Questions about individual rooms vs barracks

[Pierson]

I'm coming to this game directly from Dwarf Fortress and I'm loving it. As a fan of xianxia it's exactly what I wanted. I've made all of the usual newbie mistakes like giving my sect leader heatstroke and it's great fun screwing around.

Does all of the stuff about complementary/conflicting elements apply for outer disciples? Should I make individual rooms for them tailored to their element and the element that begets it, or should I just stick them all in a big barracks?

For inner disciples (if i ever eventually get there) should I have five separate cultivation rooms, specialised for each of the elements, or is there a way to combine them and make rooms that are ideal for multiple cultivators at once?

[fuinhaste]

outer don't care about that. Build all bedrooms with earth and metak elements, no matter if outer or inner.

Yes, one cultivation room for each element is enough. i believe there are ways to have multiple cultivators per room, but don't count too much on it. It's way more efficient to focus on a few cultivators at a time than to make all of them cultivate at the same time, specialy after you unlock branches

[Victoria Raverna]

Barracks for outer. Individual room for inner. Just make sure the room has good feng shui to avoid bad event.

For qi cultivatior's bedroom just stick with metal bed supported by earth. You don't need to match the element of the owner. They're not supposed to cultivate in their bedroom.

For cultivation room, you need to match. You don't need to have 5 separate rooms. You just need a cushion supported with qi gather elements for each of your inner that need them. So if you have for example fire element cultivator, you only need a cultivation room with cushion supported by wood elements.

You also don't need to have separate rooms for each cultivation cushion. You need separate cushion with correct qi gather element support but you don't need separate room. Maybe you need to do that for manual qi burst? I'm not sure about that. But if you don't use manual qi burst, you can have all 5 cushions in one bigger room. When you don't have enough spiritwood, if you put two cushions at the right location, some of the spiritwood can affect two cushions.

It is up to you if you want a separate cultivation room for each cushion or merge them but I think it is better to merge water qi gather (wood cultivation) with fire qi gather (earth cultivation) to make it easier to manage the temperature.

In my current game, I make a V (or heart) shaped room with 5 cushions. Save some spiritwood because two cushions share some of the spiritwood. I used to make a big diamond shaped room with 4 cushions. That one save even more spiritwood.