Beginner character creation and planning

Things I wish I knew before I started the game:

Good martial arts/elemental arts for beginners.

What stats do, some opinions on their importance.

A couple of tips and tricks here and there.

Which martial art or spiritual root is the best?

Short answer:

For new players, I recommend blade, fist, fire, or earth,.

All of these have strong aoe martial abilities early on, and will speed up your grinding a lot.

I do not recommend: Wood, sword.

These two I found pretty difficult to start with, having only single target martial abilities available early on. It means you will frequently have to kill rooms of 20+ enemies one by one rather than clearing 5-10 in one or two shots.

I have no experience with: Wind, Water, Lightning, Spear, Palm, Finger, If someone does, let me know how they feel starting up.

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Long answer:

It doesn't matter a whole lot. To understand why, you've got to know how progression works. Basically, in order to cultivate further, you join a sect. And that sect has some martial arts or elemental powers that it specializes in.

And the sect will have fruit on sale from its treasure pavilion that boosts that martial art or elemental power. Buying this fruit is how you progress your martial art/elemental powers. So your starting roots/martial arts don't matter a whole lot. Note: you also get some fruit from killing certain bosses and doing certain map events.

So if you don't like your starting martial art or spiritual root, you can always switch to another one used by your sect. Or just swap over sects, which is a longer process but perfectly viable.

(More on sects if you are interested:)

All the sects are randomly generated combinations, but there will be one for every martial art and elemental root, in every region. Furthermore, if you choose to save the two cultivators in the tutorial, you will get two recommendation letters that will let you join sects you otherwise might not be able to.

Once you get strong enough that the sect is nearly worthless to you and progress to a higher level region, the sect you joined in the previous region will make you an honorary disciple and retire you, so you can join new sects in the next region and progress further.

The sects in the first region will let you progress the martial art/elemental root you want to level 50.
Since most starting rolls and destinies only push your elemental root or martial art to level 15-20ish in the character creation module, there is not much difference with leveling a level 15 martial art to 50 and leveling a level 5 martial art to 50. Maybe ten minutes of really easy grinding.

What starting destinies should I pick?

There are a lot of really good ones. Most of them are just small bonuses and will likely not impact your enjoyment of the game much. Some small thoughts:

If you are interested in speeding up grinding, I highly suggest going for at least one of the destinies that boost attack, to make farming early game easier.

The tiny attack boosts you get from the beginner destinies becomes obsolete quickly, at higher cultivation levels the +3 or +5 attack doesn't change your damage at all. But early on it's a substantial boost and will speed up your grinding.

There is also at least one rare destiny (The Chosen One) that boosts travel speed. It's pretty nice for convenience but not at all necessary. Still, very few other things in the game boost travel speed (just your mount), so unlike most of the other stats, it's impossible to farm later.

If you're on a higher difficulty, considering going for higher perception, which is useful later on when you have access to a lot of red manuals with large lists of substats to reroll. It's not very useful early, though.

For more thoughts, check out the next section for other useful and less useful stats to roll for.

Which stats are important?

Stats that will noticeably impact your game, in order of importance:

• Agility (Movement speed in combat. Boosts to this are very valuable. Very difficult to increase later on in the game)
  
  
• Attack (only early game)
  
  
• Travel speed (explore a little bit more each month. Very difficult to increase later on in the game)
  
  
• Perception - increases amount of red stats you can reroll for in the comprehension phase. Not at all important early, but if you get to 13-15 stat lists this becomes more important. Some red substats are very desirable. If you are a hardcore min-maxer you'll probably want this. Difficult to increase. The other parts of perception - learning new manuals faster and taking less soulstones to level them up - are not very important and can be made up with more grinding.
  
  
• If you want to earn money by stealing, which is very lucrative but makes a bunch of enemies, you'll want average charisma, NOT high charisma. You'll also want high focus. However, at average charisma you're going to have a tougher time finding people to dual cultivate and debate with, so skill point grinding is going to slow down.
  
  
• MAYBE luck? I'd have to see the formula to be certain. According to the game, It affects the outcome of some of your actions. Without any idea exactly which actions and to what degree they're affected, it's hard to say whether it's the best or the worst stat to roll for.

