Some of the best armor and equipment in Where Winds Meet are locked behind Coordination, an Exploration Attribute that doesn’t level up from combat or normal XP. If you’re stuck at a low Coordination value and staring at unusable gear, the game’s brief tooltips don’t do much to help.
Coordination grows from specific open-world activities, with one oddity in particular doing most of the heavy lifting. The systems around it are easy to miss, so it’s worth laying them out clearly.
What Coordination is in Where Winds Meet
Coordination is one of the Exploration Attributes listed on your stats screen. Exploration Attributes unlock quality-of-life perks and gate certain gear requirements, separate from your combat stats or career (Healer/Scholar) attributes.
In the Exploration table used in-game, Coordination has a simple rule:
| Exploration Attribute | How to Improve |
|---|---|
| Coordination | Oddity Collection, Cultivate Abilities |
That’s why Coordination doesn’t move when you level, change gear, or clear outposts. You have to interact with those two specific systems.
How to increase Coordination (the short version)
If you only care about getting enough Coordination to equip a piece of armor:
- Focus on collecting specific oddities that grant Coordination, especially Ironwing Mantis in Qinghe.
- Turn them in to the oddity trader through the Melody of Peace system to convert exploration progress into stats and perks.
- Optionally, use any “cultivate abilities” point the stat screen highlights, though this route is much less clear and less consistent.
Most players who push Coordination into the 30+ range do it almost entirely through repeated oddity farming, not cultivation.
Oddities that increase Coordination
Oddities are special collectibles scattered around Qinghe and Kaifeng. They’re marked by a bee-like icon on the mini-map once you’re close, and visually they tend to glow or stand out against the environment.
There are 10 oddity types overall, but only some feed into Coordination. One of them is consistently tied to Coordination gains:
- Ironwing Mantis (Qinghe) – an oddity that looks like a glowing mantis perched on surfaces.
Other oddities mainly contribute to different Exploration Attributes or just to the Melody of Peace progression generally. That’s why you can turn in oddities and see another stat move but not Coordination.
For context, here is the full oddity set and how to collect them. This helps when you want broader Exploration stat gains or are following interactive maps:
| Region | Oddity | Typical Location | How to Collect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qinghe | Redmist Beetle | Above clusters of red mushrooms | Find the mushrooms, look up, jump to grab the beetle. |
| Qinghe | Enchanting Lotus | Lotus flowers swarmed by butterflies | Shoot the butterflies with arrows to free the lotus, then pick it up. |
| Qinghe | Dagger General | Inside rock piles, crates, jars | Break containers with light attacks, then catch the cricket. |
| Qinghe | Ironwing Mantis | Various perches in the wild | Interact to make it fly, follow it, and grab it when it lands. |
| Qinghe | Whisper Hive | Treetops, cliff faces | Shoot down with fire arrows, then collect from the ground. |
| Kaifeng | Midnight Nibbler | On wooden boxes or jars | Chase and catch it. |
| Kaifeng | Moonbeam Toad | Near water, various spots | Chase and catch it. |
| Kaifeng | Heartsoothe Twig | Carried by birds | Shoot the bird so the branch falls, then pick it up. |
| Kaifeng | Swallow’s Rest | On rooftops | Reach via jumps and collect. |
| Kaifeng | Thunder Fluff | On the ground | Approach to trigger spores, then grab the spores before they land. |
Any oddity collection contributes to Exploration progression, but expect your Coordination jumps to line up with collecting Ironwing Mantis and other Coordination-linked oddities, not the entire list.
Farming Ironwing Mantis for fast Coordination
Ironwing Mantis is the efficient route if you just want Coordination to hit a gear requirement. The process is simple in concept but fussy in practice.
How Ironwing Mantis behaves
- It appears as a glowing mantis on surfaces in Qinghe.
- When you press the interact key near it (default
Fon keyboard), it takes off and flies. - It then flies a short path, lands again, and becomes collectible. Picking it up adds one Ironwing Mantis oddity.
Some players see unusual behavior where the mantis appears to sprint out of view and never visibly lands. When it works normally, you get into a simple loop: activate, track, pick up, move to the next spawn.
Basic farming loop
Step 1: Open your Exploration stats and click on Coordination. Note that “Oddity Collection” is listed as a leveling method, and the UI highlights Ironwing Mantis as a relevant oddity.
Step 2: Head to Qinghe and move between known Ironwing Mantis spawn spots. Many players start from a Boundary Stone and sweep forward toward the next fast-travel point, checking each marked mantis spot along the path.
