Skills

Skills are one of the ways your character grows in Teldaria beyond levels and gear. You have eight skills — Sword, Great Axe, Dagger, Bow, Vitality, Gathering, Farming and Agility — and each one levels up independently just by being used. Swing a sword and Sword climbs; take hits and Vitality climbs; mine, farm and sprint and Gathering, Farming and Agility climb.

There are no skill points to spend and no talent trees to plan. Every level you earn immediately improves that skill's passives, and at skill level 5 each skill unlocks a signature active ability triggered with a click combo — no hotbar slot required. Everything is browsable in-game with /skills, which shows the live numbers for your character.

How Skills Work

• Eight skills, each level 1 to 100. They share nothing: no common XP pool, no points to allocate. Your "build" is simply which skills you have put the hours into.
• XP comes from doing the thing. Damage dealt, damage taken, health healed, blocks broken, crops harvested, distance sprinted. There is no way to convert one skill's progress into another's.
• Every skill levels at the same rate. No skill is set to level faster or slower than the others — the difference in how quickly you climb comes purely from how much of the activity you do.
• Levels get expensive fast. The cost curve is quadratic, so early levels fly by and the last stretch to 100 is a serious grind. Taking a single skill from 1 to 100 costs 30,904,500 XP.
• Level 2 is the cheapest level in the game. By quirk of the curve, going from 2 to 3 costs half what 1 to 2 did — then the price climbs from there and never stops.
• Progress is safe. Skills are stored server-side and autosaved every 5 minutes. Dying and logging out cost you nothing.

XP Needed Per Level

Each row is the cost of that single level-up, plus the running total from level 1.

TODO: real-world time-to-max estimates. The XP rates are known, but how fast you actually earn them depends on mob health, your gear's damage, ore density and spawn rates — someone should time an hour of each activity and post the numbers.

The Eight Skills

Earning XP

Weapon Skills

Sword, Great Axe, Dagger and Bow XP is damage-based: you earn 0.75 XP for every point of damage you actually land, in the skill matching the weapon you are using. Bigger hits are worth proportionally more, and there is no separate bonus for the killing blow — only damage counts.

The three melee skills track Teldaria's custom weapons only. Each custom melee weapon carries a type — Sword, Great Axe or Dagger — and that type is what decides which skill it trains and which passives apply to it. A plain vanilla iron sword earns no Sword XP and gets none of the Sword passives. Bow is the loose one: any arrow you land earns Bow XP and benefits from the Bow passives no matter what fired it — only activating Power Shot requires holding a custom Bow.

The weapon's class is all that matters: every custom sword trains Sword, every custom great axe trains Great Axe, and every custom dagger trains Dagger.

Vitality

Vitality trains two ways, and both are about surviving rather than dealing damage:

• Taking hits — 0.6 XP per point of damage taken, but only from an actual creature or player, and scaled by how dangerous the attacker is. The payout is multiplied by the attacker's max health divided by 20, capped at full value: a weak penned mob pays a fraction, while anything from a vanilla zombie upward pays full rate. Fall damage, lava, drowning and starvation train nothing.
• Healing — 1.2 XP for every point of health you restore, from any healing source.

Agility

Agility earns 0.25 XP per block of net sprint distance, measured over rolling three-second windows. "Net" is the important word: it is your displacement from where the window started, not the ground you covered. Sprinting in circles or bouncing back and forth against a wall earns essentially nothing — long straight-line travel is what pays.

Gathering

Gathering XP is per block broken and works off a fixed table. If a block is not on the table it is worth exactly zero, which covers most decorative and placed blocks. Ancient Debris is far and away the single most valuable block in the game.

The XP Sources page inside /skills lists every entry for the skill you are looking at, so use it in-game if you want to check a block that is not on this list.

Farming

Farming counts fully grown crops only. Planting a seed and instantly breaking it gives nothing, so there is no fast replant-and-smash loop. Livestock counts too.

TODO: what happens when a block qualifies for both Gathering and Farming — the two systems watch the same break event, so oddball blocks may pay both or neither. Needs testing in-game.

TODO: tougher mobs are not worth bonus Combat XP by themselves — they simply have more health to chew through, so they pay more damage-based XP. Confirm whether a per-mob multiplier is planned.

Passive Abilities

Passives need no input — they are simply on once you hit their unlock level, and they keep improving every level after that until they hit a ceiling. Two of them, Sword's Lifesteal and Vitality's Defense, feed straight into your character sheet and stack on top of whatever your gear, gems and runes already provide.

Passive Details Worth Knowing

• Bleed doesn't stack. Re-applying it to a target that is already bleeding keeps the stronger bleed and the longer remaining duration instead of adding a second one — you cannot layer it for burst.
• Execute is mobs only. It never triggers against another player, no matter how low they are.
• Backstab means behind. Dagger's bonus needs the hit to land in roughly the rear third of the target's facing, so you have to actually get around them.
• Bow damage grows with distance. Long shots hit noticeably harder than point-blank ones, and sneaking multiplies the damage on top of that — at level 100 sneaking is always worth it.
• Last Stand has a 90-second lockout. It can pull you out of the fire only once every 90 seconds, so don't plan a fight around it saving you twice. It fires against players and mobs alike, and announces itself with a Last Stand! message, particles and a totem sound.
• Healing Bonus applies to everything. Any healing you receive is increased, not just healing from your own ability.
• Overheal becomes a shield. At full health, healing that would be wasted turns into golden absorption hearts instead, up to a cap.
• Tool Save actually repairs. When it procs it puts a point of durability back on the tool rather than just skipping the damage.
• Mining Momentum ramps. Every 8 blocks in a row adds a Haste tier and refreshes it for 5 seconds; stop for about 3 seconds and the streak resets to nothing. Reaching Haste III means chaining 24 breaks.
• Endurance saves food. It cancels a hunger-drain tick outright when it procs, so you eat less on long trips.
• Evade DR only exists during the roll. Agility's damage reduction is tied to the brief window Evasive Roll opens, so it is a reaction, not permanent armour.

