The Mysterious Cavern popped up on my map at day 301. The only damage its initial appearance was the area I paved with spirit stones to serve as an elementally-neutral tribulation ground. Quickly put an auspicious room around it, along with the Morality Seal. Unfortunately, my cultivators are no way close to ready to fight it. None have a max qi of over 250k, and I don't really know how to use formations. Nowhere near enough holy stone to make artifacts. Artifact crafters cannot craft holy stone artifacts anyway. Working on sun pills, but I don't have many anguish gems left to refine them further.
Fired this up again, I've got a small sect slowly getting off the ground with a single inner disciple. Well, before I called it a night I got a visiting cat yaoguai that I'm tempted to take on as a second inner. She's got maxed Charisma, high Intelligence, middling Perception, but most importantly better Potential than all of my sect members. Even better, she has a little over 200 days before tribulation hits, which feels like it ought to be long enough to give her a decent shot at survival.
The only downsides are sub-20 Qi Sense and pretty poor numbers in other cultivation stats. Really good medicine and crafting, but I don't think those transfer to inner tasks unfortunately.
Worth an inner slot? Keep her an outer? Kick her out? I'm terribly unsure.
I think Medicine translates to better Alchemy once promoted. Crafting probably has some influence on Alchemy and/or Artifact Crafting. Might explain why my alchemist is becoming better at Artifact Crafting than my artifact crafter.
PRE-EDIT: According to the wiki: They do. The formulas for Xiandao and Shendao are:
Skill caps for Medicine and Crafting transfer to Alchemy and Artifact Crafting, respectively.
4% of Medicine per level of Magic Crafting(that is, if MC is 12, 48% of the level of Medicine) is transferred to Alchemy. Same with Crafting->Artifact Crafting.
Every point in Magic randomly becomes a point in Artifact Mastery, Spell, and Protect.
If you want better Qi Sense, bump up your catgirl's Constitution if you can, as that has more of an effect than Intelligence. High Charisma, Intelligence, and Perception would make her a decent choice for Sunflower Refining Law.
I'm not sure what you mean by "inner slot". Your population cap is total population, inners and outers, possibly including guests but not zombies and vessels.
EDIT: I'm trying to raise a Shendao cultivator, which is much more complicated than Xiandao or Physical. She currently has a mood buff(which is bad) for witnessing a miracle. Despite the fact that no miracles were performed near her shack, and the person the miracle was cast was actually somebody whose corpse was fed to a spirit root on the other side of the map.