 2nd weapon slot and better craft potential. Better craft potential means all your equipment is 50% stronger which on top of having 2nd weapon slot is insane power potential boost and is nigh mandatory on higher difficulties.

Tier 1 doesn't matter

Tier 2 - black tortoise

Tier 3-5 are straightforward.
Before you plan to craft 'absolute best' tier 6 gear you need to reach max dao and study the final trait.

I will explain artifact crafting slightly further below.

With that our 'build' is complete.

Alchemy guide + permanent stat pills:

Honestly rather than bothering with understanding alchemy I recommend simply using link at the top of my guide and just use recipes directly from there. You will get loads of different recipe variations for each pill, all of which work and you can choose based on what you have.
The pills in the 'big list' of recipes also tell the furnace level you need for them. Same pill can have 'easier' recipes by using higher level furnace.

Unlike crafting alchemy is ultra simple - as long as you use correct recipe and your alchemy furnace is good enough you can craft anything regardless of your rank.
The only hard part of alchemy(discovering recipes) is already done for you.

Alchemy furnace grade basically only affects the amount of herbs you can insert. More herbs which can be inserted generally means it might become possible to substitute higher rarity stuff with big amount of lower rarity stuff.

Also here is a link which compiles all craftable 'stat bonuses' in one place.
https://wiki.biligame.com/mcs/%E5%B8%B8%E8%A7%81%E6%B0%B8%E4%B9%85%E5%B1%9E%E6%80%A7%E4%B8%B9%E8%8D%AF%E4%B8%B9%E6%96%B9

The only 2 items that this 'stat boost' section misses are:
1) The blue quality 'Profound Ancient Pill' - lifespan +5, aptitude +1 for 20k as white price which is only sold by NPCs, usually independent ones or those related to demon sects.
You can't craft this pill in any way so the only way is to buy it from NPCs or the year 300 star city market shop.
This one has resistance of 4 by default. Be careful when using as it has massive poison value of 30.

2) It's actually not a pill, it's a herb that you can't grow or order via sect. You should certainly just consume this herb.
The herb is called 'Blood Bodhi Fruit'. For most of the game it's very limited.
The earliest you might get it is probably the 3 from 'Qilin' emblem/breath restraint interaction of fire sect dungeon if you got enough soul sense,
Details out there if you look up the sidequests link of chinese wiki. This is not limited to fire sect despite it being in that section. All things that are inside dungeons are doable by any sect.
Consuming it directly from inventory gives +2 aptitude with no 'resistance', so you can consume those infinitely.
Maximum aptitude is 200. Once you reach 200 - nothing that raises it will raise it any higher.
Closer to end game(year ~300) you can get a special shop NPC in Star City Marketplace which can sell this one. Shop refreshes it contents once in a long while(~2 years I think, but it might not give the bodhi every 2 years)
~year 300 there are also some quests with said NPC on world map and then in the marketplace afterwards. Those give some bodhi fruits.
Generally speaking provided you made all starter choices I told and used all aptitude pills with double pill resistance dao talent - you will super easily reach 200 aptitude with all the bodhi fruits.
He will want tier 4 Kun Heart > tier 5 Fire Toad Heart > tier 5 Kun Heart if you want to prepare in advance.
Be aware there is continuation to this quest line on year 510+ and if you do it then the shop will disappear permanently.

Alchemy/pill exp farm
The only way to get 'pill' dao exp is to create pills.
Creating pill for the first time gives a good bonus exp, so it's important to create different pills if you want less time spent. But maxing alchemy is pretty trivial.

Money making methods: robbing, sea monsters, alchemy, town quests

Robbing is trivial and by far most broken method. As long as your soul sense is higher than enemy - you can get back what you sold.
Basically your goal is to sell 1 stack of something super expensive and then ask for it back via 'threaten'.
Penalty is extreme drop in relations with said character and a tiny penalty for 'Ninzhou'(world rep)
You basically can do this once per each NPC. Covering up world rep is super easy.
So technically speaking unless you don't mind not being able to trade with a bunch of people due to bad relations - it's the best method by far.

Sea Monsters is more of a supplementary method which is amazing if your initial pool of cash is low.
Most non starter areas have monsters with ~2k health and dropping purple quality materials. You can autokill those at around late golden core-early nascent soul provided you killed same monster manually before.
They drop 6 or 12 materials + an orb. Selling those to material shop for red price is a pretty good profit without much effort. Gravity build is pretty perfect for farming those monsters, even as early golden core you shouldn't have much problem.
Theoretically you might even be able to handle monsters who drop tier 5 materials which is super profitable. Those monsters are pretty limited however even in further sea areas.

Alchemy is another great way to get cash in this game.

In Earth sect you can only do remotely useful alchemy once you get to ¬golden core.
There are 2 methods for earth sect:
1) Finite but biggest profit - this means you can't just infinite craft it but it's still relatively easy.
Once you reach golden core - you can send 'dispatches' in your main sect to get resources up to tier 4(purple)

What you need to do is send dispatch for 'Demon Core - Soul' of purple quality.
VERY IMPORTANT(!!!!!!!!!!) - DO NOT SET MORE THAN 30 OF THOSE(3 slots of 10) PER DISPATCH.
Setting more massively slows down dispatch completion.
Setting 50 outright removes the chance of someone taking the dispatch.
~30 seems to be most optimal number per dispatch after my tests.
The amount of dispatches that can optimally happen at same time is ~7(but that won't always happen).
Depending on how much spare cash you have and how much you plan to 'not pay attention to' - you probably want more than that.

The recipe is:
Furnace 5+:
Main slot 1 - 6 Soul Demon Cores
Secondary slot 1 - 5 Soul Demon Cores
Medicine slot - 1 Dragonscale Cone

The result is a soul sense pill tier 5. Out of NPCs who always have those as favorite are the lin family girls. It's a good idea to make one of them your partner so they are almost always in your cave for easy access.

Basically you want to be dispatching this resource non stop if you want cash.
It is more efficient in getting profit per time spent but you can only craft for a total of ~1 year per ~10 year worth of dispatch gains.

2) Infinite crafting - a tier 6 furnace is required(needs 14 herb slots and tier 5 only sadly has 13) + tier 3 pill dao to not reduce durability when crafting lower than furnace level pills.
Once that's done you can combine 'Dragonscale Cones'(blue quality) from sect currency herb shop in this way:
5 main slot + 4 secondary slot 1 + 4 secondary slot 2 + 1 into medicine slot.

Yes, that's literally same resource in all slots. 14 of them total.
This one can be sold for biggest profit to Baili Qi out of fixed NPCs- he is usually pretty easy to find as he is often inside his manor.

Worst case scenario to buy 14 of those will be roughly ~5.7k(by doing the inefficient soul stone donation to get sect points)
Solid profit even in worst case scenario. And with no durability loss the only thing you lose is time.
Remember that despite the method being 'weaker' profit than finite method - this method is technically allowing you to use up sect currency, so if you had any with no efficient way to spend it - this is the most efficient way.

Final Method of getting cash is Town Quests. As far as purely getting cash goes - this is least efficient and quite intensive on your game time as you need to trade with NPCs and such but if you like getting higher REP then this is the way to go.

Auction Tricks for getting Alchemy Furnace 6 + explanation of NPC 'trade favorites'.
NPC favorites are decided the first time you open trade menu with an NPC. Exclusion is fixed NPCs who always appear in all games with fixed stats, favorites and skill growths.
I like to mark the NPCs I already traded with by 'chatting' which usually marks the NPC as acquaintance. In rare case it drops relation though.
This is useful if you can't find someone who enjoys the pills you want to sell.
Hence you can save/load the favorites of any generic NPC that you never traded with before. But that should never be required as fixed NPCs have good variety of pill preferences and good amount of cash which refreshes fast too.

Alchemy Furnace 6 and Boat tier 6 are sold in the South Cliff Sea Town auction.
If you get lucky with having it in auction - good for you. If not however there is a trick you can use.
Participate in an auction and then IMMEDIATELY after it ends during black screen quicksave the game with F5.
Check the next lot, it will be random and you will be able to reload the result because you saved before the RNG is 'rolled'. Keep reloading until you get what you want in the auction.

Important auction list:
South Cliff Sea area - . has generally biggest rarity stuff possible. Tier 6 furnace/boat/cave formation flag being most noteworthy.
Tier 6 boat will cost ~800k, be aware.
Happens every 10 years for ~3 months.

Heaven Secret Pavillion(the only one not in the sea) - every 10 years for ~6 months. Can have some tier 6 stuff and tier 5 is pretty common.
Most interesting stuff that's sold:
Cave tier 5 flag, tier 6 craft materials, some tier 3 techniques/skills(tier 3 aka heaven is final for skill/techniques) and some tier 5 pills.

Shattered Star Sea - can have some tier 6 materials/elixirs and tier 5 is pretty common.
Most noteworthy is probably ability to straight up buy 'nascent' and 'deity' related pills.

Nascent Soul Barter System:
The first time after you join the 'heaven secret pavillion' auction as Nascent Soul you will unlock barter system.

Basically speaking you can see requests from others who usually want to trade some of their tier 6 stuff for other tier 6 stuff.
This is 'instant' and usually pretty 'fair'.

However what's important is that you can actually request pretty much anything tier 5-6 yourself and offer pretty much anything else instead including lower rarity stuff.
Everything is worth 'white price'. Your goal is to get ~110% price of item by using 4 slots. So big stack of something cheap can work just fine.

