Sects: joining, promotion, and what a rank is worth

There are two kinds of sect and they work differently

Steward sects. Twenty-seven of them. One NPC offers 加入门派 and, later, 晋升. Joining is instant, promotion is a commission, and the ladder stops at 亲传. Every requirement is a number in a table, which is why this guide can list all of them.

Story sects. Everything else that can be joined. No NPC offers to let you in: entry comes out of a quest, promotion arrives as a letter, and the ladder runs one step further to 掌门. The data confirms the letters exist and the thresholds they fire at, and stops there — the quests themselves are compiled scripts in an asset bundle, not rows this pass could read.

The 事务总管 title does not tell you which is which. Fifty-nine NPCs carry it and only twenty-seven of them offer a join; the other thirty-two stand at story sects (太初剑宗, 嵩室山, 剑斋, 大雪山, 狂刀门, 丐门, 重天门, 绝剑门, 流云镖局, 云川镖局, 唐门, 东厂, 双修府, 黑沙寨 …) or at sects with no entry at all (不夜京, 穆特族, 捭阖谷, 凌云门, 三十六洞). Walking up to a steward and finding no 加入门派 in the menu is the expected outcome for most of them.

What actually marks a steward sect is a row of type 58 (IT_JoinMenPai) in npc_interact. Nothing visible in the game distinguishes the two kinds before you talk to someone.

The affinity ceiling is the promotion gate

Sect affinity (宗门好感) is capped, and the cap depends on your rank in that sect (MenPaiEntity.m_HaoGanLimit):

And the promotion conditions ask for more than 24, more than 49, more than 74 — the cap of the rank you are standing in. The ceiling and the gate are the same number, so promotion becomes available at the exact moment affinity stops rising.

MenPaiManager.NpcAddMenPaiHaoGan applies the cap: it takes Min(current + gain, limit) before clamping to ±100. The gain is silently reduced to whatever fits, and the on-screen +N message is suppressed once nothing moves.

Consequence worth stating: there is no such thing as banking affinity toward the next rank. Once the bar is full you gain nothing from further sect work until you promote, and the four numbers people quote — 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 — are ceilings that happen to double as gates, not a schedule of notifications.

The cap only applies to your own sect. For every other sect the limit is the 没加入 row, 5. No amount of work for a sect you have not joined moves its standing past 5.

The floor is not capped the same way — only the ±100 clamp applies — so a sect you have wronged can sit at −100 while the best you can repair it to is +5.

Joining costs no affinity, only skill

Joining requires 宗门好感 > −1, and every sect starts you at 0 (MenPai.haogandu is 0 for all 244 rows). The real gate is the pair of skill numbers, and Handle_IT_JoinMenPai admits you the moment you agree — no task, no waiting.

The one thing that can put joining out of reach is the 身败名裂 talent (id 20520), which subtracts 30 from your starting standing with every sect at once (MenPaiEntity.InitPlayerHaoGanByTalent). With that talent you must climb back to 0 first, against a ceiling of 5.

Promotion is a commission, and one in five of them does not promote you

Asking a steward for promotion does not promote you. It hands you a 委托 pulled at random from a group (ForceSetWaitEntrust), and the promotion happens when you finish that commission — specifically in EntrustManager.DoFinisedEntrustAction, which promotes only when the commission's flag is 3 (EntrustFlag.MenPaiUpLevel).

The 内门 → 关门 pools contain ten commissions each. Eight carry flag 3. Two carry flag 0. Both of the odd ones are 传递物品 deliveries, both are named 门派：关门弟子晋升 like the rest, and finishing one promotes nobody. This is true of all six of those pools (groups 1001001, 1003001, 1005001, 1007001, 1009001, 1011001).

It is not a dead end — the steward's 晋升 option is still there and re-rolls the pool — but a delivery task where you expected a duel is the one you can safely ignore.

The other two steps have no such rows: 外门 → 内门 draws from four commissions, 关门 → 亲传 from sixteen, and every one of them promotes.

Requirements, all twenty-seven steward sects

Affinity thresholds are the same everywhere: 25, 50, 75. The skill numbers are not. These are the values the game checks, taken from each row's condition rather than from the text it prints — see the next section for where those two disagree.

Coordinates are the steward's own x and z in npc_prototype — the same pair the trainer's teleport takes.

