A whole different aspect of the game, world relations in cultivation world, make peace or war with other sects, expand, bring a bit of chaosflavor to the world with your presence

Your map probably looks much less populated than this map, its okay, not some DLC restriction, you are supposed to find most of these locations through exploration of the already existing locations, or through sheer luck in events, I'll go over some of the events I remember later
To unlock new locations you repeatedly send over cultivators to the location, each time the percentage of the location discoverable rises, when it reaches 100% you will no longer find new locations exploring there, Cultivators with higher perception (and some specific manuals) explore faster

Without further ado, here's the map

Tried to MSPaint my way into making a clean map. Sorry for the quality, steam doesn't allow me to go beyond 2MB per image, GIF compression proved to be handy
Click on the Image to Expand

why is my map red on the furry zone? they didn't cooperate, they wont bother me though

I created the following tables in a rip from the ingame information from them, without the connected text, separating the loot into treasures and regular loot and leaving a blank space (that will be filled in time, as I explore those locations)



I know most of you are interested in the treasures and how to obtain those, usually it goes as you send a cultivator (with high luck and state) from a Law that feeds the treasure in question, for example I would send a True Sun Refining Law (Fire) with high Luck and Primordial Spirit to find the Earth Flux in Gemspring Cave (Earth). Fire feeds Earth

Just a List of Locations, Check the Map then check Here

Mt South State

Blue Lotus State

Evenfall Abode State

Purple Cloud State

City of Abundance State
Just City, Explained in Power Tab

Seascape State
Just City, Explained in Power Tab

Exultant State

Riverbank State

Sunshade State

Mystic Unity State

Central Plain State

City of Desolation State
Just City, Explained in Power Tab

Seven Slaughtering State

Great Snowland State

CONTINUED IN NEXT SECTION, STEAM LIMITS

Skydome State

Kunlun State

Great Desert State

Daemonia State
Just another sect, Diplomacy Section

Pit of Doom State

Mt.Hundred Insects State

Snaketail State

Sea

Unlocked Locations

After a while in the usual questline you'll receive one that asks you to rebuild some place for people to dedicate their faith to you, that place is Mt.South and is the most generic sect shrine you'll set up, this opens up a whole different game aspect called power, its not that complex really, just a few things to know
First one is the introduction of "Influence", every shrine generates some influence every day, the size of the main hall determines how much influence you get, Influence is useful to expand your influence into new shrines and expand the shrines itself, also used for maintaining certain policies
Second is the introduction of Belief, every shrine generates per day some belief, directly connected to the number of followers you have there, this belief can be converted into inspiration XP should one of your cultivators go there to collect it, followers are capped at 400k and belief storage is capped at 20 Million on Main Hall Tier 3, its by far the best feature from the power tab. TL;DR Free XP
Next notion is about Policies, thats what you order the shrine caretakers to do, goes as follows:
Cities

• None (DONT USE, YOU LOSE FOLLOWERS)
  
• Charity
  Costs 20 Wheat to maintain, mostly a placeholder
  
• Preaching
  Requires the Associated Building, uses 20 influence to maintain, flavor of the month policy
  
• Plotting
  Requires the Associated Building, uses 20 influence to maintain, flavor of the month policy
  
• Abstinence
  Requires the Associated Building, uses 20 influence to maintain, flavor of the month policy
  
• Incorporate
  Requires a Tier 3 Main Hall, Uses around 200 Influence per day to eliminate other sects from there, save up some 20-40k influence before going into this, not recommended for every place since this makes disaster relief harder

Shrines

• Charity
  Costs 20 Wheat to maintain, mostly a placeholder
  
• Treasure Hunt
  Requires a Tier 2 Main Hall, Uses the Disciples to hunt for treasures in the location, treasures are listed in the location panel, few places pay off to use this, uses 20 influence to maintain
  
• Manual Labor
  Requires a Tier 2 Main Hall, Uses the Disciples to "Work Hard", they generate a lot more of the resources the shrine would normally generate, for example a shrine that generated 40 Spirit stones will throw 1200-1500 spirit stones in one go, particularly useful if you need quick resources or spirit stones, uses 20 influence to maintain
  
• Incorporate
  Same as listed on the City Shrine above

If you didn't quite get what incorporation means, Mt.South comes incorporated by default

About Main Hall tiers

• Tier 1 allows you to build on a few plots of land and begin amassing followers and belief, 10 Influence per day
  
• Tier 2 allows you to build on all plots of land and unlocks the cool policies, 15 Influence per day
  
• Tier 3 allows you to build a World Wonder, Explained Bellow.