The good things you can get via this is tier 6 boat/alchemy furnace.
Any tier 5/6 elixir(aside of one tribulation elixir). Any tier 6 material.

HOWEVER, there are some issues with the system as there are some rules to barter system:
1) Item must be easily attainable somewhere in the game. So some items can NOT be gained this way.
So for example all tier 6 metal/stones can be gotten through barter system easily since they are exchanged by NPCs via heavenly pavillion rewards.
But most other materials will never get exchanged no matter how much you offer.
Same for some super high tier elixirs - if they never show up in any auction then they will never be sold to you by anyone.

If you want to be safe my recommendation is:
Save game > put your offer(ideally double the price) > skip 20 years via practice and see if barter deal happened.
If it happened then the deal 'can happen' and you can afford to change price of exchange too if you want to.
Reload and act according to your needs.

2) Only one same material barter deal can occur per time skip regardless of how long said time skip is. So you can barter 2 different materials in one time skip but you can not barter 2 same ones.
Here are some examples:
1- One tier 6 craft material for 2 other tier 6 materials should happen in ~5 years spent total. However any 'extra' time is lost if you wait for longer.
So let's say you wait 20 years - you will only get 1 barter deal done and only AFTER time skip the time will start counting for next barter deal of this material.

2 - One tier 6 craft material for ~110% price(1 tier 6 + 1 tier 5 material) will take roughly ~10-11 years.

Artifact crafting explanation:

Now that's where I think explanations are required.

First of all if you want to tinker with equipment yourself - I recommend the 'crafting simulator' link above.

I will instead give suggestions which are ready for my build.

I will also explain the entire system however, don't worry.

Let's start with explanation of resources:
First thing you should pay attention when looking at crafting resource is that it has 2 important 'groups' it's sorted by:
1) Category - there are a total of 5 'categories'.
Metal + Stones + Spiritual Object + Teeth/Bones + Skin/Scales
Those categories only affect the attributes which affect the 'soul power' gear can get.
The higher soul power the bigger the stats. It's a flat system.
So 300 spirit power weapon is twice as strong as 150 spirit power one.

The way the 'attributes work is that there are 5 'attributes' and each category adds certain ones.
To get 'maximum' soul power you need a total of 2200+ out of 2500 possible attributes. Any less and you start getting penalties to soul power.

Any more gives absolutely nothing.

If you use 2 of each category you get absolute maximum of 2500 attributes.

To get 2200+ there are loads of possible combinations.
Generally speaking as long as you roughly evenly use 3-4 different groups total you should have enough to get 2200+.

2) Attribute - this consists of 2 words.
First word is Yin/Yang(yang is called astral if second word is 'chaos'). Second word is Chaos/Soul/Sword/5 elements

This is what decides which stat the equipment gets. Each word combo is giving some own stat. Sometimes multiple word combos do same thing.
And which stat it gives is based on equipment type.
If you want to see all possible bonuses on each possible equipment then you need to use the craft simulator link I gave.

Stripes
There are 4 stripes in total and you can only have one at the same time.
Bird/Dragon/Tortoise/Dragon

Generally speaking best one throughout most of the game is considered tortoise, but there is also some use for the Dragon in end game.

Bird/Tiger are fully useless. Penalties/requirements are too big to remotely consider those.

Dragon is a choice of x2/x3 soul power but with x2/x3 cooldown as well.
This is much better in end game, where flat bonuses to soul power of tortoise start to slowly drop.
Main problem is that this works only on weapon type equipment. Which highly limits it's uses.

Tortoise is most interesting one.
This one gives flat bonus to soul power based on the debuff effect you select to yourself.
Up to 120 power for max stacks of regular debuffs and up to 160 soul power for the 2 'vulnerability' debuff.
You can only select one debuff, hence +160 is maximum.

Biggest part of power from this one comes when crafting tier 3-4 equipment since it's a MASSIVE power boost at that point.

Max soul power by using 10 resources of tier 4 is 180. Adding +160 to that is literally almost doubling the bonus.
For example 'armor' equipment piece would get boosted from 36 shield per turn to 68 shield per turn through this bonus. All for a small price of getting 2 stacks of vulnerability debuff.

Once you swap to tier 6 gear - the optimized spirit power becomes 480, so the +160 is not as big of a deal, but it's still a solid bonus. At that point you can technically consider dragon in some circumstances.

TLDR goal when crafting something:
1) The higher base grade of material used - the higher the maximum potential 'soul power'. There are basically 6 'tiers' of equipment based on the 6 material tiers.
All 10 of the materials need to be of same grade. Anything else will result in a failure.

2) Ensure you use the stripe you want on the gear.
Usually it's tortoise with +160 soul power but on tier 6 that's not too much soul power, so dragon can become situationally useful too.

3) Ensure you reach 2200+ attributes total to get full soul power.
For that you need to use the 3-5 different 'categories'. If you are using only 3 groups then you want those to be +/- even.

4/4/2 and 4/3/3 are the most common spreads that still give max bonus with least groups. Not all combos work but majority do.

2 of each group gives the maximum 2500 attributes BUT there is 0 difference between 2200 attributes and 2500 attributes.

Base Soul Power(before the stripe/talent modifications) decides the price of the equipment. So even if you are simply farming exp - you still want to reach the 2200+ attributes to sell the equipment for maximum amount possible.

4) You can only create with materials up to certain grade based on your forging 'dao' level. Taking talent of that dao level is NOT required.
By default(level 0 Dao) - can only craft using tier 1 materials.
Each dao level allows to craft with 1 tier higher materials. Final level 5 dao allows you to use tier 6 materials.

Price of same gear grade is always same.

Forging exp farm
Aside of some 'books' giving forging exp the only other way to get it is by actually crafting things.

To get 'reasonable' exp you need to craft best rank possible at that dao rank.

Rank 0>1 - either read the weapon introduction book or craft grade 1 materials

Rank 1>2 - craft with grade 2 materials
700 exp/2 month

Rank 2>3 - craft with grade 3 materials
2200 exp/6 month

Rank3+ times are considering having learned the 30% time reduction.
Highly recommended to learn it before you bother with leveling forging further to save some time.

Rank 3>4 - craft with grade 4 materials
4000 exp/8 month

Rank 4>5 - craft with grade 5 materials
8000 exp/1 year and 4 month
Only at rank 5 you can craft with rank 6 materials.

Crafting with LOWER materials than the ones mentioned will massively reduce exp you get and is generally not worth the time.

Best gear for earth gravitation build:

I will list bonuses I recommend and material types you need for them.

Best ways to get tier 6 materials:
1) Barter exchange as nascent soul. You can only get metals/stones(by own requests) via this method.
Easiest way to exchange this is for 1 tier 6 material(which is useless for your build) + 1 tier 5 material. Ideally set all 4 astral(yang)/chaos and yin/earth stone/metal materials at same time. Maybe multiple times for each if you have materials.
You can increase the offer price which should speed up the process.

This at best results in 654 soul power(5+5).
To actually reach maximum soul power(720) - easiest combination by using most metal/stone is 4 stone/4 metal/2 bones

2) 6 Astral Chaos materials(2 bones, 2 skin, 2 spirit) are gained from endless abyss 100% exploration sea boss.
This makes it easy to craft 2 top tier shield equips(accessory/armor)
Paired with barterable stone/metal this means you can easily make 2 shield equips.
One is via 4/4/2 metal/stone/bones and another is via 3/3/2/2(metal/stone/spirit/skin)

You can also technically get 2 astral chaos stones from a boss in year 500+ side exploration on the world map once you are done with year 500 quest chain. But barter can be done earlier.

3) Earth Yin has no guaranteed sources so it's best to either settle for a 5/5 metal/stone craft or spend a lot of time reloading auctions. I personally don't recommend bothering too much min maxing equipment as it ultimately doesn't help in tribulation and end game anyway.

TLDR:
Our final version of build only needs Astral(yang)+Chaos and Yin+Earth material types. everything else is useless aside of crafting random gear for refine exp.
In the early stages of the game however you want Yin+Metal instead of Yin+Earth

1) Weapons - early on you want to improve on the 'golden light' weapon type which gives 'gathered force' as without any multipliers and with enough shields - this one is by far strongest damage weapon until you get enough multipliers to your main combat style.
For example dragon x3 dust weapon with all traits is 420 dust. While Gathered force is 720. But there are loads of multipliers which only work on skill of the element you use, so gathered force will by late game(likely late golden core/early nascent soul) become worse than something else, in our case dust.

For 'gathered force' you need box type weapon with Yin+Metal materials.

'Ring' type weapon is one you need to select for dust.
I would say dust is certainly best by time you fully finish 'earth dao' enlightenment.
Material Keywords you need are Yin+Earth

A perfect tier 6 equipment yields 128 dust as base+tortoise(vulnerability 2), paired with 50% boost from dao talent that's 192 dust per weapon.

So almost 400 with 2 weapons per turn. Usually each point of dust is much more than 1 damage since you got many other damage multipliers.

Alternatively with tier 6 you can technically build 2 dragon weapons. Each weapon with 50% dao boost will do 432 dust. So almost 900 in one turn but with 3 turn cooldown afterward.
Practically speaking it's not that great however in our build since weapon usage requires to be last action as it still drains your Qi due to gravity despite costing 0 Qi to use.

2) Armor - either pure shield or 9 material slots for shield + 1 slot for damage reduction.
Damage reduction is only for highest difficulty in builds where you need to have damage reduction to profit from the 'Earth Dao' tier 3 bottom talent.