Two of the stewards carry no personal name, only the job title. Two more have a job title that disagrees with the sect table: 朔海派's steward is titled 溯海派事务总管 and 鸿月派's is 鸿月帮事务总管.

麓山书院 is the outlier worth planning around: its 内门 step wants 剑术 300 where the equivalent step elsewhere wants 80–130.

Four places where the sign lies

Each row prints its requirements as a hand-written string and checks them with a separate condition list. In four rows those two disagree, and the condition is what runs:

The first three are harsher than advertised; the last is more generous. 云潇山庄's 亲传 line has a cosmetic typo of its own — it reads 剑术≥=640 — but the number is right.

Those signs also use their own vocabulary. They write 长兵 for the attribute the character sheet calls 枪棍, and the table above uses the character sheet's names throughout — read off a running session, not guessed from the enum, which spells four of them differently again.

Where affinity comes from

Every source that moves 宗门好感, with the amount it moves it by:

Bounties are the only source with real throughput, and what they pay depends on the kind of task:

Then the rank multiplier from MenPaiManager.m_身份好感加成系数: 外门 ×2, 内门 ×1.62, 关门 ×1.3, 亲传 ×1.05, 掌门 ×1.

A second multiplier runs the other way. When a bounty pays out that sect's own token, the count is scaled by m_身份好感令牌加成系数 — 外门 ×1.05, 内门 ×1.3, 关门 ×1.62, 亲传 ×2.0. The same bounty that hands an 外门 disciple sixteen affinity and a handful of tokens hands an 亲传 disciple eight affinity and twice the tokens. Rank does not make sect work better; it changes what the work is for.

In practice a mining bounty is worth 16 affinity as 外门, 12 as 内门, 10 as 关门 — so each of the three promotions is two or three of the right bounties away, and every other kind of bounty is worth running only for its own reward.

What a rank actually buys

Wages. menpaigongzi holds four rows per sect, one for ranks 外门 through 亲传. Each pays a money pouch, a 修为 book, a 感悟 book, and that sect's token — 4, 5, 7 and 8 of them by rank. From 内门 upward it adds two skill books matched to the sect's own two attributes, and the whole set steps up in tier as you rise: 断章 → 笔录 → 典籍 → 密卷.

Collecting the wage is refused if you have not finished that month's sect commission (MenPaiGetGongZiResult.NotFinishEntrust); if you failed it, talking to the paymaster hands you a replacement instead of the money.

The exchange. The sect shop's stock is split into seven groups, each gated on rank (MenPaiShopRewardItem.SetLockState): groups 1 and 4 open at 内门, 2 and 5 at 关门, 3 and 6 at 亲传, and group 7 only at 掌门. Everything is bought with that sect's token, so the token multiplier above is what actually funds it.

Sect commissions. The 委托 board draws from a different list per rank (menpaientrust, keyed by the rank enum) — 12 or 13 entries each, all of them 宗门考核 tasks that raise one of the sect's development attributes. The 亲传 and 掌门 lists are identical.

切磋, 挑战 and 众门大比 — two of the three are for outsiders

The visibility conditions on these rows are unambiguous, and they are the reverse of what the names suggest:

• 切磋 and 挑战 are shown only when you are not a member of that sect, and hidden the moment you join.
• 众门大比 is shown only to members.

切磋 costs 20 精力 and pits you against one member per rank tier. Winning steps you up a tier and pays +1 affinity; the 30-day cooldown only starts once you have beaten tier 4, so a run of four fights is one visit. Rewards are items drawn from the tier below yours at half count, plus that sect's token ×(tier × 5).

挑战 costs 40 精力 and is a four-round gauntlet, one opponent per rank tier, with no affinity attached — it pays items only. Every opponent is rebuilt each time with every attribute scaled by 1 + 0.2 × (times you have already cleared it), so the second run is 20% harder than the first and it never stops climbing.

众门大比 runs in June, once per year per sect (IsCanJoin compares the stored year, and the interaction is locked outside month 6). It is a sixteen-entrant bracket: your finishing place is 2^(5 − round) − 1 if you won, so a first-round exit is 16th, second 8th, third 4th, and the final gives 2nd or 1st. There is a third-place playoff. Only places 1, 2 and 3 carry rewards — the reward table has three entries and nothing looks up 4th through 16th — and 1st includes everything 2nd and 3rd would have given.