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Charisma is also worth mentioning if you want to explore the game's social system. You can:

• socialize with people,
  
• start relationships (master/disciple, adoptive parent/child, etc),
  
• court girls

However, warning, a lot of the social things are rather badly translated and as of this moment, to the best of my knowledge the dating/romance features are incomplete. You can marry a fellow cultivator, but nothing really changes after the marriage. To the best of my knowledge there are no bonuses, special interactions, quests, or anything that result from marriage.

From a min-max stat perspective, charisma is mostly for gaining mind exp via sparring, dual cultivating, and debating. High charisma characters will have an easier time building up mind exp for their passives.

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Stats which don't matter much at the start

Defense/Martial Res/Spiritual Res/Crit Res - Defensive stats will go up naturally as you break through new realms. The bonuses you get from passives and farming qi orbs and heaven and earth treasures will greatly outweigh any starting boosts very quickly. Defensive stats also don't really affect your grinding speed much so I do not think they're very important.

Lifespan - You won't get anywhere close to using all of it up unless you REALLY enjoy grinding. For reference, I've hit origin spirit twice and both times I was a little over 30 years of age. Both times I took quite awhile grinding stuff midway through. At that point, I had over 300 years of lifespan left. So yeah, increases or decreases to lifespan are completely meaningless as far as I can tell. Maybe later on they'll add some quests or artifacts or something that require you to spend lifespan. Right now, the only thing I've found that takes lifespan is raiding cultivator tombs, if you have the feng shui skill "ghost deed". You trade a few years of lifespan for some decent loot but nothing special. Neither lifespan nor the loot is particularly useful to most people.

Reputation - You'll grind an immense amount of reputation completing bounty boards and sect missions. Any tiny starting boosts will be easily covered with 2 minutes of grinding.

Energy/Focus - These are resource pools you spend for skills and items. But you'll get tons of it from breaking through cultivation realms and even more from cultivating mind manuals, and any boosts you get at the start will be pretty much unnoticeable the entire game.

Specializations - See the specializations below.

What about specializations?

You can farm these up by killing certain monsters that spawn on the world map, so don't bother rolling for them.

• Alchemy is required to progress your cultivation, so that's the most important one
  
• Forging is required to make artifacts, at higher levels if you want non-trash artifacts..

Highly recommend you do the forging boss (dark mask or crystal golem, forget which) and alchemy (qi deviated alchemist) boss every time they appear on the world map for this reason. However, your starting stat doesn't really matter in these and you will have more than enough stats to progress if you make sure to kill every monster that pops up.

As for the others:

• Feng Shui is modestly useful but easy to farm (blood puppet)
  
• Herb is modestly useful but easy to farm (mushroom man)
  
• Ore is required if you plan on boosting your artifacts to the point where they're useful (but can be ignored if you're not interested in building artifacts with artifact spirits)
  
• Incantation, as far as I can tell, is not implemented in the game yet.

Sidenote:

If you are farming up your specializations, remember that most towns have a market with some "prescriptions" available. I think this might be poorly translated. But buying them and learning them will increase the drop rate of the various ore and herbs, which is helpful if you're farming a lot of them for various reasons.

Miscellaneous tips for after character creation:

1) If you are new, DO NOT kill cultivators. Even ones that deserve it. You will get nothing from their bag after they are dead, you will make a lot of enemies, and these enemies will chase you down over and over, month after month, relentlessly attacking you. Killing these enemies will make even more enemies, and eventually your enemies will be higher cultivation realms than you, giving you month after month of impossible to win fights and no safety anywhere. They will track you down to the most desolate ass-end corner of the earth to beat your ass down.

I highly recommend trying to be everyone's friend, and refusing to kill people who attack you early. It's very easy to dead end yourself, even in normal difficulty, by getting attacked every month by foundation establishment cultivators when you are in qi refining, or qi condensation stage cultivators while you are in foundation establishment. It's zero fun getting stomped on repeatedly by someone with double your stats, who does 100+ damage a shot to you while you do 1 damage a shot to them.

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2) Farming some spirit stones early will greatly speed up your start. In particular, after you leave the newbie village and move on to the first region, you'll have access to a city, multiple towns, and several sects. In the city, you can buy a mount and a better interspatial ring. I suggest farming bounty boards until you get both the mount and the ring.