Equipment type only matters if you need damage reduction.
Damage reduction is exclusive to helmet equipment type.

Keywords you need for shield are: Astral(yang) + Chaos
Keywords for damage reduction(helmet only): Yang + Earth

3) Accessory:
Accessories have 2 main choices.
On normal(or easier) difficulties you certainly just want more damage.
Which means either 'gathered force' early on or dust generation later on just to speed up battles further.
On very hard you might want shields for more survival and actually having a guaranteed win in some difficult fights.

'Beads' can have 'shield' and 'dust'.

Seals can have 'Gathered force' and 'dust'.

The material requirements are same as weapon/armor ones.
Yin+Metal for Gathered Force
Yin+Earth for Dust
Astral(Yang)+Chaos for Shield

Early game goals past my 'early walkthrough' section:

First priority is to finish a 'makeshift' gravity build when you reach foundation.
While you are doing that - try to start building up money/reputation via town/sect quests.

Second priority once you are done with that is to start crafting gear to build up 'dao' of forging.
If your forging dao is already level 1 then you can start with combining cheap green materials. Each green craft is 700 exp(2 months) when you are level 1(1000 exp), so calculate how many mats you need to buy.

Once you reach level 2(8k exp) - start crafting blue ones for 2.2k exp(6 months)
At this point if you get black tortoise stripe unlocked via 'dao' enligthenment bonus then you can already get insane boost to gear power, however you can't craft accessory slots yet.
If you think you can reach level 3 with your cash reserves and have enough for some level 4 gear(each craft of level 4 gear is roughly 70k cash if bought from shop) then do that.

Generally speaking reaching dao level 3 and creating full tier 4 material gear with black tortoise(vulnerability +2) shouldn't cost too much(remember to sell crafted gear you don't need in weapon shop, this will compensate more or less all your money loss from purchasing materials, so technically speaking forging only costs 'time' unless you plan to keep equipment) and will be massive power boost, kinda trivializing game and allowing you to tackle some of those optional very hard fights.

By tier 4 materials start to cost meaningful amounts of cash.
You can have white price for tier 4 in'white emperor pavillion' material shop in Wuling city which sells 3 different purple material groups for that purpose: spiritual, skins and bones.
It takes ~45000 to buy 10 materials with white price. Doesn't matter what you combine as long as you manage to get 2200+ attributes to get 180 base soul power then you can sell equipment back for ~63k in weapon shop. An ~18k profit. Not much, but it's something you get while getting forging exp.
With white emperor palace shop assistance you can combine 3/3/3 of spiritual/skin/bone + either stone or metal from an NPC to get 180 base soul power. That guarantees max sale price of equipment(63k in weapon shop)

As for your own equipment crafting:
You want Astral+Chaos armor of any type for 'Shield gain'
This early on you certainly want Yin+Metal weapon of box type for 'Gathered Force'
Accessory would depend on difficulty. On lower difficulties you can afford to take more damage for faster fights. Meaning Yin+Metal of seal type accessory for 'Gathered Force'
On very hard difficulty you would probably want Astral+Chaos bead type accessory for more 'shield' and hence survival.

Once you are done reaching 70k refining exp and getting a bit cash while at it - start preparing for golden core. Check breakthrough section and ensure you got everything ready by time you are ready to breakthrough.
Best cash gain(alchemy) opens up with the golden core so ideally you try to rush it ASAP. Try to get enough cash to upgrade your cave so it can reach ¬140-150% exp and you can just keep cultivating for 6 month or 1 year periods(and doing town quests/trades) or more. Kinda depends on how lazy you are. Your goal I would say is to have some starter amount of cash so you can start up the method of making amazing cash.

That being said you also really want to reach 8k sect currency for primary technique exchange. So I would start exchanging 'purple' and 'blue' whenever possible if you have more than enough for the exchanges of town quests.

Once you reach golden core - you get to choose which kind of elder you become.
Best option is 'foreign affairs'. It does require missions done once per 25 years(or face 25 rep loss for ignoring it) but as a result gives a solid 3200 base/6400 maximum soul stones per year depending on reputation. Which is kinda neat passive income. Especially now that the years will generally start flowing faster.
The jobs usually take 5 years of your time so it's best you ignore them and take rep penalty.

A new feature opened up as you became golden core: Dispatch.
Dispatch allows you to get any item up to tier 4 but at a pretty big overprice.
Now you want to invest all your spare cash into sect dispatching for 'demon - soul' tier 4 alchemy items if you want to start earning major cash.
Read more in alchemy money making section. The idea is that it's the only resource you need aside of infinitely purchasable ones(via sect herb shop) to actually craft the soul pill tier 5.
Crafting it costs roughly ~48k. Selling it to NPC who likes it goes for ~100k.

'Sect Cave' quest opens up - your first need to talk with the artifact building guy in your sect then go to the dungeon of your sect and choose cave option.
Exploring this field takes time and it doesn't give anything too valuable. go a bit north and then all the way east to rush the 'best spot'.
There are 2 possible 'cave spots'. One starts at low quality and one starts at medium one.
Medium one is the one suggested by your ghost sensei.
Sect cave can NEVER become top tier, it's permanently stuck in the rank it started as.
Main reason for sect cave is IMO to have a 2nd farm. This means you can grow 2 tier 5-6 plants at optimal speeds instead of just one. Nice.

Before you do anything else - try to buy the 'Citation from Four Heavens' for 8k sect currency.
This will be our 'primary' slot technique until end of game since it's a type of technique that's 2nd highest group of cultivation speed. There is one group faster and you might learn one such technique but that one is kinda optional survival improvement one.
Make sure to level it until level 3 ASAP. Only pause if quests happen and you plan to do them.

In year ~90 if you had 'Baili Qi' sound transmission then he will give you a quest.
Be aware that the moment you interact with Baili in the port of Pengsha - a quest sequence will start that you will have to finish immediately, if you decide to return from sea area the quest will auto fail.
This quest will send you to 'Pengsha Island' town to find Baili Qi in the port there. It's in the Pengsha sea area.

I would wait out this quest longer however.
Baili will be waiting in the port until year 300, so it's not hurry. It does give tier 5 boat as reward but it's best to wait out mainland quests first as there are loads ~year 100-120 ones.
Year 115 quest will also give tier 5 boat which will help exploring the sea efficiently a lot.
Event on the world map which appears on year 100 leads to you getting 'black token' after a somewhat tough fight.
This leads you to shortly afterwards getting a 'Listening to the rain' sidequest which can grant you access to 'Storm Palace' manor and gives you 800k for joining it as well as access to 'kill' quests.

To actually use the boat you need to equip it. It's in the artifact section of the inventory.
From where you start at sea - go towards eastern border. Then inside the area you end up in - go east until you are approx in the middle and then south until you are approx in the middle to reach said island.
By choosing 'positive' answers to his questions and agreeing to help him out you will get a tier 5 boat which will greatly improve your sea navigation speed.
The quest continues further afterwards and results in some dragon sect reputation.

This covers essentially all advise I have aside of herb farming, dual cultivation and sea system explanations which I will summ up below.

Herb Farming

Herb farming is done inside a cave.
By default each herb grows passively at ultra slow speed.

Adding more than 1 herb does NOT speed up anything even in total. You simply spend the 'growth' equally between herbs you grow.
So if you were to grow 1 herb which takes 50 years - it will take 50 years. If you were to grow 2 of those - you would need 100 years after which both are grown then 3 in 150 years and so on.

If you didn't get 'mysterious bottle' at character start then don't expect to do much with this herb farming mechanic.

If you however have the mysterious bottle then things get interesting.

Normally speed of growth without bottle is ~20-60 exp per month. It depends on both forms of cave upgrades(cash and formation ones)

Bottle however only improves via 'formation' upgrades.
It starts with ~200 at default stage.
With 'purple flag'(tier 4) upgrade the bottle will spend ~1.25k per month for example

Only amount of soul stones spent per month is affected. The 'exp' the herb gains is always 1 exp = 1 soul stone.

Starting with tier 5 herbs - you can set soul stones and end up in profit even if you sell them simply into the herb shop.
Basically tier 5 herb needs ~30k exp, meaning 30k soul stones for max growth speed for whole period of growth. Herb shop buys those herbs for 35k.

Tier 6 herbs can also be farmed. At least most of them.

I however use those not as 'selling material' but as 'sea town quest material'. Pay attention to what herbs are usually requested in sea towns and grow them for those quests.
For whatever reason almost all tier 5/6 herbs on NPCs are 'red price' which kinda makes purchasing them pretty bad idea unless you desperately need them or need the first one to start crafting more.

Be aware game has bug with 'red price' on herbs of tier 5/6 and they are almost always shown as red price even if they are not favorites of an NPC.

Dual Cultivation + Character Affinity

To dual cultivate you need to make an NPC your partner. This can only be done once the character reaches absolute limit of relations. Partner also needs to be same major realm as you. Ideally save game before you attempt it since there are some questions which can decide you becoming partners or not.

Character affinity is a value which goes from 0 to 200. You need 200 to request becoming dao partners basically.
This value is increased by getting 'favor' with NPC. What game doesn't tell you however is that it depends on the realm of the one you interact with.
Late Qi Refining need ~150 favor per affinity point
Late Foundation needs ~600 favor per affinity point
Late Golden Core needs ~5k favor per affinity point
Late Nascent Soul needs ~20k favor per affinity point
1 favor is roughly 1 soul stone the NPC would buy the item for
'Early' of same realm needs ~half of at the above(exclusion is qi refining) so early golden core would need ~2.5k favor per point.

