Sect Beast Tide: turning twenty minutes into score

The Sect Beast Tide in Sword of Immortality is a weekly 20-minute scoring window, and most of the gap between a good run and a wasted one is target selection rather than damage. Two multipliers sit on top of each monster's own value: a party bonus and a war boat bonus. This chapter covers the window, the Qian and Kun split, the multiplier table, the boat assignment and the order in which to run the twenty minutes.

When does the Sect Beast Tide open?

The event runs every Friday from 20:00 to 20:20, server time. That is a strict 20-minute window with no extension and no second session, which is why logistics matter here more than in any other weekly activity: a missed run cannot be made up later in the week.

Twenty minutes is roughly 340 divine ability cycles at the 3.5-second rhythm described in the combat chapter. Every second spent walking, waiting or hesitating is a second that does not convert into score. The practical consequence is that party assembly and boat assignment belong before the timer starts, not during it.

How do the Qian and Kun brackets split?

Participating sects are divided by standing. The top 4 enter the Qian bracket, and ranks 4–8 enter the Kun bracket. The corpus lists rank 4 on both sides of the line, so treat the split as an adjacent-tier pairing rather than a hard cutoff, and treat your bracket as whatever your sect's placement produces at the time of the event.

The bracket changes how much coordination is worth. A Qian run is where boat discipline and 15× hunting are close to mandatory, because the other sects in that bracket are doing the same. A Kun run still benefits from both, but the marginal return on over-coordinating is lower. The free 1.5× party bonus is the first priority in either bracket.

Which monsters are worth killing?

Each monster carries its own score multiplier, and the spread is the entire event:

Multiplier	Notes
2×	Filler
3×	Filler
5×	Mid-value
10×	High-value
15×	Priority target — appears for a longer duration and has an obvious prompt

Read the 15× row twice. One 15× kill is worth 7.5 of a 2× kill, and the corpus supplies the two properties that make it findable: it appears for a longer time, and it announces itself with an obvious prompt. The instruction attached to it is blunt: when it appears, immediately switch target. If you are mid-fight with a 2× monster and the prompt fires, you drop the 2× and go.

The economy is superlinear because travel time is a fixed cost. Two 5× kills total 10×, but they only beat one 10× kill if each 5× takes less than half the time — and they do not, because you still pay the movement between them. In practice the highest multiplier currently on the map is almost always the correct target, which is why the 15× prompt is a hard interrupt rather than a judgment call.

How do the party and war boat bonuses stack?

Beyond the monster multiplier there are two separate bonus sources, and they multiply rather than add:

Source	Multiplier
Monster multiplier	2× / 3× / 5× / 10× / 15×
Full six-person party	1.5×
War boat	1.6×

A 15× monster killed by a full party riding a war boat is a different scoring event from a 2× monster killed alone. The party bonus has no recorded downside: six players grant 1.5×, and the score is multiplied rather than split. Running the event solo therefore leaves about 33% of the available score unclaimed before the first kill.

The boat bonus is conditional. The war boat comes in two variants, Zhuimo (Demon Chaser) and Saohui (Filth Sweeper), and riding either grants 1.6×. Because the multiplier is identical on both, the choice that matters is who is on the boat, not which hull your sect fields.

Who should be on the war boat?

The recorded criteria are high combat power, free hands and manual play, with scouting as the job. That is a role list, not a reward for the top of the damage meter:

• High combat power — the boat has to kill what it finds.
• Free hands — the boat needs players who can look around, not players locked into a rotation or auto-battling.
• Scouting — the boat's task is to locate the high-multiplier spawns.

An auto-battler on the boat applies 1.6× to whatever happens to be nearby, which is usually filler. An attentive manual player applies the same 1.6× to the 15× spawn because they were the one who found it. The bonus is unchanged; what it is applied to is not. If you are choosing which line can hold a boat slot, the answer is the one that kills quickly without a fixed rotation, and the build chapter covers that trade-off. Sect standing, which decides the bracket, is covered in the faction chapter.

How does the 5-second teleport shape the route?

The teleport sits in the bottom-right corner of the screen and has a 5-second cooldown. Five seconds is short enough to chase most 15× calls across the map, and long enough that a wasted press costs real score: a mistimed teleport puts you on cooldown for part of the window in which the 15× is alive.

Treat it as one decisive commit per spawn. Pick the target, press once, and do not double-tap because you were unsure. Without the teleport your effective monster pool is whatever you can walk to; with it, the pool is the whole map.

What does the 20-minute run look like?

The order of operations, in sequence:

1. Before 20:00 — assemble a full six-person party, confirm who is on the war boat, and confirm those players are manual and attentive rather than auto-battling.
2. At 20:00 — everyone spreads to cover ground; boat members take the scouting role instead of parking on a spawn.
3. During the run — clear filler (2× and 3×) only when nothing better is available; treat 5× and up as the real content.
4. When the 15× prompt fires — switch immediately; the boat calls it, everyone teleports and converges.
5. On the teleport — one commit per spawn; the 5-second cooldown punishes a second press.

This order front-loads both bonus multipliers so that during the event the only remaining decision is which monster to hit. All of the optimisation happens before the timer starts.

If your sect is new to the event, fix the party first. The 1.5× costs nothing and applies to every kill, including the filler you clear while waiting for a call. Boat discipline is the second layer, and it only pays once the boat is crewed by players who will actually scout for the 15× instead of holding a spawn they already found.