TODO: how much damage 100 Defense actually blocks, and how much health 10 Lifesteal actually returns. Those conversions live in the server's combat stat system, not in the skill system.

TODO: whether Bleed, Cleave Slam and the other skill effects apply inside claims, cities and protected regions. Only Great Axe's Execute is confirmed to be mobs-only.

Active Abilities

Every skill has exactly one active ability, and all eight unlock at skill level 5. They cost nothing to use — no reagents, no mana, just a cooldown.

How to Cast

• Weapons and tools — prime, then fire. Hold the matching item, right-click to prime, then left-click to cast. The primed state expires after about 10 seconds if you don't follow through. Gathering primes off any vanilla pickaxe, axe or shovel (wood through netherite); Farming primes off any vanilla hoe.
• Bow is the exception. Left-click to activate Power Shot — no priming — then draw and fire with right-click as normal. That arrow is the empowered one.
• Vitality and Agility need no item at all. Double-tap crouch (two sneak presses inside about half a second) to arm, and an action-bar prompt appears: left-click casts Second Wind, right-click casts Evasive Roll.

Priming is smart about it: if the ability is still locked or on cooldown, right-clicking won't prime it — you get the reason on your action bar instead, so you don't burn a click discovering the ability wasn't ready.

What Each Ability Does

Ability Details Worth Knowing

• Cleave Slam sweeps roughly a 120-degree arc in front of you and tells you how many targets it caught. Its damage caps out at 9.0 in the mid-60s of Great Axe, so levels past that extend its reach rather than hitting harder. Face the pack, not one target.
• Shadow Step needs a living target within 10 blocks, inside a tight aim cone of about 23 degrees, and clear space behind it. If there is no valid target or no room to land, the ability fails with a message and is not put on cooldown — you lose nothing but the click. On success you land 1.2 blocks directly behind the target, which is exactly where Backstab wants you.
• Blade Dash and Shadow Step empower one hit. The buff is consumed by the first hit you land, or it times out. Don't dash and then flail at air.
• Power Shot boosts the arrow twice — once when it leaves the bow and again when it connects.
• Second Wind is a group heal. It heals every player inside the radius as well as you, and grants you Resistance. Resistance reaches level II once your Vitality hits 26. Allies get the flat heal; only your own portion is boosted by your Healing Bonus and Overheal passives.
• Prospector's Focus multiplies your Extra Drop passive rather than replacing it, pushing a maxed Gathering player to nearly 70% double drops while it is up.
• Replenish makes every fully grown crop you harvest replant itself for free while it is running. It grants no Haste on this server.

TODO: whether Mining Momentum's Haste and Prospector's Focus's Haste II stack or overwrite one another. Both apply the same effect at different strengths.

The /skills Menu

/skills opens the hub: a five-row menu with the four weapon skills on the top row, the four utility skills (Vitality, Gathering, Farming, Agility) on the row below, your own head showing your total level across all eight skills, and a Nether Star button for the leaderboards. Every skill icon shows your level, a 20-segment XP bar and your percentage into the level; maxed skills glow.

Clicking a skill opens its detail page, which has sub-pages for its Passives, its Level Track, its XP Sources and its Leaderboard. The XP Sources page is the live version of the tables on this page — it is the fastest way to check what a specific block or action is worth.

The menu is drawn with Teldaria's custom interface graphics, so it looks nothing like a vanilla chest menu.

In-Game Feedback

• An XP bar appears at the top of your screen (boss-bar style) whenever a skill gains XP, showing that skill's level and progress, then fading about 3 seconds after the last gain. Each skill gets its own bar, so a fight where you deal and take damage shows a Sword bar and a Vitality bar at once.
• Your skill data is available to scoreboards, tab and holograms through placeholders — level, current XP, XP required, progress, maxed status and total level, for example %teldariaskills_level_sword% or %teldariaskills_total_level%. Skill names work with or without the underscore, so great_axe and greataxe both resolve.

Commands

Skill names tab-complete: sword, great_axe, dagger, bow, vitality, gathering, farming, agility.

Respeccing

There is no respec, because there is nothing to respec. Skills have no points to allocate and no choices to undo — a level is earned by playing, and the only way to change your build is to go level a different skill. Nothing in the system charges money, items or XP for anything.

The only reset that exists is the staff command above, which wipes a skill back to level 1 with no XP. It is a deletion, not a refund.

TODO: server policy on skill resets — whether staff will wipe a skill on request, and under what circumstances.

Skills boosters multiply all the skill XP you earn for one hour, from 1.25x (Novice) up to 3x (Ultimate). They are sold in the Mission Shops; see Boosters for every tier and where to buy it.

TODO: whether anything besides Skills boosters, such as rank perks or events, boosts skill XP.

TODO: whether skill levels gate anything outside the skill system — quest requirements, job unlocks, region access or item requirements.

TODO: whether the leaderboards ever reset or run in seasons, and how many places they show.

TODO: whether your skill levels follow you between servers on the network.

Related Systems

• Fishing Skills — fishing has its own separate skill tree, trained with entropy and respeccable for 50,000 entropy
• Level — the primary progression system; every 10 levels grants a stat point
• Jobs — another way mining, farming and combat pay out as you play
• Parties — group up before taking Second Wind out for a spin
• Master Command List — every command on the server in one place