Once you have become a partner with someone - you can then choose to send them into your cave.
Once inside the cave - you can talk about 'dual cultivation'.

The way dual cultivation works is that you choose one out of 6 possible dual cultivation methods.
1 is available by default and 5 more are learned by using manuals.
Dual cultivation manuals need to be clicked from inventory after which they are instantly learned.

'Starting up' dual cultivation doesn't cost any time at all, so treat it as extra bonus with 0 effort on your part aside of just clicking on it.

However for dual cultivation time to actually 'pass' you need to be specifically 'practicing'. Meaning you can not be learning dao or learning some technique. You must literally be 'passing time'.

There are technically speaking 6 dual cultivation techniques:
Be aware that almost all of those increase their 'number gained' with realm but speed is based mainly on what I write.

1) Default - does nothing, removes any progress

2) Solidification - exp gain speed based on partner's realm
Example:
Ni XuXin(late foundation) - 45000 exp in 4 years and 9 months
Lin MuXin(mid golden core) - 105000 exp in 7 years and 4 months
Lin Muxin(mid nascent) - 315000 exp in 13 years and 2 months

3) Warming - exp gain speed based on partner's aptitude
Example:
Ni XuXin(71 aptitude) - 45000 exp in 1 year and 11 months
Lin MuXin(76 aptitude mid golden) - 105000 exp in 4 years and 5 months
Lin Muxin+Baili Qi(81 aptitude mid nascent) - 315000 exp in 8 years and 3 months

The exp values from the 2 methods above are NOT modified in any way by any exp % bonuses. So those help more to people who play without min maxing stats but those with great stats will only see those as insignificant bonus.
Also scaling is really bad, so it's mainly only useful up to ~golden core.
And early on you probably will be busy spending time practicing something or doing something.

The 2 books above are not too rarely sold by NPCs for 10k.

4) True Source Method - mood gain based on partner's realm
Example:
Ni Xuxin(late foundation) - 15 mood in 3 years and 2 months.
Lin Muxin+Baili Qi(mid nascent) - 105 mood in 8 years and 9 months.

This book is bought for ~80k. It can rarely be found on NPCs and some auctions.

5) Divine Intercourse - Soul Sense gained based on partner's Soul Sense Dao tier.
Example:
Lin Muxin(mid golden core/dao tier 4) - 1 soul sense in 3 years and 4 months.
This is the only way to infinitely raise soul sense.
Lin Muxin(mid nascent/dao tier 5) - 1 souls sense in 2 years and 1 month.
Baili Qi(mid nascent/dao tier 2) - 1 soul sense in 8 years and 9 months


This book is gained in a Golden Core side quest related to Lin family in year 115
You need to have completed year 27 Lin Family side quest as prerequisite for this one.

6) Inner Light - HP gained based on partner's Body Dao tier.
This book is gained in a Nascent Soul quest related to Lin family in year 450. Needs to have completed the previous Lin Family quest in year 115.
Example:
Lin Muxin(Mid Nascent soul/body tier 2) - 70 years for 210 HP.
Baili Qi(Mid Nascent soul/body tier 65) - 28 years for 210 HP.

Sea exploration

Sea towns have no teleportation so all traveling must be done manually.
You do get 'fast travel' by reaching 50 reputation at sea, but it still takes time and actually takes cash too.
Each 'direction' input moves you a fixed amount of space and spends some amount of days.
Your speed is affected by either tier of boat if it's equipped OR by your speed if you instead fly on your sword when you have no boat equipped.

Boats have fixed speed values. tier 4=20 days, tier 5 = 14 days, tier 6 = 8 days
When boat is equipped - your HP is protected by boat durability. But the only way to restore HP of boat is by spending soul stones.

Sword flying is affected by speed stat When moving in a 'storm' you will directly take HP damage and it's possible to die.
Maximum sword speed = 10 days. You need ~100 speed for that and it beats the tier 5 boat. But sword flying can't beat boat tier 6.
Much later on(year 500+) you might discover a 'crane foot' movement technique but it has 0 difference with flying sword in terms of time spent traveling. Hence boat tier 6 is always top tier.

The earliest way to get a boat is in South Cliff town auction.
There are 2 more ways to get one.. One is 'barter' but that requires becoming nascent soul. Another way is year 750 quest.. but at that point game is almost done.

Let's start with Sea Town descriptions. You can see them all displayed on the map, I will list them by area they are in:
Inside the area - the towns are kinda trivial to find. Simply look for 'light'/'shallow' water color and the town will be roughly in the middle of that place.
1) Thousand Streams Sea - mainly a 'side quest'(not town quest) town.
Has almost no NPC and no town quests.
There is a pill merchant who sells some tier 4 pills but those are mainly stuff like healing/cultivation exp. Useless basically.
The side quest decides the fate of the island(it either remains or is destroyed) and which technique you get.
Even if it remains - it's kinda useless town anyway.

2) South Cliff Sea - has a 'marketplace', meaning quite a lot of NPCs to trade with.
Has town quests. Has auction. This auction is the most 'advanced one'.
It can have alchemy furnace 6 and boat 6 for example which are absolute best ones and one of few places you can get those in. Certainly easiest one too.

3) Shattered Star Sea - mostly empty in terms of NPC amounts. But has town quests and an auction. Auction in this one can have some tier 6 stuff but generally doesn't have anything extremely good when compared to south cliff sea auction.

4) Pongsha Sea - loads of shops + marketplace, so good amount of NPCs.
Has an auction but it's a very weak one, mostly tier 4-5 stuff.

Inside the sea towns quests usually ask for tier 5+ materials. This time including 'monster parts' too.
Sea town quests only refresh once per year.
What's nice is that quite a lot of NPCs sell those at white price.
You can easily just keep cultivating 1-2 months to complete all monster material quests with big chance in towns which have market due to big amount of NPCs.

Sea 'completion'
Each 'dark' sea area(dark as in when you check the map menu) - basically majority of areas that are not town locations have 'exploration progress'.

You fill those up and then usually get an extra quest or something for the area. Often involving some optional hard boss fights.

Progression itself doesn't really have a set pattern, but a bit is almost always gained from:
1) Talking to NPCs(usually +5 per NPC, but there is certain limit in each area you can get) in that area.

2) Some random islands can be 'trade islands'. Those usually sell a map. The first time you buy a map - you get +10 exploration progress.

3) Killing 'big monster' icons on the sea. Killing one gives +10 exploration and +30 sea reputation.
There is only one per map but those seem to respawn every once in a while, so they are your 'foolproof' way to reach 100 exploration. Not sure how often this happens though, but I think ~50 years after you kill.
Those are nascent soul tier and drop tier 5 materials.

If you want to save time searching for those - save the game and explore area to find them. Once you do - reload and head straight where they were.

4) Purchasable in Pongshen Sea town for special currency. The currency is usually gained by visiting random islands, those sometimes have random event which yields artifacts that you can exchange for said currency in Pongshen town.
Be aware that those events are not fully 'random', they are actually limited. Some areas have them some don't. Those have pretty high frequency of appearing if you didn't see them yet, so I would say if you explored 2 islands without any event then there likely isn't one in this area.
Always select 'information' to actually get the currency when returning to pongsha island NPC exchanger.
Some locations might seem like they have no events. That's because they are involved in main story sequence later on.
South Tu Sea is a main quest area which will instantly get +100 exploration if you follow the main quest of year 500.
Deep Yin sea is also a main quest year 500 area so don't bother with it earlier.
Deep Hell/Deep Black Sea events open up after you are done with Deep Yin Sea.

Basically to fill up area - ensure you talk with NPCs until you stop getting relation + ensure you find island with traders to buy map + complete everything that seems unique on the map.
If after all that you still don't have 100 - you need to purchase remainder via pongshen.

Particularly important non town areas are:
1) 'East Sea' - this area has 'special island' in random position that looks different from usual 'random islands'.
Best way to find it if you want to conserve days - save the game and simply sail until you find it. Upon reloading it will be in same position.
This island has got loads of tier 5 free loot.
This island also gives repeatable +30 exploration to Shfiting Dragon Sea and +50 reputation to Dragon Clan(once you bring back the scale from it).

This island 'refreshes' every 100 years(so year 100/200 etc) and hence repeatable for it's rewards.
Certainly worth a trip every 100 years. Refreshes positions every 100 years.

2) 'Shifting Dragon Sea' - has a special town called 'Dragon Palace' that you unlock upon 100% exploration. You need to beat a quest to actually unlock access to towns functions.

Breakthrough Details:

Breakthrough is something you can do once you hit exp cap of realm in 'late' stage.
Each breakthrough is a challenge you in most cases you need to prepare for if you want it to go in best possible way.

In breakthrough you do NOT get negative impact of 'poison'. However if you overconsume pills in preparation to reach 120 poison you will die.
After breakthrough your poison is fully cleared so it's generally a good idea to try and use poisonous pills with permanent stat boosts before a breakthrough if you are certain you have enough poison resistance not to die.

Foundation
Foundation breakthrough is trivial.
I mostly explained it in the tutorial creation of 1st character. There is nothing much to add so check it there.

If you plan to level body dao - make sure you level the 'cleansing' trait of level 1 body dao before you do foundation.
This one is not super critical however as it's low bonus.

