The Skill Tree will allow you to spend tokens earned by levelling up your character! These skills are a means of introducing new mechanics and modifying existing behavior. A couple of the new gameplay mechanics the player can unlock through the skill tree are as follows:

• Explorer’s Map: This will enable the player to open up a map by pressing the M key. The map keeps a record of all the places you have visited and notes any locations of interest, such as quest locations, village locations and more!

• Sneak Ability: The sneak ability will allow players to move around in a sneak position that will not alert hostiles of their presence.

Other skills may modify or enhance existing gameplay mechanics, for example the cooking and hunting skill both improve the quality of items related. The Paleontology skill makes fossil drops become significantly more frequent, and also gives the player the Fossil Journal which allows them to track progress of any interesting fossils they have found :)!

Proficiency Tree

The Proficiency Tree is for skills that directly relate to actions the player can make. They improve a players ability to perform tasks, or give the player access to new abilities (such as mounting certain mobs) that they could not do before.

Expedition Tree

The Expedition Tree is all about how the player interacts with the world. Generally, these skills can have a global impact on the world, such as modifying spawn rates, modifying the rate at which “safe” areas decline into being “dangerous”, increase the worlds natural growth rate etc;

Culture Tree

The Culture Tree allows players to alter the way they interact with NPCs and how they tie into village mechanics. This tree currently doesn’t have many skills on it, as the game is still very much built around the content in the first two ages (Stone age and Tribal age). As the game progresses, more skills will become available in this category. An example of one skill in the culture tree is Guardian, which increases both the health and attack damage of NPCs in your party. (The party system allows you to team-up with NPCs for quests).

Final Note

These are the skill tree skills that will be present in the Beta. The final game will have more skills and we are likely to redesign the skill access order (as you cannot unlock a skill until its parent skill has been unlocked). Generally, these skills represent what will be available in the first two ages.

We have also not decided on the exact rate at which the player will level up, however we want this to be quite slow, such that each skill can carry a meaningful weight. The idea here is that it might take a while to work towards the given skill you want, and that you may choose to take a different path each time you play!

A final note is that skills are not going to be essential to gameplay in any way. They are optional extensions that can subtly modify the game in the way that is convenient to you. For example, it allows you to make the areas of the game that you find interesting a little deeper, or conversely, if you don’t like hunting, unlocking the hunting skill will mean that you don’t have to seek out food as often.

We have also considered the idea of end-game skills. This could potentially be a “skill” at the end of the tree that could significantly modify the game in one way. For example, a skill in the proficiency tree which makes the players hunger not decay, or an expedition skill that makes all hostile mobs timid. Which would allow you to explore the world without getting attacked (if you are just interested in exploring and industry mechanics by that point).

Feedback

Let us know if you have any ideas for skills or other mechanics you want to see in the game! We are building the ideas that we find fun, however there might be something we haven’t considered!

• MantaGames