Also essential are buying some teleportation charms to speed up your return after exploration, and some psychic charms so you can figure out where all the elemental lands, the lands of spirits, and the lands or arcane are. All of these will give you access to very lucrative boss loot that you can sell at the auction, and that you will use to break through to the next cultivation realm.

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3) Once you've figured out where most of the elemental lands are (use psychic charms at every town, and pay attention to the monthly event tab at the top left to see when bosses spawn at the elemental lands) you can kill those bosses for qi crystals and put them up at the auction house to make a lot of money.

You will also need one qi crystal of each type, along with three materials from the three lands of spirit, to reach foundation (heaven). Highly recommend that you do the max breakthrough for every ascension, the extra stats are no laughing matter and snowball upon each other to make each successive stage easier.

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4) Early on, look for a mind cultivation manual that gives attack bonuses. It doesn't have to be a high rarity. Just an extra 7-8 attack makes a rather huge, noticeable difference early on.

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5) Accept every offer to train together and debate so you get exp towards mind skills. You should also accept spars whenever you're confident in winning. These all give experience that goes towards mind skill points. This will be a big bottleneck in your power for a long while. Once you start killing some mythical creatures and winning some bidding wars in the auction house, you'll have far more good mind manuals than you can afford to spend points on.

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6) One of the best breakthrough destinies in the game is Combat Expertise. This destiny removes all conditional requirements from your ultimate. This allows some ultimates that were previously impossible to use in cultivator duels and certain boss fights to be cast immediately, at any point. It single handedly carried me through many, many cultivator battles and boss fights, even against people an entire cultivation realm higher than me.

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7) Many motion skills give iframes. Highly recommend the wind motion skill because it gives 3 seconds of invulnerability AND lets you channel or attack in the middle of it. Even as a nascent soul stage fire cultivator, I've been using a wind motion skill four cultivation realms under me because of this reason. I can still cast my special or shoot my martial skill while as a whirlwind, which makes the wind motion skill uniquely overpowered.

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8) Try to have at least 40 alchemy by the time you hit golden soul. Or else you might end up waiting 3 years straight for an alchemist to spawn to get your last little bit of stats before you can progress to origin spirit. Like me. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RNG, man.

Cultivator Duels, Tournaments, and Sparring tips

• If you're having trouble in early cultivator duels and sect tournaments, try picking a martial skill that can aoe past rocks, and just dance behind a rock or a large tree while spamming your martial skill. If you're decent at this, enemy cultivators will miss 60-70% of their attacks on you, so unless there is a HUGE stat difference you will win eventually.
  
  
• Summons and artifacts are also huge difference makers in cultivator duels.
  
  
• Don't forget that you can heal in cultivator duels. It might be worth to buy or craft some very high level healing tinctures and attack tinctures so you can use them mid-battle. Combine this with the first tip for pretty good results early.
  
  
• Cultivators will frequently target summons first if they're closer, so earth golem/flower faerie/others are great in cultivator duels.
  
  
• Combat expertise trivializes most cultivator duels. You can open the duel with an ultimate and absolutely demolish the enemy cultivator quite early on. Be warned though, some cultivators might also have combat expertise and drop their own ults on top of you for a very unpleasant surprise. If you're using a good motion skill you can safely iframe out of it, though.

Dev Feedback

Things I'd like to see in future versions of the game:

• More social activities with partner and wife.
  
• More social activities with master/disciple.
  
• More social activities with family members.
  
• Auction house filtering so you can skip manuals and treasures you don't use or won't need.
  
• Ways to improve theft chance and success rate
  
• Optimize the loading screens a bit more. Maybe preload certain events on the world map so we don't have to go through two loading screens every time someone challenges us to a spar or a duel at the end of the month.
  
• Feng shui book that lets you find textbooks that boost specializations.
  
• Allow you to set bounties for certain items once you reach a certain reputation level. So you can request a textbook that boosts specializations or some rare herbs/ores.
  
• 2v2 or 3v3 battles with a team of friends against enemy cultivators.
  