Each 'extra' point you get above 100 is +2 max HP, there are no other consequences to foundation.
The ultimate goal is to always create '6' same elements for absolute maximum value of points.
But 3+3 is not too much of a loss either.

Pills that can help get more score:
1) Foundation pill x6

If you are min maxer and upped alchemy to dao tier 4 you can use 12 foundation pills for slightly more HP potential.

2) Pill of your element blue quality with +30 weight for next battle.
Breakthrough counts as battle so this will work if you use it beforehand from inventory.
This improves chance of getting your main element and hence '6 of same element' combination.
You can even use multiple of those. 2-3 for example can go a long way.

3) Blue quality pill that improves +2 weight to your element permanently.
Can be used 5 times(10 if you got pill dao level 4 talent)

Golden Core:
Golden core is both easy and complex.
Easy because there is a 'hard limit' of how far you can reach. If you form 'tier 9' golden core then that's pretty much it - you can't go higher and there is no extra reward for doing it easier/faster.

Complex because there are more details to the entire 'process' hence it needs a 'walkthrough' and getting quite a lot of things ready if you want to get a 'tier 9' golden core.

Aside of simply getting a golden core the final phase of golden core also decides which 'type' of golden core you get, there are 3 type in total:
1) Generic core - you did not satisfy any of the other 2 requirements. The only thing you get is +2 random Qi Generation.
2) Dual Element core - you need to have crafted specifically a 4+4+1 element golden core. 4/4 need to be dual elements you want to boost. 1 can be any element.
Dual elements get +10 weight each and you get +1 of each generated guaranteed.
3) Mono Element core - you need to have crafted a 5+ same element golden core. As long as you have at least 5 out of 9 of same element - you will get this one.
That element gets +20 weight and you get 2 guaranteed Qi generation of that element per turn.

Needless to say for our strategy we want an earth mono element. Hence 5+ earth cores in last phase. Getting mono element core should be pretty trivial due to root weight difference.

Let us start with stuff that can help.

Dao talents that can help:
1) Pill level 2 - if you plan to level pill dao at all then the one that gives you more HP upon golden core formation is a must since the other level 2 trait is kinda pointless.
With tier 9 golden core that's +27 HP. Not much, but might as well get it.
This talent also trivializes getting tier 9 since you get 1 extra qi per round.

2) Pill level 4 - completely trivializes this breakthrough but also does not give anything 'extra' since you can easily reach 9 grade core without it.
So if you skipped it during foundation - you certainly don't need it here. And honestly speaking using any extra pills is more of a waste too.

Pills that can help:
1) x6 Core Condensing Pill - mandatory to use

2) x1 Five Qi Pill - mandatory to use

3) 'Special' elemental weight pill of your element(blue rarity Earth Core Pill is name of one you need for our build) ~x2-3 should be enough - this pill only works on last 'phase' where you are forming 9 golden cores.
It's mostly there to help ensure you can easily get the 'mono element' core you want.
IMO 3 is overkill if you boosted your element through all other possible sources(char creation + blue permanent pills)

Manuals you need to study:
1) Great Circumstance Exhalation - best bought from sect for spirit cores(50 cores to buy it)

2) Reverse meridian - best bought from sect for spirit cores(50 cores to buy it)

3) Qi Sink - gained from a certain optional event. Check the side quest chinese list. It's the one related to 'arena' in Yifeng City.
It's a pretty hard event so it's recommended you do it when you are at late foundation or at least finished your foundation gravity build and/or making good gear.

4) Small Heavenly Exhaustion - can choose it as extra reward if you do event for 'Qi Sink' in a 'good way'.

5) Breath Adjustment(optional) - can randomly be sold by NPCs for ~5k. This one simply allows you to 'reroll' 2+2 Qi into 4 random ones. So nothing a save/load can't solve ultimately.

Spirit cores are farmed in 'heavenly demon eye' event. 'Regular players' will likely have at least 2 attempts in total - on year 30 and year 50.

Strategy Assuming you got all the 3 pill requirements + first 4 manuals done:
Turns:
1) First phase completion + use small exhaustion.
Reason we rush small exhaustion/phase 1 is because it small one works only in 2nd phase.
If something went bad - either reload or use 'reverse meridian' for an influx of Qi.
2+3+4) Use great exhaustion + small exhaustion. If you are going over limit - invest into 'progression'. If you can't do the above - your reroll mechanism is breath adjustment.
Qi sink can prevent a bad RNG if you foresee what can happen.
Reverse Meridian can help get enough Qi to spam the above.
5+) Start filling up the 'progression' and reroll assisting via Qi Sink +
On final phase with core formations - make sure you are aiming at correct cores. For example in case of my recommended build you want 5+ out of 9 cores being earth.

Nascent Soul:
Nascent soul just like golden core simply needs you to 'beat it' and has no extra rewards for doing it more efficiently.

Simply completing it is kinda trivial.

There are basically 2 steps in the process:
1) Destroy Core
2) Form Nascent Soul
You have 2 stats to keep track of - Will and Meridians. If any hits 0 - you failed.

The challenging part happens if you decide to use pills. There is a special pill which makes the breakthrough HARDER but gives +200 HP per pill after breakthrough. Limit is 2.. or 4 with double pill resistance talent.

I will base my walkthrough around earth sect + using 4 pills which make the progress harder.

Things you want to prepare for breakthrough:
Pills:
1) 4 Pulse Forging pills - this is the pill which gives 200 HP per use and makes breakthrough harder.
2) 4 Meridian Protection pills - main assist pill.
3+4) Great Awakening pill + Great Revitalizing pill
5) ~10 Spirecrag pills. Those are the +30 weight for certain element for next battle pills. Those STACK additively. We only need 'earth' so might as well use ~5-10 to make RNG better.

Manuals:
1) Splitting Dan Skill - earth sect special skill. You can get it in the sect manual shop 2nd floor. It costs 500 sect currency.
2) Reverse Circumstance Nasvent Array - this one you get in random event in 'East Sea' area. Just enter random islands and you will get this one before long.

Stats+Dao:
You will want 'good understanding' of Earth/Qi to actually learn the manuals.
'Mood' increases one of stats needed for survival in this breakthrough.
Specifically it increases max will. If you have enough - you should start with 102 will. Enough is ~500 I think. You should easily have ~1k by now.

Step by step turn walkthrough:
You NEED to follow this walkthrough to the letter. Your win or loss is decided by following this correctly. I am using minimum pill amount required, so with more helpful pills this process is much foolproof but that's using more pills than you need to.
Be aware that 'qi movement' skill is something I don't mention but it's basically a once per turn 'reroll' to ensure you fix some 'minor fails'.
Basically there is no harm in having ONLY earth qi. So always reroll non earth.
It is especially important on 2 final turns.
1) x3 spirit unloading skill
2) x6 spirit unloading skill
3) x1 Shattering Dan > x2 Splitting Dan > x1 or x2 spirit unloading. Your goal is to reach 49 or under 'meridian' for +10 to trigger.
4) x4 spirit unloading
5) x8 spirit unloading, discard 1 of any Qi(not earth if you have anything else)
6) x4 reverse nascent array - this is where it's a test of RNG. If you can't get 32 earth here then you need to restart and if bad luck happens a lot then consider using more 'spirecrag pills'.
7) x1 reverse nascent array - 2nd test of RNG, you need 8 earth this time. If you got it - you won.

Nascent breakthrough unlocks a new technique slot. Aside of simply being an extra slot - this slot decides which 'passive' you gain.
Passive is based on 'attribute' of technique. Best overall is 'body' skill type for damage reduction.

Deity Transformation:
Final breakthrough that's not ending the game.
This one just like foundation has more than simple 'finish'. The better you do - the more stats you get. A good breakthrough here can net ~18k HP.. yep, really.

To put it simple - you need to reach 100 'immortality' before your 'mortality' reaches 100.
That's the only goal to actually break through.

There are however 2 extra 'optional stats' you can aim at. Body and soul.
Those improve certain stats if you manage to get more of those.
Body increases HP/escape speed. Body is considered best to focus but it hardly matters at this point.
Soul increases comprehension/aptitude/soul sense. Soul is considered pretty useless since those stats are kinda useless by now. You have likely maxed out aptitude, comprehension is kinda whatever at this point... and soul sense is kinda useless too.

To start the breakthrough - you need to be at 'peak'(150k exp) in at least one dao(aside of formation/pill/refining).
Which dao you select to break through with will decide the 'help' you get during breakthrough and a 'special skill' you get after it.
Special skill doesn't really matter as it's just something you use to bring the tribulation closer. They are kinda powerful but a remotely decent deity cultivator build can't lose to anyone in the game.
'Body Dao' is generally considered best one as it has highest body stat potential due to giving a +15 body stat.

Things that help:
Initial immortality boosts:
1) Win first place in Heaven Pavilion tournament for the first time. Gives +4.
2) Kill Langfang Sea boss and then visit the Dragon Tomb in Dragon Palace as nascent soul. Gives +4. Getting this one prevents you from getting +2 enlightenment points by waiting until deity to visit it.
3) Chaos Immortal Pill - pill gives a +4.
4) Immortal character creation - it's the one trait I recommended that gives more enlightenment each major realm. Gives +2.

Having all those would start you at +14.

