This tab is a MAJOR progression tab, select the active one, and every time you complete it you gain Health/Atk/Def
One thing to note is that the first Skill "Breathing Qi" is more efficient than "Sensing Qi" which is more efficient than the one after it, lather, rise, repeat.

UNTIL

Comprehending Heaven & Earth, once you unlock this one, now everything gets _more_ efficient each time. So basically Focus on Breathing Qi primarily, until you unlock Heaven & Earth, then just focus on the highest you got.

You buy these in the store, and learn them.
Be careful later, as some times a new book you can only get to 30ish is going to be weaker than a book several levels back that you got to 100... It's not always a good idea to just use the best books available.

Always be upgrading these, they are persistent - early on you might not have enough currency, but eventually it's nothing.
Cultivation room is huge, Spirit field is great for farming which is really useful for stat fruits and early money. Spirit Formation becomes a huge source of stats for Breakthroughs/Tribulations later.
If you don't know what to focus on, odds are you can probably just do Cultivation room until you know better.

Place good souls, as you upgrade the spirit formation in the Abode you get more tables for souls here; these upgrades are huge for tribulations/breakthroughs as the bonuses are % based.

Stat sticks, look for cultivation related stat upgrades when dealing with tie breakers.

Kill stuff, upgrade them if you kill enough. If clicking "evolve" does nothing, it means you don't have enough attack, no explanation of why that matters, but get more atk stat and you will be able to click the button eventually.
This is how you farm souls, but I imagine you probably figured that out.

Conversation never changes and is never useful

Shop is primarily how you get Manuals for the Manual Cultivation tab.
Every set of 3 Breakthroughs gets a new floor, which gets a new tier of items.
Buy the manuals, if you have a lot of money, buy the Medicine, it does more than it should and I honestly still have no idea why it has such a big effect despite the numbers looking like it should be absolutely inconsequential. I think the stat bonus is applied early and therefore scales with other stuff... but I have no idea what that stuff is.
Also if you are doing crafting, the recipes to train your crafting will be here.
Everything else is largely irrelevant imo.

Quests were kinda neat super early, but they are 100% irrelevant very quickly as the rewards never really increase.

The ingame guide kinda covers it, catch animals to train and equip as stat sticks, early game they are relevant, mid game they start to scale very poorly, I suspect eventually they will be more relevant again.

Just do this occasionally, it's not great stats, but it helps a bit and could help you push advancement sometimes, just check it occasionally and clear out the easy ones.

Farm this for breakthough and lifestones. ever 10 levels is a boss and if you beat it you can resume from that spot, its helpful to get higher sometimes because then after you rebirth you can skip ahead to get a good breakthrough item drop faster, which can speed up breakthroughs while getting back up to your old place.

This is how you unlock more treasures with higher caps, I have no idea when this becomes relevant, but the game itself is kinda fun. You use the beast training Array (in sect, talk more about later) to turn tamed animals into sacred beasts. you kill stuff to gain beast orbs, then use the beast orbs to level up your sacred beasts. It's fairly straight foward but the rewards are not going to be revelant for a while after you unlock this.
You can get some very hefty bonuses to your Beast Array which upgrades your Formation Aura, and therefor your Sects resource generation.... I suspect that this is also the way to get enough beast attribute upgrades to make your equip beast relevant again.

This is a tower defence with your cultivator, when you unlock it, expect a lot of really quick buffs, but its _very_ straigth forward.

I'm not going to go into each tab, these are fairly straightforward.

I will note that, Talismans (last tab) are from the DLC, and are really good if you want to drop a couple bucks to unlock them.

Planting is a great way to make money early, and I use the Qi fruit liberally for progression.

Alchemy and Forging seem to make very irrelevant rewards for me in the midgame, but higher alchemy and forging skill improves the results of the Array's in the sect, which also improve the results of the crafted items, so I suspect eventually they will scale back into relevance. If that doesn't make sense to you, you're probably early enough that you don't need to think about Gathering/Mining/Alchemy/Forging/Taming really.