Step 3: When you see a mantis, stand close and press the interact key once. As soon as it takes off, track its movement. When it lands the second time, move in and interact again to collect it.
Step 4: Turn in accumulated oddities to the regional oddity trader through the Melody of Peace interface. As you accumulate enough relevant oddities and perform the right explore actions, your Coordination increments, and you unlock Exploration skills.
It takes “a lot” of oddities to see a Coordination level bump, but players who commit to a focused sweep report large gains in under an hour once they know where they’re going and what they’re catching.
Dealing with bugged or hyper-fast mantis behavior
Some players report a specific problem: the mantis flies off-screen almost instantly, never visibly lands, and can’t be tracked even if you spin the camera.
There isn’t an official fix spelled out in-game, but a few practical adjustments help reduce failure rate:
- Face “through” the mantis as you interact. Trigger the mantis and immediately walk backwards. This keeps its path more likely to stay within your camera’s field of view as it darts away.
- Limit camera whipping. Over-rotating the camera can make a fast-moving, small object effectively disappear; favor moving your character while keeping camera motion measured.
- Check your frame rate cap. Some players suspect movement speed may be tied to frame rate. Keeping vsync on and capping at 60fps is one common workaround that keeps behavior closer to expectations.
If Ironwing Mantis continues to behave inconsistently on your setup, you still gain broad Exploration progress from other oddities and activities. It just won’t move Coordination as quickly.
How “Cultivate Abilities” affects Coordination
When you click Coordination on the stats screen, the game lists two leveling vectors:
- Oddity Collection
- Cultivate Abilities
The second one is much less transparent. Selecting it highlights an area south of Qinghe and references a manual, but players frequently struggle to find a clear, repeatable activity there that reliably grants Coordination.
The key points are:
- Cultivation is treated as an Exploration-type activity tied to specific world interactions in a highlighted area.
- It can cause in-game “sickness” if misused, which is cosmetic/debuff flavor rather than permanent harm, but makes it harder to test repeatedly.
- There is no widely shared, reliable loop for farming Coordination through cultivation alone.
Because of that, cultivation should be treated as a supplemental or flavor route. If you’re chasing a specific armor’s Coordination requirement, oddity farming—especially Ironwing Mantis—remains the practical path.
Using oddities after you collect them
Oddities don’t do anything just sitting in your inventory. They feed into the Melody of Peace progression and, indirectly, your Exploration Attributes.
Step 1: After you’ve gathered several oddities in a region, visit that region’s oddity trader NPC. They’re tied into the Melody of Peace system and are introduced early in Qinghe.
Step 2: Open the Melody of Peace interface through the trader. Here, you can trade in oddities to unlock upgrades and route your Exploration progression into perks like new Exploration Skills.
Step 3: Spend points and oddities on upgrades that synergize with exploration and survival first: movement, Mystic Skills like Wallstride – Shadowdash require many oddities, for example, but pay off hugely in traversal.
As you trade in more oddities and keep doing the matching activities (oddity hunts, minigames, etc.), the corresponding Exploration Attributes—including Coordination—tick up. The changes aren’t always tied to a single hand-in; think of it as an accumulation of exploration “experience” that periodically converts into a level.
Other Exploration activities linked to attributes
Coordination isn’t the only Exploration Attribute locked behind offhand references in the stat screen. Each one links to specific open-world activities:
| Exploration Attribute | Primary Activities |
|---|---|
| Magnanimity | Pitch Pot, Madiao Cards |
| Elegance | Gourmet, Kitty Hunt |
| Perception | Oddity Collection, Archery Competition |
| Coordination | Oddity Collection, Cultivate Abilities |
| Intelligence | Gift of Gab, Guess |
| Musicality | Graceful Melody, Oddity Collection |
| Constitution | Outposts, Sumo |
| Erudition | Universal Harmony, Meow Meow |
| Memory | Healing, Disguise |
| Mindset | Fishing Contests, Oddity Collection, Cure Spellbound |
| Ambition | Level Up |
Coordination sits in the middle of that ecosystem. If you’re exploring broadly—Boundary Stones, Graceful Melody, Outposts—you’ll see multiple Exploration Attributes rise over time. Targeted farming is mainly necessary when a specific stat gates equipment you want right now.
Once you understand that Coordination is basically “oddity plus cultivation” experience, and that Ironwing Mantis carries much of the load, the stat stops feeling mysterious. Plot a mantis farm route in Qinghe, feed your haul into Melody of Peace at the oddity trader, and Coordination climbs steadily until your chosen armor finally unequips that red requirement icon.