Pills:
All pills can only be used once for their effect despite their resistance being higher. Using more than one does nothing.
1) Chaos Immortal Pill - starts you with more immortality. This pill can also be gotten by following main story in year 500 story chain. It's very deep into it - after you are done exploring South Tu Sea there is a 'Sea Families' dispute winning which nets you the pill.
2) 'Body' stat pill - improves your 'body' gains.
3) 'Soul' stat pill - improve your 'soul' gains.
4) Pills which boost your chance of two elements. Your main element + a 'good' synergy for it. For example using earth build you would probably want ~30 earth ones and ~30 fire ones.

Skills:
1-2 - mandatory.
3rd is useless
4th has some reroll utility, helps avoiding save/loads.
5th - mandatory.
1) 'Forget Mortal Incantation' - learned automatically by beating Heaven Pavillion tournament.
2) ' Nine Dragons Heavenly Thunder Fire' - learned during 'dragon palace' quest chain at sea.
3) 'Guardianship of the Will' - you will find it during year 500 quest if you had a high enough 'mood' tier. I think last 2 tiers work. This one is kinda optional since it only affects 'soul' stat which is kinda useless.
4) 'Determining Spell' - you will learn it if you complete the year 500 quest chain.
5) 'Yongquan Method' - buy it from for 2k 'spirit cores' from sect exchanger NPC. You can get 2k spirit cores during 'return to demon eye' quest which is deep into the year 500 main quest sequence.

Core skills when doing breakthrough:
Transform Into Mortal/Transform into immortal/Yongquan Method/Forget Mortal Mantra/Induction Method
Ending turn as immortal raises Immortality but you can NOT restore Qi during it.
Ending turn as mortal restores Qi. Mortal transformation skill itself restores 1 Qi per 10 body stat.
Yongquan(will shorten it as yong) method not only allows you to 'carry over' qi into next round but also gives mortality -3 if used when in immortal form. So it's mandatory to use it in immortal state.
Forget mortal is a simple mortality drop for 2 Qi. Must use if you plan to stay in immortal form at end of turn.
Induction method is a simple immortality boost.
Determining - a 'reroll' you can use before turning into immortal.

You only need to be careful you ALWAYS use Yongquan method if you plan to use up all Qi since you will otherwise not have enough.

If you want to add some body stat then you simply want to use either body method or 'good synergy' nine dragon fire.
Everything related to soul shaping is kinda pointless as it adds kinda pointless stats.
While 'nine dragon fire' seems less profitable - it's in fact more profitable if you use the pill.
Pill gives +1 to body stat gain from both body method and nine dragon fire.

Example of how a 'body' dao breakthrough can look with end result of ~175 body stat and not too much RNG.
This turn build uses skills 1/2/5 and the body pill at the very least. Skill 4 helps a bit.
Make sure you are looking at what Qi you are using and what skill costs are before you commit.
Turns(if you ever forget what turn it is - simply check 'mortality' debuff on top of the screen, the debuff level is the turn you are on):
1-3) Your only goal is to actually get x6 body method uses by turn 3 end.. You can use Yong to 'reroll' Qi during turn 1-2.
First 4 turns are worst RNG place of this tactic, luckily it's at start so just restart the game if you fail.
4) Immortal > Yongquan > Mortal
A small tip - before using immortal you can technically use 'determining' skill if you learned it to 'reroll' portion of your Qi. I never mention this skill since it's pretty much a reroll mechanism before using 'immortal'. It's a nice way to get rid of non earth/fire Qi point if you get one.
5-6) Body Method > Immortal > Yong > Mortal > Body Method
7) Body Method > Immortal > Yong > Mortal > Body Method > Nine Dragon Fire(needs 'good synergy', don't forget)
8) Body > Immortal > Yong
9) Mortal > Body > Immortal > Yong > Forget Mortal(this is NOT mortal, it's a separate skill, pay attention)
10) Nine Dragon Fire > Mortal > Immortal > Yong > Forget Mortal
11) Mortal > Body > Nine Dragon > Immortal > Yong > Forget Mortal
12) Mortal > Body > Immortal > Yong > Forget Mortal
13) Nine Dragon > Mortal > Body > Immortal > Yong > Forget Mortal
14-16) Mortal > Immortal > Yong > Forget Mortal > Induction x2
17) Pre last turn. Do something similar to turn 16 but stop at 93-95 immortality to have a next turn.
Generally speaking this usually means only using 1 induction or 0 inductions based on starting immortality.
Leftover energy can be used on nine dragon fire.
You should be able to survive 'mortality' of this turn due to using yong/forget mortal.
Next turn will start at exactly 99 mortality, so just a bit short from
18) Last turn.
You NEED to finish this turn with induction bringing you to 100+ immortality since 'mortality' is gained before 'immortality', hence you will fail breakthrough even if you were supposed to 'finish it' due to being in immortal state.
You should be at 97-99 immortality if you followed advice above. This means one use of induction beats the turn.
Use mortal to get Qi, use all Qi on body stat aside of ones you need to use 'induction'.

At ~175 body you will get a bit under 17k HP.
If you were to reach ~230 body you would get a bit over 18k HP.
As you can see no big deal.

If you were to add 'soul stat' - you would get roughly +1 soul sense per soul stat and +0.5 aptitude/comprehension per soul stat.
So 8 would be 8/4/4.

Tribulation/ascension:
Ascension is what you unlock immediately after getting to 'deity realm'.
By default tribulation happens exactly 1000 years after you get to deity realm.
However you can lower this by 100 years for each use of your 'special' skill you unlocked.
Special skill is an icon in battle above help/logs/flee button.
So whenever you want to finish game - start spamming that skill. Can only be done once per battle. Can't use it if your tribulation is in under 100 years. Last 100 years have to be passed manually.

You can technically also extend game by 400 years by using certain potion but that's a bad idea since it makes tribulation harder. 1k years is more than enough for whatever you might want to do. Hell, you would most likely spend time speeding up the tribulation with the

What matters in tribulation?
1) There is only one pill which makes tribulation easier - one you should have gotten from the 'Deep Hell' sea 100% exploration event inside the cave after killing or sparing the boss.
2) Your max HP. You basically want to reach 'late deity' for sure.
I also highly recommend making Baili Qi your dao partner and doing some +HP dual cultivation until he is dead if you want to be truly safe.
3) The 'immortal art' skills you set.
Nothing else matters.

As for immortal art skills - you can set up to 12 of those. You have to 'learn' them through special menu first.
20 of those are learned by completing certain 'challenges'.
Most of the other ones are learned by learning certain 'Dao' enlightenment talents. Usually either 'combined' ones or the final ones. So you can usually only learn ~5 of those. Those are usually more powerful.
Pre last one needs you to complete year 1000 ghost quest and last one needs completing thunder sea 100% explore event.

Which are the 'good' skills worth learning you ask?
I assume your goal is to beat ascension while reviving your 'master'.
This means you need to survive 15 turns out of 18 with extra 2 Qi penalty.

My recommended skills to learn in order of importance/ease of learning:
1) Soldier - this is the most important, 'forging' final talent one. If you can prepare artifacts to destroy then this one is insanely powerful. Once per turn huge shield for 2 Qi(it targets highest tier you have in inventory)
Tier 6 is 4k shield for a mere 2 Qi for example.
None of your equipment works in tribulation so make sure you unequip everything to be used as fodder for this. Spend all your cash on tier 5-6 gear. You need a total of 15 gear pieces since it's once per turn usage.
2) Pill- only if you fully mastered pill obviously. It's a 2 qi heal for 10k HP + gives 4 Qi but only once in entire tribulation. Basically not a big deal if you don't have it but very worth putting it if you do.
3) Quenched(Thunder Sea) - needs you to complete the thunder sea 100% exploration event. This one is a permanent buff you should use ASAP. It increases your max HP based on damage taken.
4) Body - this one restores 50% of LOST(damaged) HP for 4+3 Qi.
When paired with thunder sea technique you should be able to reach ~40-50k HP total. It shouldn't be a problem to restore ~15-20k HP with this if you plan everything well. Super efficient.
5) Earth - nice skill when paired with high cost one(body is most noteworthy but the 5 Qi Cost ones are worth too) afterwards.
6) Ember(Ghost) - consume 50 years of life and get 2 points of Qi for 1 point of Qi. Allows you to get rid of unwanted Qi too.
To learn this you need to complete the process which I describe in 'witness' achievement.
At this point lifespan is useless. You will likely stop playing at ~year 1200-1500 at latest. It's possible to have ~3k lifespan. Tribulation lasts 18 turns means you only really need 900 lifespan total to use this each turn.
7) Challenge(deal a total of 8k+ damage) - this one is simply trivial to complete challenge with our build. Just use 2 turns to prepare gravity and explode with maximum damage.
You only need damage boosting techniques here.
Gives a 'damage' technique for 5 Qi with ~5-6.5k damage.
8) Challenge(1k+ shield) - just use the gravity for 2 turns then turn dust into a shield via 'dust coat'. It's not optimal way to do it, but that's learning minimum extras.
Ideally also put the shield boosting techniques.
This is a 5-6.5k shield boost for 3+2 Qi.
9) Challenge(deal 7k damage in same turn across 3 rounds) - same as previous challenge pretty much. A damage buff for 2+1 Qi with ~50-60% damage boost for next damaging skill used NEXT TURN. Is it worth it? 60% is basically 'not a loss'. This one is mainly good if you have some huge nuke with some downsides.
Another advantage is that sometimes you want to spend 3 Qi not to 'lose' excess Qi as spending 5 would be too much.

