Development covered 6 Sep 2026 to 7 Sep 2026 (commit dates).
Until this week, combat in Myriad Immortal Sect was decided by one number. Your power against theirs, a ratio, and the ratio told you how many blows the fight would take. It was simple, it was easy to tune, and it could not express the idea the genre is built on.
In cultivation fiction a disciple two great realms below you cannot hurt you. Not a smaller hit. Nothing lands at all, and the sword skids off. A ratio has no way to say that, because a ratio always gives the weaker side some small slice of damage, and enough small slices add up to a kill.
The threshold replaces the percentage
So I rebuilt the layer. Both sides now share one table of attributes, and defence is an absolute amount instead of a multiplier. An attack that does not clear the defender's threshold does nothing at all.
The part that took longest was where to put the wall. Put it too low and ordinary level gaps inside one realm become impossible fights, which is miserable. Put it too high and the wall never appears. It ended up roughly one great realm below you, with a soft edge instead of a cliff: as you close in on the threshold your blows start to land a little, then properly. Players feel the gap first, as a fight that drags, before they hit the point where it is hopeless.
Three requirements that pinned one number
Inside a realm the power curve needed a slope too. My first attempt at the idle RPG balancing here was wrong twice without making any noise.
I had spread a whole order of magnitude evenly across the ten stages of a realm. That made the gap between the bottom and top of the same realm wide enough to cross the wall, so two cultivators of the same realm could fail to scratch each other. It also made the step from one realm into the next exactly the size of any ordinary stage, which flattens the best moment in the game.
Three separate constraints settled it. The wall must never fall inside a realm. A breakthrough must be worth more than all the climbing within a realm. Someone a full realm above must still win in one exchange, because the story promises that. Each gave an upper bound, the bounds agreed, and the slope landed at half an order of magnitude per realm. I like it when independent requirements converge on one number, and it usually means the number is right.
If you want the player-side view of how power is now scored and shown, how the game scores and displays combat power explains what the readout means after this change.
A floor for what the poorest player can carry
Once health became a pool you carry between fights, I audited what a new disciple could actually get hold of in the first twenty levels. Eight pills, and not one of them healed, raised attack or raised defence. Two artifacts in twenty levels. No techniques, no formations.
That is a design bug. So there is now a rule: every band of realms must offer at least one heal, one timed attack boost and one timed defence boost at a price that band can afford, and below Golden Core none of them may sit behind alchemy, sect rank or formations, because a beginner has none of those.
The cheapest heal is free. Several herbs already had healing names, so they can now be eaten raw for a fraction of what the brewed pill gives. Eating one means not brewing it, which turns a gathering trip into a small decision instead of a chore. The guide to brewing pills covers the other side of that choice.
The camera only shakes when it is telling the truth
Two feedback rules came out of the same week and I think they generalise.
Screen shake is the loudest thing a game can do, and what it says is "this is bigger than you". It used to fire on your own attacks, scaled up with your realm, so the stronger you got the more the screen rattled while you flattened things. Now it moves only when the enemy outranks you. Beating something easy is quiet. That turned out to feel more powerful, not less.
The other rule: a miss still has to be seen. A dodged first blow used to suppress the effect, the sound and the damage number together, so against a slightly faster beast about a third of fights began with a click and nothing on screen. The player concluded the button was broken. A dodge is information, and it needs its own picture.
What I would tell anyone doing idle RPG balancing
Pick the one sentence your fiction insists on and check whether your maths can even say it. Mine could not, and every patch I had made to the old ratio was a workaround for that.
The slope is easier to feel than to read about. The new fights are live and free to try, with nothing to install.
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