The branch system exists for one sect you cannot join

Sects can be split into two 派别, each starting at 50 standing, moving ±5 as you complete or fail that branch's bounties, and unlocking exchange groups at 60 / 75 / 90 in one direction or the mirrored 40 / 25 / 10 in the other (MenPaiShopRewardItem.MduiHuanZuUnlockHanGan).

The menpaipaibie table has two rows. Both belong to 丐门, which is a story sect with no steward and no join option in the interaction table. Anything written about choosing a faction inside your sect is describing machinery that, in this build, has data for exactly one sect.

掌门 is not on the steward ladder

There are 81 promotion interactions in the game — 27 sects × 3 — and their rank conditions are 104|1, 104|2 and 104|3: 外门, 内门, 关门. There is no fourth. NpcMenPaiShenFenLevelUp will happily take a player from 亲传 to 掌门, and two other callers use it, but both are gated on CanNpcShenFenLevelUp, which tests an NPC's 境界 tier (4, 8 or 12) and is never satisfied by the player's own promotion path.

What remains is the letters. mailcondition holds 45 rows that fire on sect affinity, at exactly > 24, > 49, > 74 and > 99 — the four numbers again — and they belong to story sects:

The fourth threshold, 100, only exists here. It is reachable only at 亲传, whose cap is 100, and it is what the letters use to open the 掌门 step. The quest each letter starts is a compiled script this pass could not read, so which of them ends in 掌门 is still a lead rather than a reading.

Sect affinity changing is what makes the letters check themselves: NpcAddMenPaiHaoGan fires m_MailManager.OnTrigger for both ECT_CheckPlayerMenPaiHaoGan and ECT_IsPlayerJoinedCurrentNpcMenPai on every change.

十二连环坞 appears in both lists, and it has two stewards to match: 甘熠彤 at 358, 23 offers the ordinary three-step ladder, and 卜文星 offers nothing but carries the title. Its letters are a full set of four. It is the only sect with both routes.

What the community got right, and where it drifted

Checked against the TapTap sect guide (村头二狗, last edited 2025-08-28), which is the most complete account out there.

Right, and worth crediting:

• The 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 ladder. Correct as letter thresholds and as promotion gates, and the guide even records the consequence of the cap — "门派好感达到晋升条件时做任务不会增加" — without naming it as a cap.
• The split between sects that end at 亲传 and sects that end at 掌门 maps exactly onto steward sects versus story sects.
• Every coordinate it gives for a steward matches the prototype, to the rounding. Twenty-two out of twenty-two.
• Every promotion number it gives for a steward sect matches, except where noted below.

Where it drifted:

• It repeats three of the game's four bad signs (骆家军 and 高家 at 长兵 35, 十陵阁 at 剑术 540) — inherited, not invented, but wrong at the point where it matters.
• 爻光谷's 内门 step is given as 搏击 60; the check is 90. Its 入门 is given as 35; the check is 40.
• Three steward sects are missing: 望尘客栈, 寻清门, and 十二连环坞's steward route.
• 楚军 and 齐军 are described only through the recruiters at 554, 834. Those recruiters are separate NPCs with no sect id; each army also has an ordinary steward — 萧青 at 536, 859 and 范嘉玉 at 1404, 486 — running the same three-step ladder as every other steward sect.
• Its framing of affinity as the thing that "triggers a notice" reads the cap backwards. Affinity does not reach 25 and prompt you; it stops at 25 because that is as far as an 外门 disciple's standing goes, and the promotion asks for exactly that.

Where this was read

SweetPotato.MenPaiManager, SweetPotato.MenPaiEntity, SweetPotato.MenPaiZhongMenDaBiManager, NpcInteractionSystem.Handle_IT_*, EntrustManager.DoFinisedEntrustAction / ForceSetWaitEntrust, MenPaiShopRewardItem.SetLockState, and the tables menpai, npc_interact, npc_prototype, entrust_event_prototype, entrust_prototype, menpaigongzi, menpaientrust, menpaipaibie, menpaizhongmendabi, mailcondition, talent_proto.

Two things were checked against a running session through the trainer's HTTP API rather than read: the attribute names the character sheet actually prints, and how many NPCs wear the 事务总管 title.

Interaction rows carry three condition columns and they do different jobs: condition decides whether the row is shown, condition2 hides it when it matches, and condition3 leaves it visible but greyed out with des as the reason. A trailing ! on any term negates it (AnswerManager.ParseAnswers). Reading a requirement means reading condition3; reading who an option is for means reading the first two.