Tribulation Process:
Assuming you want the Wei Wuji achievement - talk with him and tell him you are confident.
He will absorb 2 qi from you if you got more than 6 at end of turn. You always want to have more than 6 at end of turn basically and this would take a total of 15 turns in that case.
Technically speaking you got 18 turns total(9 tribulation strikes), so you have some 'fail' leeway.

Tribulation itself is basically an increasingly big amount of damage dealt to you every 2nd turn.
You basically get 1 turn of damage and 1 turn of 'pause' where nothing happens.
Generally speaking during 'pause' you heal up or stack shield.
During 'damage phase' - you deal damage to tribulation which reduces damage it deals.

Generally speaking strategy is:
Don't forget to use the pill before you start.
Use 'quenched' ASAP.
Always ensure you use Ember + Soldier each turn. Those are super efficient per Qi Spent.

Remaining qi usage after those(but don't forget to leave 6 Qi to revive master unless it's emergency):
If you see tribulation HP - you can use 'break'. You should use 'earth' before 5+ Qi moves like break if you can afford it.
If you don't see HP - use 'shield'.

Try to avoid using 'pill'(if you even have it) before efficiently using 'body'. Only use it if it helps you get even lower HP for body basically.

Achievement Hunting:

There are a few tricky achieves:

1+2) The only 2 'very hard' difficulty achieves. Both can be done super early so it's best to actually make separate character for those(highly recommended) to rush those.
Do everything as in my 'starter' guide with a few differences.

For talents take:
40 talent points:
Martial Arts + Transmigrator > Heavenly Roots > Earth > Veins(-8) + Fire Body(yes, fire body despite us taking earth element focus) + Innate Dao Body + Demon Bloodline + Dragon Bloodline + Natural Pupil > Seriously Ill(-3) + Firm Heart + Hot Springs + Tear of Stars + Unforgettable > Lightfoot Master + Martial Artist + Glimpse of Dao

99 talent points(if you completed game first):
Can take literally all positive talents aside of 'qi consolidation' which is kinda fully useless and still have 1 point left.

This maximizes 'power' of character.

The 2 achieves themselves are:
1 - Winning year 1 tournament on very hard.
2 - Winning sect competition(needs you to stay in Qi Refining until year 30) on very hard

Start by doing my usual 'recommended start'. The only extra thing you need to do is:
Buy 2 active skills in starsky city technique shop:
Fire Bell Seal + Earth Wall. Doing this skill combo gives +10 shield.
Ideally you do a 'good synergy' fire bell seal usage which gives +2 earth Qi and follow it up with the shield. Shield can be 'bad', doesn't matter.

Doing this skill combo while your weapon is slowly doing your job is the way to go. You got some minor HP heal per round with dragon bloodline too as form of assistance.

Sect competition is fully trivial since you got so many years. Simply keep crafting gear until you reach tier 3 gear. Invest your enlightenment into 'tortoise' stripe of forging dao.
Craft a box weapon with 'gathered force' - yin+metal
Craft an armor with 'shield gain' - astral(yang)+chaos
Use vulnerable 2 stripes on both.

Technically speaking it shouldn't be hard to reach tier 4 material usage to craft an accessory.
Probably beads with 'shield gain' - astral + chaos.

3) Win your first demon championship on normal+ difficulty.
Winning this is extreme pain in the ass RNG with no way to make it easier aside of save/loading.
First of all - there are 5 entrances.
Western, NW, NE, SW and SE.
Those are just approximates.
Best entrances to reach central area are: NE>W>SE
NE: by far best - move south x2 > west x2 > south x3 to quickly reach the central area. You will need 15 speed for this route.
Western: keep going linearly until you can go through cave to the east > go through cave and then go north > east x2
SE: keep going east until you can go north > north until you reach fork > west and through an event. Event requires panacea > North from after the swamp to reach center.

Until you reach 'central' area - getting a fight/event or not getting one is fully random. You want to ALWAYS get a fight or some event(to filter it out) so you would need loads of save/loading.
In central area you are guaranteed to get a fight on each tile so once you reach it - you can relax and just keep going back and forth between the central tiles.

Getting 1st place is very unforgiving since the only thing place depends on is killing specifically 'spirit core' demons, only they count for kill amount.
During 1st tournament you pretty much want every single tile being some kind of event or fight, ideally a fight with demon, otherwise most likely someone else will win since first tournament finishes early.
Ensure you aren't spending any extra time on any event, pay attention to days since some events skip an extra day with some choices.
What's making it worse is that instead of 30 days - you only got 26 days as 1st time you do this event it always ends with 4 turns left.

I think you need 18 kills total during 1st tournament, but I am not 100% certain that's always the case, so it's best to have as many as possible.

So keep save/loading and you will usually be fine.

4) Breakthrough - Foundation before year 30, golden core before 100, nascent before 300, deity before 800. All on normal+ difficulty.

Should be trivial if you follow my build and always prioritize upping the highest cultivation yielding skill ASAP to set as your primary slot.
Setting up your own cave helps too, albeit for it to actually be useful you want to at least upgrade it to level 2 for cash(so a total will be 270k on that) and ideally get a few easier formation/flag upgrades.

5) Dragon pool while having dragon bloodline from character creation.
Basically you want to start game with dragon bloodline. In the sea you will eventually find a dragon pool. If you got dragon bloodline when using it - you will get this achieve.

6) Thunder Body Forging - you need to get thunder sea exploration to 100.
Not sure if it's required but this area also has a few random events which help reaching 100 rather easily.
After you reach 100 - a place for thunder body forging will appear.

Thunder trial mostly depends on your max HP. It should be doable at nascent soul with ~4k HP. But having more HP helps. After deity breakthrough it's fully trivial.
Body Dao seems to help too, but I am not sure how much. I did just fine with tier 4 body dao and ~4k HP.
It's a challenge that reminds the breakthrough ones.
Your big goal is to do final 3 skills ASAP as those are permanent buffs. After that keep healing yourself as top priority but if your HP is full or would go over full then do a shield.

Beating it gives 800 health and 10k body dao exp.

7-10) Side quest related achieves which are kinda missable.
7 - become 'heaven rank assassin' of storm palace.
To join storm palace you need to complete year 100 world map 'quest'. This is an event about fire cultivator who fights another cultivator and kills him.
Best to select 'wait' to have an easier fight.
This gives you a certain quest item, after getting which you will soon afterwards trigger a 'listening to the rain' sidequest.
If you answer favorably towards invitation to the wine + towards the questions('money is power' is that NPCs worldview so select materialistic choices) he will tell you a secret which allows you to join Storm Palace.
Storm Palace offers big soul stone yielding missions to kill certain NPCs. There is no actual penalty for doing those, they are evil cultivator bounties.
Complete harder ones and you will become a top tier assassin really fast.
If you aren't given hints to find NPCs for a long while - just reset the bounty, the NPC probably bugged out/faded away from the game.

8 - Witness Overwhelming Sea Saint(Saint Fu Hai) breakthrough.
Somewhat missable.
You need to defeat Langfang Sea sage/saint boss + reach late nascent but NOT deity yet + having explored dragon palace already and doing related quests there + NOT beating the endless abyss 'sage/saint' boss yet.

If you did all the above then you can return to Dragon palace and you will witness said breakthrough The real requirements are lower than that but doing all the above is what will certainly trigger the scene.

9 - 'Witness' achievement. One of easiest to miss.
The whole thing starts once you progress with the year 500 main story quest all the way until it wants you to explore 'yin sea'.
Once you do that successfully - you will open up a special ghoset island for 100% exploration.

Start by simply going there and proceed until you can actually do something.
You will see 4 NPCs you can interact with:
1 is the island owner, do NOT buy the technique yet even if you got the currency for it(farmable from tier 5 monsters in those 3 'deep seas')
2-3 are ghosts giving quests. Accept those quests. This gives +30 sea explorations for 2 other 'deep sea', should help you a lot if you want to 100% those.
4 is an NPC, talk with him after accepting the quests.

Talk with ghost NPCs 2-3 and choose to 'abandon' quests.

Talk with NPC 4 again and he will reveal secret of the island to you.
Choose 'promise'.
Now click 'cyclone' icon in bottom right of the screen to enter the cave.
Once next choice happens choose 'tell the truth' > 'tactful probing'

Now you can freely buy the 'Defying Good Fortune' technique whenever.

For the achievement itself you need to revisit this island on year 1000+ to 'witness' what happens.

NB: DESPITE YOU DECLINING THE QUESTS - THE QUESTS STILL ACTIVATED THE RANDOM EVENTS IN RANDOM ISLANDS OF DEEP HELL SEA AND DEEP BLACK SEA.
You can freely do those normally, it's just that you won't get 'extra' reward for finishing those quests.

Once you revisit island on year 1000 - you will have a fight with the ghost lady who failed the ascension.
You only need to wait for a few turns and battle will end automatically.

10 - Sword through Blue Sky achievement.
This one is essentially watching White Emperor's ascension.
It needs you to complete the year 750 main quest. Which has a pre requisite of 'Yin and Yang' quest completion(year 500 main quest chain end)
On year 750 you will need to go to Wuling Town emperor pavillion.
After that you can send invitations to five people(Mystic Dao, Rainbow, Fire, Bamboo and Star Palace) and have to wait for at least ~50 years otherwise, so ~year 800. There will be a bunch of fights with some potential optional loot and the quest will conclude.
Quest has deadline of year 850 so don't skip too much time.

11-15) 3 'Saint' Boss fights in sea areas, mostly related to full explorations and hard to miss.
Have to defeat those on normal+ difficulty.
3 great saints + tree roots + dream tree
One of the 3 great saints can be resolved 'peacefully' in which case you simply need to learn his special technique which substitutes the kill requirement.

