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"Some of the writing works perfectly well on its own but becomes noticeably repetitive when you read enough of it together, so that has meant going back through a fairly large amount of existing content."

This mostly seems to be case for guild reports beyond Outer layer, and Wilderness imprint for Dual Wilderness, where a bunch of the narration falls into, for lack of a better word, "fill in the blanks" kind of repetition.

For example, there's a few of "You recover fragments of a cultivator's implement from [place X], each piece polished differently by a route that [does Y thing]. The surviving geometry shows that [elements 1 and 2] [do their characteristic thing]. You cannot restore the implement and do not try."

...Now obviously, there's hundreds upon hundreds of these, so it's a lot of text to review, and if you just play Act 1 normally, you won't really have enough to compare against.

There's also stuff like "Two enormous beasts meet beyond a ridge. You cannot survive either of them. So you watch." 

If it rolls early on when you're still only in Outer layer (since imprints are shared between the 3 depths unlike enemies), then it makes sense, cause you're still pretty weak. But if you get this while cleaning up before Act 2, then it does become kinda funny given All-Ten Confluence has the "ultra-apex" of each element and basically you're kinda powerful compared to most of the Mortal Realm.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the exact problem I’ve been finding. At one point there was simply so much text to get through that parts of it effectively became Mad Libs. The underlying information was different, but the structure around it was often the same, especially in things like the guild reports and Dual Wilderness discoveries.

That’s why I’ve stopped treating this as a sentence-by-sentence cleanup and started reading entire groups of related content together. A line can look perfectly fine by itself, but once you put 20 or 30 similar entries beside each other the pattern becomes very obvious. I’ve already been going back through those systems specifically and breaking up the repeated structures rather than just swapping words around.

The power-state example is also a good catch. Some of those wilderness scenes were written around the assumption that you were encountering them relatively early, but because the discoveries are shared across depths and can still appear much later, that assumption does not always hold. I’ve been checking those kinds of lines for exactly that reason as part of the current pass. If a scene can happen both when you are barely surviving the wilderness and when you are cleaning up Act I content at very high power, the narration cannot casually assume you are still weak.

There is a lot of text, so this is taking a while, but comments like this are useful because they point at the same corpus-level issues I’m trying to eliminate rather than just individual awkward lines.