Sect seems a _lot_ more complex than it is, hopefully I can help you figure it out.
I'm not going to tell you what to do exactly, I still want you to play the game, but hopefully I can help you approach the tabs with a level head so you're not panicing.

This has the status of your Sect, early on the Resources at the bottom are going to be very relevant before you start scaling into absurdity.
Disciples in this context are nameless peons that do work and fight for you, I will call these outer disciples moving forward.
Sect Aura is just your Formation Aura, which is from your Core Array, remember this, I will mention it later.

Recruiting -> Turn this on, never turn it off, never think about it again.
Competition -> This is how you get NAMED Disciples, these are the ones that do big jobs, and you send to get resources, I'd just set this to Auto unless you're short on money, and only take purple/red, or if you're really patient just take red. I'll explain what this means later, so keep reading!
Guardian -> Turn a beast egg into a stat stick, it also levels them up a bunch using the sect, but by the time that's relevant for you, you won't need my help.
Donation -> You can stack/retrieve money from here. Early on this is a great way to save your money when you rebirth, later on your sect will make so much more money than you could even make so you just steal from them when you need it...
Management -> This is how you control your sect 99.99% of the time.
Storage -> look at your sects stuff, when you need to check this you won't need me to tell you where it is.

It's not technically a tab, but since it's most of how you manage your sect I wanted to make it a section.
There is a _lot_ of junk on this screen, but just ignore the table.
Put somebody in the job, just pick the top person as they will have the best stats for it, they will do a bad job initially, but that's fine.

There are 3 buttons we care about

CONSTRUCTION: This is what building is going to get built after the current building is complete, you will need to change this a whole bunch - also you will know which one you want to build once we get to the section about buildings.

PRIORITIES: This is what missions the Named Disciples will be sent on, Realm is tribulations/breakthroughs, getting them to higher tiers is probably one of the biggest progression steps for your sect as this increases the results of their resource collection and their buffs to buildings. Their max level in their skills is also determined by their tier.
Learning will get them to increase their skills, this improves their resource collection and their bonuses to the buildings they manage (if they manage the building)
This is important as well. Named Disciples will improve their skills in order of their affinity for them, up to a maximum skill level (determined by their tier)
Resources will send them off to get resources they are good at getting, basically if you are too short on resources to use Realm, and you've done a bunch of Learning lately so they are improving their less important skills, this is how you spam resources to progress, Named Disciples doing resource missions will do _way_ more than the passive gain from the buildings.

START/STOP this is the third button, it starts and stops, hit Start.

One thing I will mention is that the log on the right will talk about whats going on, if you're on Realm and you see a whole lot of text saying "not enough resources to break through" you need more resources and should probably switch to resources.

There are your buildings that give passive resources. They are managed by a named Disciple, and you staff them with the normal disciples.

Construction Office This buffs building speed and the amount of normal disciples in your sect, you need to get this up a bit at the start

Garden Make Herbs

Mine Make Minerals

Hunting Hall Make Beast Cores

Beast Hall Beast Cores -> Exp for the Sect Beast stat stick

Foreign Affairs Hall Makes Spirit Stones

Alchemy Hall Herbs -> Pills

Weapon Hall Minerals -> Weapons

The big things to note here is that Foreign Affairs hall is going to be 100% of your spirit stone generation eventually, and that Pill and Weapons are required for both your Named and Outer Disciples to breakthrough and progress realms.

Switch the focus on your buildings using the management tab talked about previously

This is for your combat army, ignore this for now. Once you have thousands of Outer Disciples that are in upgraded realms, and you've got a lot of Inner Disciples who are in the Immortal Realms, you can probably dip into this, just put high Qi Inner disciples into spots and then put Outer Disciples into the army, then use them to kill - it's pretty simple once you can do it, and you won't be doing it for a long time.

This is how you upgrade your Outer Disciples. This is _entirely_ irrelevant and frankly a waste of your limited resources until you're much further and started doing combat. Once the cost is inconsequential, just start doing it, by the time you realise what they're for you'll be a little happy you saved yourself some time by upgrading some already (but don't stress too much, you do 1 at a time now and eventually you do a _lot_ more at a time and with a much higher success rate)

These are your Name disciples, I think if I was localizaing the game I would have called them Inner Disciples, but I started called them named disciples a while back and it just stuck with me, sorry.