Bosses are:
Langfang Great Sage - Langfang sea 100% exploration.
This boss is originally a Kun with 80k HP. You are not supposed to win this. I am not sure what triggers the next phase exactly, but I think it's losing enough HP since I spent a really long while spamming gravity but fight only ended after he started dealing some serious damage due to his stacks of damage.

Regardless - battle will autofinish at certain point and you will be inside it's stomach.
After that you instantly enter a fight against 'stomach'. It has 20k HP and 50k shield. It also has 20 shield regen and 10 extra qi regen.
This is technically 'real' fight that you can win. But you can also retreat after a few turns.
If you decide to retreat - you can cultivate inside this stomach. Cultivating weakens boss significantly.
For example by 10 years spent he will lose all extra qi. By 25 years spent it will lose all extra stats including shield.
I would say he is doable by default with our build. But if you got problem you can always weaken him. Rewards do not change.

He gives a total of 6 yang and 6 yin tier 6 metal materials. I like to set 1 tier 6 + 1 tier 5 material in 'barter exchange' for stone/metal materials our build needs. Upon return to dragon palace you will get 4 more tier 6 materials that aren't needed for our build.

After battle with this boss you can either select to make yourself known(300 sea rep) or remaining hidden(300 mood)
I generally recommend remaining hidden for mood.
This along with all other mood boosts(most importantly the 500 from winning hidden pavilion tournament first time) will allow you to reach 2k mood(final tier) with just the first 3 tiers of mood potions if you got double pill resistance. And those potions are drastically cheaper than tier 4+.

Overwhelming Sea Saint - Shifting Dragon Sea
This one is a 'friendly' one you can't fight in any way. He has a breakthrough achieve associated with him and has no 'boss fight' or anything. He is a background NPC so to say. He is the leader of Dragon Clan.
This one has no 'kill' achieve for obvious reason and his achievement of breakthrough was already described above.

Cloud Swallowing Saint - Swallowing Cloud Sea
This one has a peaceful resolution.
I recommend only coming here once you reach 'late nascent soul'
This allows you to forcibly break through illusion after which you will have a choice of either provoking the boss or asking him for advice.
Killing him is a fight that directly gives achievement.
Asking for advice is still a fight but not until death. You get an alternative for getting same achievement - learning the genjutsu technique from him.

Fight itself is against 50k HP enemy. Main difficulty on this one is that your Qi Cap will be 0 and you will regen less Qi.
As nascent soul - you need the Qi Dao tier 4 top talent to restore a total of 9 Qi and you need to hope that you eventually get 8 out of those 9 as 'earth' for our main nuke.
Boss also has stackable dodge chance.

Peaceful resolution gives +10 sea rep for some seas(the ones bordering this sea)
Asking for advice path requires you to take down other 'super bosses' and some important main story quests so you can talk to him about it and become friendlier.
Once you become friendlier - say 'just passing by' and he will teach you the Genjutsu technique. I think you need roughly 3 stories before this can happen. Certainly need to reach 'friendly' at least.

Great Sage of Nine Mysteries - Endless Abyss 100%
The final 'saint/sage' super boss.

First fight is against a 50k boss. It's not particularly hard and is pretty straighforward.

After the fight you enter dungeon.
There is a bit loot to grab. There are also 4 formation spots. Breaking them requires tier 4 or tier 5 formation dao(not sure exactly if it's 4 or 5)
You can only break one formation spot. The correct one is north one, breaking which trivializes the fight.

If you did not break any formation - boss will be somewhat stronger and have +10 Qi Regen.
Generally speaking our build is very strong vs boss.
That being said it's still essentially same fight vs 50k enemy but either powered up or down basically.

Boss drops a lot of tier 6 materials:
6 astral chaos, 6 yin chaos and 2 yang + 2 yin soul

He also drops an artifact which can be exchange for 30 'information' currency in Pongsha town.
Which means 30 reputation to any sea.

Tree Root Whiskers - South Tu Sea main quest
This one is technically a 'main quest' one but killing him(and even main quest itself) is easily missable.
It's the long quest chain that starts in year 500. It will eventually lead you into the south Tu sea whirlpool. There will be a small dungeon leading to this boss.
Technically speaking you can lose or wait 10 turns to 'lose' this fight and proceed without killing this boss.
But if you win - you get achievement and bigger rewards.
Boss has 100k HP. By far the most compatible boss for our gravity build.
On first 10 turns it doesn't do anything unless you damage it to break roots.
I would stack gravity until 1-2 turns are left on 'parasitic progress' and then use the big nuke if using our builds.
Our build can easily instant kill this boss on said turn if you learned all advanced techniques. Most importantly the 'ape' technique.
On normal mode I dealt ~650k damage on turn 9 so even with 8 turns on very hard it should be an easy victory.

Heavenly Tree Dungeon - South Tu Sea 100%]
Assuming you did the main quest - after year 750 final main quest the same whirlpool where you faced the 'roots' of the heavenly tree will allow you to revisit the tree dungeon.
This one will have 2 consecutive fights vs cultivators of late deity transformation and ~30-40k HP + rather strong skill sets.
I would say this is the ultimate fight of the game and it will stay here forever.
The rewards are nothing special, a bit tier 6 yin wood material.

16+17) Ascension/tribulation + Helping Wei Wuji restore body during tribulation.
This instantly finishes the game if you manage to complete tribulation.

If you want the extra achievement:
Talk to Wei Wuji > Tell I have confidence.
Start tribulation after that.
You might need the technique from Deep Yin Sea bought to revive Wei Wuji, not sure.
This adds extra condition which requires you to survive 15 turns in the tribulation before winning, always having 6+ Qi at end of turn.
Read more details on ascension in the breakthrough section at the very bottom.

Other achieves)
Are mostly winning all types of competitions and dealing X damage type or having X amount of stacks. The latter should be trivial in end game, just make sure you save a bit time for those and feel free to utilize save/load.

[Super Arthritis ⁧⁧ ⁧⁧Man]

Why didn't you post this as a guide?

[Hentaika]

Was planning for this to be something smaller than it currently is.
And reformating it now would take too long XD

[归风去]

逆天

[Hentaika]

Originally posted by 归风去:

逆天

谢谢

[Noval]

This is a nice guide! thanks for sharing. I’d recommend turning it into a guide when you have the time so people can easily access it. It’s a shame to see it buried in the forums, especially considering the effort you put into writing it.

[Hoyi]

This is some serious work, good job! You should definitely turn this into a guide when you have the time.

[Plebeian Kilo]

Demon Bloodline(5) OR Dragon Bloodline(6) - demon one is arguably the most optional talent but it's neat to have more HP to play with. Especially if you decided to go for higher difficulties.

Did this mean to say OPTIMAL? Does saying it is the most OPTIONAL mean the dragon bloodline is better?

[Hentaika]

Originally posted by Plebeian Kilo:

Demon Bloodline(5) OR Dragon Bloodline(6) - demon one is arguably the most optional talent but it's neat to have more HP to play with. Especially if you decided to go for higher difficulties.

Did this mean to say OPTIMAL? Does saying it is the most OPTIONAL mean the dragon bloodline is better?

The latter, but only in a way.
It means that if you want to pick something else(for whatever reason) - demon is the thing you want to remove. Quite a costy one that doesn't impact so much for it's cost.
Dragon is practically speaking the only 'reasonable' other option however, hence the choice between the 2.

Dragon bloodline is mostly for an achievement. Gameplay profit wise I would probably pick demon instead, but for achievement hunters dragon bloodline is a no brainer.

[Plebeian Kilo]

Originally posted by Hentaika:

Originally posted by Plebeian Kilo:

Demon Bloodline(5) OR Dragon Bloodline(6) - demon one is arguably the most optional talent but it's neat to have more HP to play with. Especially if you decided to go for higher difficulties.

Did this mean to say OPTIMAL? Does saying it is the most OPTIONAL mean the dragon bloodline is better?

The latter, but only in a way.
It means that if you want to pick something else(for whatever reason) - demon is the thing you want to remove. Quite a costy one that doesn't impact so much for it's cost.
Dragon is practically speaking the only 'reasonable' other option however, hence the choice between the 2.

Dragon bloodline is mostly for an achievement. Gameplay profit wise I would probably pick demon instead, but for achievement hunters dragon bloodline is a no brainer.

Thank you, I appreciate the response and the work and time you’ve put in for this translation. I would suggest making it a guide so it doesn’t get washed away by other posts as it is very helpful for us English speakers!! Thanks again for the translation!

[Hentaika]

Originally posted by Plebeian Kilo:

Originally posted by Hentaika:

The latter, but only in a way.
It means that if you want to pick something else(for whatever reason) - demon is the thing you want to remove. Quite a costy one that doesn't impact so much for it's cost.
Dragon is practically speaking the only 'reasonable' other option however, hence the choice between the 2.

Dragon bloodline is mostly for an achievement. Gameplay profit wise I would probably pick demon instead, but for achievement hunters dragon bloodline is a no brainer.

Thank you, I appreciate the response and the work and time you’ve put in for this translation. I would suggest making it a guide so it doesn’t get washed away by other posts as it is very helpful for us English speakers!! Thanks again for the translation!

Guide section is already too full with guides so almost 0 chance someone will find it there. People very rarely bother beyond top recommended.
And the amount of work to reformat the guide for guide section would be somewhat high.