Thank you for the reply and multiple options!
Really enjoying the game so far, but often feel like I'm wandering around in the dark 
Next just got to figure out why my first inner disciple is so slow at getting... foundation? (Is it still called foundation once you reach Inner Disciple?)
I'm assuming it's because his stats and the starter law don't mess well at all (-5)
Yeah, ----- for Law match is completely brutal. You can make up for it a little bit by having him learn techniques that boost his stats - if you build a manual pavilion you can have people transcribe your laws into it and he can even learn techniques from other laws. Look at his stats, figure out which are too low, and focus on boosting them.
That said, he's never going to be an
amazing cultivator, so what you should also do is send him out to adventure and advance the plot so you can learn more laws to teach others.
More importantly, have him camp and enter areas with people, talk to them and learn / share information to raise their opinion of you to 60, then invite those people back to your sect so you can recruit them. Target people with good stats, obviously, and
Qi Sense is by far the most important skill for a cultivator (even more important than stats in the long term, though you want both), but beggars can't be choosers, and there's no real disadvantage to filling your sect out to the initial cap of 12. That will give you more people to choose from and let you create a better second inner disciple once one of them builds their foundation. Of course, you also want to recruit some people who will make good outer disciples.
In general your first few inner disciples are going to be throwaways meant to lay the foundation for making better people later on (your first Gold Core is probably going to suck too; same deal. You use their power to pave the way for a better one later on.)
Eventually, if you want to cultivate fast, the thing to do is to build a Cultivation Room, which should look a bit like this.
The outer ring of items should be Spirit Wood; there isn't really any replacement for it. You can get spirit wood by cutting down the glowing trees. The inner items should ideally be stuff that both feeds the element of your cultivator and has qi gathering, but if you don't have anything like that you can just put stuff that feeds their element there instead. At the exact center you should place a cushion, and assign it to the cultivator who you want to use that room. The lanterns and door position aren't important from a feng shui perspective, but it's good to keep the room lit to avoid bad thoughts.
Eventually, building a room like that is absolutely essential to getting a high-quality (or even decent-quality) gold core. You don't strictly need it before then, but it helps, and it's good to have it ready in advance because when someone forms their gold core you will want to seize the perfect window of time when the season feeds their cultivation, which (for everyone but metal cultivators) only lasts a few days out of the year.
You can find other examples of cultivation rooms by visiting the big sects later on.
welp, shortly after sheng finally managed to bury starter guy, map special effects kicked in and starter guy's corpse dug its way back out
Unlike Dwarf Fortress this isn't a result of the map as a whole, but a result of choosing an inauspicious burial place. Unless you
want them to come back as a zombie, always bury people auspiciously.
22 days in and my starter guy just died from a haunted house induced heart attack after I accidentally blocked off the one other critter I pressganged convinced to join into a building
This is similar. Never create inauspicious bedrooms (unless you're trying to kill someone for some reason); they cause heart attacks. The key to an auspicious bedroom is to have only one door, facing southwards, and to have the material of the bed (and any other feng shui items you put in the room) be fed by the element of the surrounding room. Most of the time your rooms will be made of stone or earth and, therefore, most of the time your beds should be made of metal, which is fed by earth.
Don't worry about bedrooms feeding a cultivator's element (it's a pain in the ass because the only materials that work for this for some elements will create uncomfortable temperatures for sleeping.) Just give cultivators a cultivation room instead and they won't cultivate in their bedroom.
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Topic: Amazing Cultivation Simulator (Read 138730 times)