Basically this is an overview of the cultivators you will use as middle managers for your workshops and generals in your army, as well as send to get some resources in the Conquest screen.

There is really nothing terribly useful for a new player on this screen, eventually when you want to prune and carefully curate your sect, you could use this screen to filter out the weakest members, but it's not necessary in early or even mid game.

Early on, totally ignore this.
Once you're a little more comfortable and you've got a larger stable of Named Disciples, there are a few areas, like a tree place, a lava place, an icy place... they have names, we just don't care enough to use them in this guide. These spots give resources for the next screen "Array" which is a huge source of upgrades, you will put disciples in these areas and they farm up coloured gems. They also get fruits and scrolls for upgrading the stats of Disciples, but if you're doing that you don't really need a guide.

One thing to note is that farming these areas is a full time job, if you leave the same dudes in these areas they will fall behind the rest of your Named Disciples, so shuffle them out occasionally for upgrades. You may need to pause the Management tab to get people assigned to these locations as as "free" disciples will be given jobs almost immediately by the management tab if it's active.

HERE BE THE GOOD STUFF

CORE
Nothing can higher level than this, and inspecting this gives you a summary of the bonuses from all the other buildings.
Every 10 levels you Transition an additional person per tick, as well the Formation Aura is the sum of all the different formations, and this creates your Sect Aura which is a _huge_ multiplier on the production of _everything_ in your sect. Increasing this will make a very noticeable difference.

One thing to note, Sacred Talisman and Sacred Beast Formation are *DRAMATICALLY* easier to level in the mid and early game, you can expect those two to contribute roughly 99% of your Formation aura for a long time, as Sacred Weapon and Sacred Alchemy will be stuck with low numbers for quite a while, where as Beast and Talisman for whatever reason don't need much more than the resources from Conquest

Unlock this _ASAP_ it is a _huuuuuuuuge_ upgrade, just scraping past your final tribulation is worth it, you can spend some time with this unlocked then rebirth and do a perfect run back to this point fairly easily with all your new tools.

This is a whole ass new game where you manage a kingdom, and wage war.
I've only been here a few days but I do have some advice about the UI when you're getting started.

The production Tab is your friend, you can see "expending" and "producing" on this tab, use this to scale your resource production.

Automation will Stop when you hit the Limit, and Automation will not could any "Reserve" resources, so for summoning stones or ships you can use reserve, everything else I wouldn't bother.

90% of the challenge is in the UI, you will be flipping around and trying to remember numbers, that's not you missing a feature, that's the gameplay.

do not make the mistake I made of building multiple buildings for one item, just use the +/- or the Building# button to set the number of buildings on the resource/craft

As for organising your automation, when you click a building in the Create tab, "Building #" is a fast way to set the number of buildings on that craft. I used that a lot after a few days.

Also one heads up, population is going to be what gates your Kingdom level, so focus your war efforts on population increasing, you get enough of everything else just accidently.

A few other little pointers I've found helpful.
When you rebirth Qi Sense is #1, I tend to put about 70% of my points into that, 20% into Talent, and the last 10% spread among the rest.
Qi Sense gets you HP as well as Cultivation Speed, which in turn gets you HP/Atk/Def.
Talent is good, especially for Manuals which get you a lot of stats (and cultivation speed) but the skill exp isn't very useful early on.

Attunement and Root give atk/def respectively, but the amount is mostly dwarfed by what you could get from Qi sense and cultivation for the most part.

Chance is just more resources, and gathering resources when you need them, at least for me so far, has always been trivial.

Qi is pronounced Chi, don't be lame, say it correctly.

Share any tips if you've got them, honestly 99% of the fun of the game is discouvery, if we all wanted to paint by numbers we'd probably play something a little more mainstream lol; but if you stumbled into something you think other people might want to know because you surprised yourself with it, share!