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Skill Trees

Ten disciplines, 81 base nodes and 30 rank nodes. Skills level from what you already do, cost points and study notes, and never pay coins.

The third progression layer

The server has three ways for a character to grow, and they do different jobs. Buffs sell numbers for coins, so with enough money you can eventually own all of them and there is no real choice in them. Professions pay coins for actions, and their one branching decision is the mastery pick. Skills are the third layer: they change what you can do, and they cannot be bought.

Three properties hold across the whole system:

• Skills level from what you already do. Points come from playing, not from a profession slot. It does not matter which of the 15 professions you carry; a miner with no Miner profession still levels Mining.
• Skills are never wiped. Nothing about a season, a death or a profession change touches your levels or your bought nodes.
• Skills never pay coins. There is no node anywhere that credits your wallet. This is structural rather than a habit: a savings-rate node was designed and cut for exactly this reason, because money with no player action behind it is a faucet. The Commerce tree reduces fees and reveals numbers, and pays nothing.

What a node buys instead is a numeric effect or a capability flag. There are 40 numeric effect arms and 19 capability flags in the system, and every one of them is read by live code: a node whose effect has no reader is refused at boot and never enters the tree at all.

The ten disciplines

Each discipline has its own level, its own point budget and its own study-note balance. They do not share anything, so progress in one costs you nothing in another.

Two notes on the edges of that table. Ruins levels on a brush: mining a ruin deposit instead of brushing it pays nothing at all, and the ruins themselves pay no passive income. Commerce reads the credited figure at the tail of the payout funnel, so it counts what actually reached you and never the groß that was requested.

Rift, Ruins and Commerce were once called Magic, Exploration and Finance. Only the display names changed, so nothing you own moved.

Levels, XP and points

Every discipline runs to level 30. The curve is fixed in code rather than in a config key, so it is the same for everybody and cannot drift between restarts.

One discipline to 30 is roughly the cost of taking one profession to its top rank. Ten disciplines is ten times that, which is why the tree is written to be a long-term project rather than a checklist.

How XP is credited

• Damped, not raw. An award is damped before it lands, so repeating a cheap action many times pays less per action than doing it once. A single block of dirt and a full ore vein are not worth the same.
• Player-placed blocks pay zero. Placing and re-breaking the same stone is not a source.
• Duelling and Commerce have daily ceilings. When you hit one, awards in that discipline stop and you are told once that day. Killing the same player again inside the victim window pays nothing, though the victim is still noted.
• The bar tells you. Skill XP appears on the action bar as a status line for the discipline you just fed, and a level-up sends a chat message with a clickable that opens that tree.

XP is written to disk in batches, roughly one write per hundred awards, plus a write when you quit. A clean shutdown loses nothing. A crash can cost up to 99 awards, which is a stated and bounded limit rather than an accident. Purchases are different: those are written the moment they happen.

Study notes

Points alone do not buy a node. Most nodes also cost study notes, and study notes are the second currency of the system.

They live in a ledger, not in your bags. A note is credited to a per-discipline account held with the rest of your skill state. That has consequences worth stating plainly: notes cannot be dropped, despawned, lost on death, laundered through a shulker or traded to anyone. They are also not money. There is no transfer verb, no price and no market for them.

Where notes come from

• Guaranteed at levels 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30. Six per discipline, no roll involved.
• Rolled between levels. At most one rolled note per level, and the chance is proportional to the XP actually credited rather than flat per action. The target is that about 35 percent of levels yield a rolled note. The allowance counter is persisted, so relogging does not reset it.

The ratio is checked at every server start. Below 1.0 a tree would be unfinishable by construction; far above it, notes stop being a decision.

Legacy note items

Notes used to be paper items in your inventory. Any you still hold convert into your ledger by shift-right-clicking the stack, or in bulk with /skill notes convert, which sweeps your inventory and your ender chest in one pass. That command is also the reliable path on Bedrock if the shift-right-click gesture does not come through.

One producer still hands out the item rather than a ledger credit: Ancient Ruins can place a note inside a deposit, where the finder is not known until somebody brushes it. Those convert on the first click like any other legacy stack. Nothing you earned under the old rate was taken back when the rate changed.

