Manuals
A cultivation manual is a lootable book that permanently teaches you something. Use it to read it. A manual teaches either a technique or a skill tree node - never both - and it is the only thing in the mod that hands out progression you did not pay for.
The system is on by default (Manuals-Enabled).
What They Teach
A technique manual adds that art to your learned set, permanently. This only matters for an art whose rule sets Requires-Manual true - and none of the nine built-in techniques do by default, so out of the box a technique manual is something a server owner or another mod adds alongside a gated art.
A skill-node manual unlocks that node for free. It still honours the node’s prerequisites - a manual cannot hand you a tier-5 fork whose tier-4 parent you never took - but it ignores the point cost entirely.
Nodes taught this way are recorded as granted rather than merely unlocked, which matters for /cultivation respec: a respec refunds points per node you paid for, so a free node is excluded from the refund and survives the reset intact. Reading manuals cannot mint skill points, and respeccing cannot destroy a manual you already consumed.
The Shipped Manuals
Five ship with the mod, all teaching a first-tier skill node:
| Manual: | Teaches: | Drop Weight: |
|---|---|---|
| Manual of Iron Sinew | Vitality, tier 1 (max health) | 1.0 |
| Manual of the Hidden Edge | Might, tier 1 (damage %) | 1.0 |
| Manual of the Clear Spring | Insight, tier 1 (Qi gain %) | 1.0 |
| Manual of the Unmoving Mountain | Warding, tier 1 (damage reduction %) | 0.6 |
| Manual of the Windchaser’s Stride | Swiftness, tier 1 (movement speed %) | 0.6 |
Which manual drops is chosen from this table by Weight. A weight of 0 means an entry never drops on its own and can only be handed out deliberately. The table is config-driven, and another mod can register its own manuals in Java.
Where They Drop
| Variable Name: | Default Value: | Description: |
|---|---|---|
Manual-Tribulation-Drop-Chance | 0.04 | Rolled every time you survive a tribulation strike. |
Manual-Demonic-Cultivator-Drop-Chance | 0.12 | Rolled when you slay an NPC whose role id is listed in Manual-Demonic-Cultivator-Npc-Roles. |
Manual-Player-Kill-Drop-Chance | 0.02 | Rolled when you slay another player. |
Manual-Demonic-Cultivator-Npc-Roles is empty by default - a server owner fills it with the NPC role ids their world treats as demonic cultivators, which is what makes that drop source live.
The player-kill roll is deliberately tiny, and it is special: what falls is a manual for something the victim themselves knew, drawn from their own learned techniques and unlocked nodes. Cutting down a cultivator can genuinely shake an art loose from them. Like every other PvP spoil it is gated by the anti-farm rules - a farmed kill rolls nothing at all. See Karma.
A manual that has nowhere to go is not awarded. If your hotbar and storage are both full, the roll is reported honestly: no item, no message, no claim of a find.
Reading One
Use the manual in hand. It is consumed on a successful read when Manual-Consumed-On-Use is true (the default).
A manual you cannot use refuses and consumes nothing either way:
- Already known - you already have that technique or node.
- Prerequisite missing - the node it teaches sits behind a node you have not taken.
- Unknown - it names a technique or node that does not exist.
Manual behaviour, drop chances and the drop table all live in the arts configs - see Config - and the related commands are on the Commands page.