Now, that we know how to start cultivate. Let’s go back to the character menu. It’s time to talk about Mental Breakthroughs. This is a big one. So get your seat belts. Now, to explain.
Mental Breakthroughs
All the rest of the buttons on this menu all have to do with managing Shendao’s Mental State. The mental state is this red thing here.
Shendao’s Mental State is different from normal cultivators in that it has its own breakthroughs.
Just like how normal cultivators have breakthroughs from Golden Core to Primordial Spirit.
Shendao additionally has several ‘mind’ states each with their own requirements before you can breakthrough to a ‘higher’ base mental.
You can read what mental state you are on, by hovering around the mental state bar.
Now, while this may be a bit confusing. It’s actually quite simple if we break it down.
The top half explains what mind state you are on. This is like qi shaping, core shaping, golden core, etc…for normal cultivation.
In this case we are in the ‘move’ state.
The next part that says Inclination is just the rate at which your mental state increases. In this case our base mental will automatically go up by +24 for each day until it hits our mental cap.
Our base mental is of course this thing right here. It is 70 at the moment.
The next paragraph describes how our inclination (mental state increase) works. In this stage. We get more base mental per day, the higher our mood.
And lastly, it describes what we need to do to breakthrough to the next level.
If you remember from the menu. Indulgence is from these buttons here.
So if we follow the instructions and set Yang Shangzhen to indulgence, while keeping his mental state at 100.
Then he will be able to complete his mental breakthrough in 3 days from the ‘Move’ state to ‘Calm’.
And after meeting the requirements, we start getting progress.
Explaining Distress & Shendao Cultivation Rooms
Now, that you know what mental breakthroughs are and how to complete them. We can talk about Distress and what a Shendao Cultivation Room should look like.
As you start cultivating. You’ll find many later Shendao Mental Breakthroughs will require you to have low Distress.
You may wonder. Well what is distress?
To explain. First, click on the mood and social hotkey.
For this example, we will be using another cultivator named Meng Mouwei before going back to Yang Shangzhen.
Distress is all your character’s moods added together.
Distress is all of these things here.
It also counts all negative moods as positive numbers. So Artifact Needed -15. Would actually add 15 points to your distress.You can see the actual combined number when you hover around the ‘Distress’ bar.
This is the ‘Absent Mind’ word on Meng Mouwei.
As a general rule of thumb. High distress is bad. That means we should try to get all the moods as close to 0 as possible, to make later mental breakthroughs easier.
That means getting rid of all this stuff.
And knowing that, this brings us to what a Shendao Cultivation Room should look like.
The ideal Shendao Cultivation Room will attempt to remove as many mood buffs as we can, to lower the distress levels.
The moods related to your room are these two buffs right here.
We can get rid of these moods by having a slightly auspicious bedroom with ugly walls. The simplest design for your cultivation room. Will look something like this.
A wood house with an igneocopper bed and two doors.
We can see if this worked by looking back at our mood screen.
It is now +4 instead of an exquisite +15. And we no longer have the +15 from Good Feng Shui.
Once you get more familiar with the distress system you can make some very elaborate rooms.
Now that we have covered shendao cultivation rooms. We should talk about the other ways to lower distress.
Sect Meals should be set to simple to avoid Exquisite Meal.
Clothes should be of common quality to avoid Magnificent Clothing.
Additionally, male characters can just take off their shirt and wear just pants to reduce this mood further.
And lastly, all temporary moods.
Can be removed through the Wise Detachment Miracle.
To summarize. This is what we had originally.
This is after all the fixes and the Wise Attachment Miracle
Now that you know, mental breakthroughs and distress. The rest of the buttons on the character menu will make more sense when you read them.
Let’s start with Humanity.
This represents how close you are to becoming a true god. You start out completely human, and gradually gain divinity and lose humanity as you make breakthroughs and cultivate.
There are only two things you have to remember about divinity.
- If you hit 100% divinity at any point. You will ascend to heaven. In this game, ascension is the same thing as dying. You lose the cultivator forever and he leaves behind his corpse in the form of a statue.
- Divinity decreases the effect of moods on your distress. So you want high divinity to make mental breakthroughs easier, but you want to avoid hitting 100% or you will die.
That’s about it.
Next you have your Shendao training methods.
Balance is the default training method. You will gain a small amount of mental state and a small amount of divinity over time.
Restrained gives you temporary divinity over time up to half of your current divinity. If you have 50 divinity for example. You will eventually get a boost of 25 divinity after a couple of days if you are in restrained mode.
This is useful when making mental breakthroughs, but it can also make you ascend and die.
Indulgence temporarily increases humanity, which will prevent your Shendao from ascending, but it also slowly decreases your mental state, makes your cultivator eat a lot of food and do a lot of leisure activities.
Indulgence is also useful if you did not max out your character’s social skill before promotion and want your Shendao to talk to your outer disciples.
And lastly, we should cover the remaining thing left on the character menu.
Mind Fasting.
Mind Fasting will give you a stacking debuff that reduces a character’s distress value.
This distress debuff will persist for an equal length of time as you used Mind Fasting.
If you Mind fast for 5 days. The debuff will last an additional 5 days. If Mind Fasting is ended early, all accumulated stacks will be lost. Stacks will prevent Mental State from changing
This can be useful when doing breakthroughs that require Indulgence, as Indulgence tends to decrease mental state the longer you use it.
To illustrate this further, this is what happens when you mind fast.
- You click on how long you want to mind fast.
- Your character will then start to meditate and go sit on their bed or cushion for how many days you told them to.
- You will get a stacking debuff that decreases distress, until it hits 1 distress. If you have high distress. This will take a while.
- Your character’s mental state will remain the same. It cannot increase or decrease as long as you have the distress debuff.
Remember, mental state is this thing right here.
And then after you are done. The distress debuff from mind fasting keeps working for however long you mind fasted.
This means as long as you mind fast. You can always get distress to 1 as long as you spend enough days in meditation. As it is an infinitely stacking debuff to distress.
So if you don’t mind, mind fasting for long periods of time when doing your mental breakthroughs.
You can pretty much ignore all the distress mechanics and have your Shendao eat lavish foods and live in a palace made for a king.
Now, it’s not recommended to just completely ignore distress as it can make later breakthroughs a bit of a mess to manage.
But as you get comfortable. Just know you can just mind fast and ignore distress, once you know how things work. It just makes everything take longer to finish.
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