World Wonders
Expensive buildings that can't be demolished, each provides a special bonus that can be very useful in game, some things I would like to remind:

• Not every wonder can be built in certain places, they have requirements about the terrain around that have to be met, surprisingly the wiki explains that. Mt. South can build any of them
  
• Ingenuity Pagoda gifts you with two vessels, these vessels are of lower quality but don't deteriorate in day to day work, however they can be killed in battle (invasions to the sect) and they don't respawn, rendering the wonder useless
  
• You can't build 2 of the same wonder, but there are some buffs that are identical in other wonders
  
• The "Learn from Nature" wonders unlock a special policy that costs 50 influence per day and sends you an eureka pill every so often, yes that pill produced on the Demi-God xiandao state, no, it's not really that useful, gives you about 150k inspiration XP but can be sold to the merchant for 1500 Spirit Stones (the Influence/Spirit Stone ratio is worse than the manual labor spirit stone)
  
• Red Stele Forest is far too useful for diplomacy, being able to see the likes of everyone speeds up your work by A LOT
  
• City Housing not that useful, population won't be lost as much as you think and it has a cap
  
• Shendao Wonders are a must have

I'll talk about optimal placement, shrine production and events in the next section

Shendao Statues
Shrines are particularly useful for Shendao Cultivators, I'll explain in more detail on the Shendao Guide, in short it ends the need to seek followers

Managing Shrines
Events will happen every once in a while, when they pop up you'll be given options to chose from to deal with it, there are correct options and a few of them have requirements, the basic stats to deal with policy events is 15 Battle, 15 Social, 10 INT and 10 CHA.
To increase the stats of the shrine you should send disciples that have appropriate stats for increasing, 10% of the disciple stats will be added to the total stat of the shrine, you can have 10 disciples on tier 1, 20 on tier 2 and 30 on tier 3 (+1 from the manager), generally this means using the "Spirit Master Hall" building from cities to recruit tons of people in order to populate these shrines, each recruitment costs 100 Influence and can get you at max 10 disciples

Event Cheat Sheet

Charity

Plotting

Preaching

Abstinence

Natural Disasters
Going to sound weird but natural disasters are the best thing to gain followers in this game, all you have to do is give the shrine a different kind of material for upkeep, send a levelled cultivator in to help disaster relief and wait and you'll get 50k followers easy (depends on total population), usually you just need 100k followers to be able to get Tier 3 master hall and then you're done with that chapter

Natural Disasters

Treasure hunt policies come with their own events tailored for the location, you don't need to care too much about it, most are barely useful. just use "Spirit Stone" on Central Plain and "Battle" on Mt.South

Any answer for the manual labor and learn from nature policies will be correct

Optimal Wonder Assignment



When you're settling a new agency you're given the choice to give spirit stones to the settler, it just gives a headstart to the followers you get at the beggining

I'll be honest, you can straight up ignore diplomacy, the only thing you have to do it is create a trade area in your sect, put some things there (or mark a storage as "available for sale"), gift them useless stuff and then buy access to their land for 300 spirit stones

with that alone you can go through the game, getting the other sect's favor is almost useless since even if they like you they'll still sell to you at ♥♥♥♥ prices and require a special currency called favor, how do you acquire favor? either from quests with rare items as requirement or by building the specific wonders, since favor is not permanent that's not recomended, being friends with them also reduces the amount of attacks from them

If you still want to make friends with them here's a few ways

• repeatedly send your disciples to visit them (1-5 favor, higher gain the higher standing with them)
  
• complete the easy (50 favor) or hard (200 favor and 2 connections) quests for them, barely worthwhile but great for speedrunning relations lategame
  
• visiting them, convincing all their cultivators to visit you and when they come treat them well (~20 favor for each visitor), not hard but a lot of work involved with the damn chat minigame
  
• random events, because something had to be random here, in general avoid taking sides in any events you come across, the favor loss is far greater than the gain

Favor progression starts at 0, going up it reaches friend at ~400 and respected at ~1000 and going down it reaches hostile at ~ -400.

I only recomend being friends to one sect, Skydome palace, I'll state my reasons

1. They provide the item used for turning illuminated objects into people
   
2. It's easy to get them to like you
   
3. They are pretty and controversial

Might be a good time to mention, every sect has a little backstory and most have a little questline to follow, nothing big or worthwhile though. Skydome Palace only accepts beautiful people and exultant sect only accepts woman and teaches them to succ lifeforce out of other people

If you want to attack them, don't, while it is possible to train yourself to those levels you'll probably be done with the game earlier, attacking another sect is a painful experience, harder than dealing with ancient cultivators, they are stacked with sages ready to beat you back to where you belong, not like the sages that invade you, those are stronger with millions in Qi

If however you still want to attack them, there's some cool mechanics to it, like stealing their sect wonder (akin to your mini-universe in power), and having a submissive state on your hand

I'll be developing more guides and adding more to the ones already here, bought the steam version just for this, if you have any questions feel free to add me and ask, the game sure leaves a lot to be found