Progression runs on three separate axes, and they do not overlap:
- Skill levels make the things you already do cheaper, faster and more forgiving. A skill levels from raw experience, and the experience comes from doing — there is no trainer and no grind menu.
- Ability ranks are bought with points and bend a specific number: how fast a hold decays, how much a cell stores, how wide the timing window is. An ability never buys an outcome, only a term.
- Knowledge — glyphs and the like — is a list of what you can do at all, and it grows by being taught.
Earning and spending
Each skill level earns 2 ability points, and a rank costs 1. Points are cheap on purpose — they are for buying what sounds fun, not for solving a build puzzle. Experience is paid for quality: in channelling, a kept beat earns experience and a mashed one earns nothing. Practice with no target still pays — that is what practice is.
Levelling
Every skill has its own curve, but the shape is shared: each level costs about half again more than the last (athletics, the reference curve, wants 100 XP for level 2). Levels never hit a hard cap — they approach a floor. Channelling, for instance, halves the distance to its best possible efficiency roughly every five levels and never quite arrives.
The skills
- Athletics — moving under your own power.
- Channelling — driving current through a glyph.
- Construction — raising things in the world.
- Cooking — the fire half of the kitchen.
- Crafting — benchwork and handwork.
- Fishing — patience, and what takes the lure.
- Gathering — taking what the world offers.