I really like this proposal. Personally I played the game from the beginning by trying to make the most of each life, so once I got the chance, I was just ending each life with a few decades in the wilderness for that life's chance at an imprint. It feels like wasting lives to just pop into the wilderness right away and then reset for the next chance, and I would never intentionally play that way. Now I'm letting the game run Harmonized cultivation for several dozen lives because it seems like the only efficient way to get past the Qi wall before Core 3, but I'm still going to the wilderness at the end of a life or two whenever I check on it. So far I only have 20 imprints, 1 technique, and 1 wilderness relic doing it this way. No idea if that's the intended rate, but being able to run several wilderness lives in a row to search for relics and imprints would certainly be nice, rather than feeling like I'm just running up the life counter to no real purpose. I don't see much point to having the default life be wilderness as it is.
Viewing post in Cycle of the First Dawn comments
I decided to just get all the relics, you inadvertently get a pretty large lump of imprints and techniques by relic farming but yeah once per life for 55 diff wilderness zones seems like a lot of short stopping of lives. Especially if the wilderness count expands as we go into Act II
For Core 3: I feel as though having 10-15 bands of cultivation is fine as an idea but the jump from core 2 to 3 to have that as a requirement does require the grind at the cave for a chunk of reincarnations. Should be a better way of earning initial affinity jumps so you only need to get like 4-5 bands worth of cultivation loops in.
Yes. I found that cultivating in the Harmonized Settlement gained affinity far faster than at the cave. I ended up with Harmonized cultivating skill at near level 5000 by the time I got to Core 3 (just earlier today) with harmony band 12. It still wasn't fast enough Qi generation (just under 2 years per point), so I went to a Paragon city with a Lightning Beast form to get it done with training (the rate there was almost .8 Qi per year).