• Get an english editor for cultivation terms and social stuff. www.wuxiaworld.com has a team of really good editors that speak chinese and have a lot of experience translating xianxia.

Final Comments

This guide is purely my opinion, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

I spent several hours writing up this guide and adding little things to it as I played through the game. I am the first to admit, however, that my knowledge is incomplete.

Furthermore, the game is still in early access, so it's certainly possible that new features, skills, nerfs, or buffs will render some of my guide out of date or wrong.

If you see anything you'd like to correct or add to, feel free to comment below!

[Oblyx]

Pro Tip: If you choose elder dragon aura and get following bug when breakingthrough and get dragon scale upgrade for it (Which can be done when you reach foundation) you don't have to worry much about AoE so stuff like sword actually becomes quite good and If you still want some more AoE I recommend getting imperial sword artifact and upgrading to your current realm and get a good artifact spirit for it (The earliest good artifact spirit you can get is Mengyi FYI)

[Sparetime Gamer]

Very Good Recommendations. I would like to add the following:

THE FIRST THING TO DO when you enter a city. stash everything you got besides the stuff you want to sell in your bank. the npcs cultivators especially the righteous ones are FUCKING THIEVES. i had my half learned ultimate stolen and had to kill my sect sister in order to get it back. "very fun times" afterwards

[Sloppy Daoist]

Dev Feedback
You could add: please add Borderless Window

[βίος]

add to dev feedback to let natural progression by repeatedly using skill ex: using fire spiritual skill will slowly adding natural gain to fire roots. i never seen a wuxia that increasing expertise by eating fruit all the time. this will be give option for people who doesnt want to join sect a progession

[VortexMagus]

Noble, I do not consider weapon master particularly relevant. It's only really relevant for early game since farming the fruits in region 1 to get your primary stat 50 is pretty trivially easy even in chaos and requires only a few months.

If you plan on specializing in multiple martial weapons, it still doesn't make much of a difference since you will have to farm sect affinity and buy fruits with spirit stones anyway to get past 50 for the next area, and the weapon master trait does not add much to it.

The 30% exp bonus is just to learning blade/spear/sword manuals faster, I believe. While its nice to progress a little faster, anything that you can boost via grinding a little is fairly low priority because the starting destinies offer stuff like agility, perception, and luck, which are very difficult/impossible to raise via grinding at the moment.

[Noble Ten]

Would you say Weapon master (red trait?) is a good trait, In the case I want to main one of the weapons (sword, spear, blade) While you say geting martial isnt hard. How does the 30% bonus work ?

[[Slayer]]

I was a nub and started with the true love trait. My wife literally gave me the cultivation mats needed sometimes for breakthroughs.

[VortexMagus]

Bossmaker, if you want more stats, you can stop progressing for awhile and build up sect affinity with other sects in the area. This will allow you to spend spirit stones to buy their fruit (and manuals if you're interested).

The higher your roots and martial arts are, the less damage you take from enemies using those martial arts and elements. Someone with 350 of every root/martial art will take far less damage from cultivators and enemies than someone with 50 of them and 350 of his main.

The coatl boss will do less lightning damage to people with a high lightning root. The boss dropping boulders will do less damage to someone with a high earth root. A whole bunch of mobs and elite mobs are wood-element and will do a lot less damage to someone with a high wood root.

Also, keep in mind that spamming comprehend on red passive manuals is will get you a huge chunk of extra substats. It's enough to make quite a big difference.

Both of these methods are very grindy, though.

[VortexMagus]

I didn't really cover breakthrough destinies in my guide because one, I don't have a list of all of them, and two, I haven't played them all so I don't have many opinions on them.

Old but strong is the one I think you're talking about LotusBlade, and it's very weak early and very strong if you spend a lot of time farming or cultivating skills.

That being said, I usually hit nascent soul before I get to age 40, so +20 defense isn't very significant at that point and most other breakthrough destinies are stronger. If you enjoy grinding and taking your time with everything, old but strong becomes a much more powerful destiny.

[LotusBlade]

One of the very important passives for moving to next cultivation realm is "old age" or something, it gives +1 def per year of lifespan. So you can relax and just farm game at very slow pace, getting all skills to purple / red and only then move along to next play area after all stats are maxed.