Tiers, forks and what a node costs

Every discipline is five tiers deep and carries two fork groups. There are 81 base nodes in total: nine in Gathering and eight in each of the other nine disciplines.

A node costs points, usually study notes, and requires a level. Point cost rises with the tier:

Tier 3 opens at level 12. The costs are checked at boot to be strictly ascending, so a deeper node can never be cheaper than a shallower one.

The budget, and why you cannot own a tree

That inequality is the design. One branch is finishable and a tree is not, so the fork you take is a real choice for the life of that discipline. It was not always so: an earlier version priced the dearest branch at 30 against 29 earnable, which made every tier-5 capstone unreachable by construction. Nobody could buy them, and nothing said so.

Forks

A fork group is two nodes at the same tier. Taking one locks the other, and the card tells you which node you already own rather than only refusing the click. On the tree screen a fork tier is drawn as two cells with the middle of the row left empty: the gap in the spine is the fork, and there are no arrows or dividers doing that job.

Rank ladders

Beside the 81 base nodes there are 30 rank nodes: one ladder of three ranks in every discipline, all of them at tier 3.

A ladder is one upgrade bought in steps. Each rank requires the rank below it, so it cannot be bought out of order, and the magnitude climbs by a fixed step per rank rather than being three unrelated numbers. Only rank 1 carries a capability flag, because a flag you already own cannot be granted twice and charging points for that would buy nothing.

On the tree screen a ladder takes a single cell rather than three, so a tier row still reads as a row of distinct upgrades. Clicking it opens the ladder's own screen, which lists the ranks cheapest first, shows how many you own out of how many exist, and prices the next one. Every discipline reuses an effect its tree already grants, so a ladder does not add a new kind of thing to learn.

Fifteen points out of twenty-nine is a real trade. Filling a ladder is more than half of everything a level-30 discipline will ever give you, and those points are not available for tiers 4 and 5.

Respec

A respec clears one discipline's bought nodes, hands back every point you spent in it and returns the study notes those nodes cost. Your level and your XP are untouched, and the other nine disciplines are untouched.

It is paid for in coins, and the fee has two terms:

Two details of the mechanism are worth knowing. The fee is burnt, not transferred: undoing a choice shrinks the money supply rather than moving coins into a pot someone else can spend. And you are charged before anything is changed, so a respec you cannot afford is refused with the shortfall named and your tree left exactly as it was.

The number the screen quotes is the number you are charged. That is asserted at every boot, along with the rule that a larger refund can never cost less than a smaller one.

The fee defaults are a first guess rather than a tuned figure, so treat 500 plus 250 a point as the current shape rather than a permanent one.

Screens and commands

Everything in the system is reachable two ways: through the menu and by typing. Nothing is menu-only.

The menu itself has six screens: the hub, a tree, a node card, a rank ladder, the respec confirmation and a two-page help screen whose second page is the live XP ladder for the discipline you are furthest along in. A tree screen paints one tier per row and pages four tiers at a time.

Bedrock is not a fallback here. The same screens render as native forms with the same cards and the same wording, and the page buttons work. The one thing a form cannot do is hover, so a row's whole description is folded into its button label.

Java players connect at blacklight-network.de. Bedrock players use the same address on port 19132. The server runs Paper 26.1.2.

Limits worth knowing

Some of these are trade-offs, some are known rough edges. All of them are better read here than discovered after you have spent points.

• You cannot own a whole discipline. 29 points against a tree costing 33, or 48 with its ladder. Respec is the only way to change your mind, and it costs coins.
• Study-note effects are not yet per-discipline. A node that multiplies your study-note chance currently raises that chance in all ten disciplines, even where its card names only its own. It is a known defect, recorded rather than hidden.
• Level 30 is the ceiling and the curve is fixed. There is no prestige and no continuation past 30. Once a discipline is capped, its 29 points are all you will ever have there.
• Duelling and Commerce are the two capped disciplines. Both stop awarding once their daily ceiling is reached, which makes them slower to level deliberately.
• Passives are given and taken back. Effects like haste at depth are applied when the condition holds and removed when it stops, when you swap the tool, when you surface and when you log out. Only what the skill system granted is ever removed.