How do perks work — do I collect them, or do I have to pick one?

Steps

1. Open the character screen and tab to perks. It sits beside the skill list, and levelling up puts the same list in front of you unasked — which is how two of these four recordings reach it.
2. Read the four headings first: perk points, active, available, unavailable. A perk in your list is not necessarily doing anything.
3. Read each perk’s full sentence. Most of the ones with a real upside put the cost after the comma, and the names give no hint of it.
4. Scroll the whole list before choosing. One player stops reading partway and says there are far more than he expected — the thirty-two below are what four players got through, not the full set.
5. Check the level requirement, not just the skill requirement. One perk is read as needing alchemy 80 and character level 20.
6. Read the requirement line on anything greyed out. One player finds his blocked by a character level he has not reached and by another perk he has not taken.
7. Expect more slots rather than planning around one. One player at an early level picks a single perk; another, further in, is running three.
8. Assume the choice sticks. Nobody in this pool changes an active perk on camera.

What the screen shows

One player narrates the headings as he opens it: “So we have perk points, active, available, and unavailable perks”, then “that is a lot to go through”. A second, on an unrelated channel two days later, describes the decision instead of the layout: “we get to pick one active perk”, and reads his shortlist. A third calls the right-hand column perk points and starts reading straight down the list.

Those are three descriptions of one screen. A screen that separates active from available is a screen where holding a perk and using it are different states, which is why this page states the distinction as established. “One active perk” turns out to be one player at an early level rather than a cap. Hours later, on the same channel that read the list, a player recaps his build for arriving viewers and names three perks in a row as things he currently has — the underwater-regeneration one, a one-handed damage perk, and the unarmed-speed one his whole character is built around. Three at once is what is on record; the ceiling is still unknown.

The strongest structural evidence is the order. Two players on different channels read the top of the list in the same sequence — meat, fire and lightning, armour, unarmed speed, resting, alcohol — six entries deep before they diverge. Two independent caption tracks agreeing on that ordering means the list is fixed rather than rolled per character.

A third channel then reads the same block back the other way. Where the first goes meat, fire and lightning, armour, unarmed speed, resting, alcohol, underwater, maximum-one, the third starts at maximum-one and works up through underwater, alcohol, resting, armour, meat and unarmed speed. Same eight entries, three channels, mirrored. That is what a fixed list looks like read from the other end, though no recording shows whether the screen offers a sort control, so the page reports the symmetry without explaining it.

The thirty-two perk effects on record

• Enemies drop more meat. Two channels, and both name the perk Chef. First in the list on both.
• Take no fire damage, but double lightning damage. Three channels, and two of them name it Conductive. One player spells out the consequence: walk through fire, run from lightning mages.
• Armour no longer affects you, for better or worse. Two channels, identical wording.
• Move, jump and attack faster while nothing is equipped. Two channels, identical wording.
• A chance to find extra items when resting. Two channels; one adds that it is capped at one per day.
• Alcohol has 1.5 times the effect. Two channels.
• Regenerate health slowly while underwater. Two channels, both naming it Iron Lung, and one picks it as free healing when out of potions.
• Your maximum health, magic and stamina is one. One channel. Read that one twice.
• Enemies drop rarer, stranger meat. Two channels — apparently a second, better version of the first perk on this list.
• Deal more physical damage but take more magic damage. Two channels, both naming it Dysmorphic.
• Increased damage against beastmen. One channel for the effect — but a second channel finds the same entry locked, which is the subject of its own section below.
• Take and deal half damage. Three channels, all naming it Ghostblooded. One player stops to ask what the point of that is.
• Increased damage against humans, and unique dialogue options. Three channels. One player takes it for the dialogue alone.
• Deal more damage while another party member has lower health than you. Two channels, both naming it Heated Rivalry — the only perk on record that refers to co-op.
• Take less damage while underground or under a roof. Three channels, two of them naming it Subterranean.
• You explode when you die. Three channels. Not to be confused with the one further down that explodes everything else.
• Half maximum health, but slow healing over time. Three channels, all naming it Regeneration, and one reads a level 8 requirement beside it.
• Attack faster, and sometimes attack on your own. Three channels.
• Fire is stronger in daylight; frost and lightning are stronger at night. Two channels, both naming it Geomancer.
• Stamina regenerates faster — by 40% on one channel and 20% on another. The two readings are not reconciled here; see the limits.
• Immunity to poison. One channel.
• Bonus damage while wielding a one-handed weapon with nothing in your off hand. Two channels, both naming it Pit Fighter.
• Summons are stronger and last longer. One channel.
• Flame spells do significantly more damage to undead. One channel.
• A higher chance of pickpocketing successfully. One channel.
• Take 20% less damage from all sources while blocking. One channel, which attaches a queen’s name to it that this page does not print. Distinct from the blocking perk further down this list, which trades movement speed for stamina.
• Gain 20% more armour while every clothing slot is filled. Two channels, in the same words; one of them reads the name as Fully Dressed.
• Stronger at night, weaker during the day. One channel, reading a vampiric perk whose name it renders twice and differently.
• Kills heal you. One channel, reading it as a second vampiric perk immediately after the first.
• Enemies explode when you kill them. One channel. Distinct from the perk that explodes you when you die — both are read aloud in the same session, minutes apart.
• Sheathing and unsheathing is faster. One channel, which reads the name as quick draw and then takes the perk.
• Blocking slows your movement, but blocked hits drain far less stamina. One channel, read in the same breath as the one above.

Why ten perk names are printed and the rest are not

Every perk name in these recordings comes out of a machine caption, and captions are unreliable on invented words. The rule this page applies is simple: a name is printed when two unrelated channels transcribe it the same way, in the same list position, attached to the same effect. A name read by one player only is withheld no matter how ordinary it looks.

Ten names now clear that bar. Chef, Conductive and Iron Lung were the original three. A fourth recording, plus a full read of a transcript that had only been sampled before, adds seven more: Ghostblooded, Regeneration, Subterranean, Pit Fighter, Heated Rivalry, Dysmorphic and Geomancer. Three of those are read by three separate channels rather than two.

Two of the seven need a note about spelling rather than about sourcing. Dysmorphic comes through as “Dysmorphic” on one channel and “dysomorphic” on another, and Geomancer comes through as “Geommancer” on both. In each case the captions point unambiguously at an ordinary English word, and this page uses the standard spelling, exactly as it does with exhume and entombed elsewhere. That is a different situation from a coined name, where there is no standard to fall back on.

Pit Fighter is the one that changed status rather than being newly found. This page previously withheld it on its own rule: the effect was read three times, but by a single player. A fourth recording names it in a list of three perks the player is choosing between, which supplies the second channel the rule wanted. Nothing about the perk changed; the evidence did.

The unarmed-speed perk remains the near miss worth recording. Four readings exist across two channels — Nudistic, Nutistic, nudest and nudist, each followed by ecstasy — and no two agree. One player builds his entire character around wearing nothing, which makes the sense of the name obvious, and the same player stops mid-sentence the first time he meets it to ask how it is even said. Sense is settled; spelling is not. It stays unprinted.

The beastman-damage perk fails the same way from the other direction. Two channels reach it, one reading the name as “Drag” and the other as “Dreg”. Two channels are not enough when they disagree about the word itself, so the effect and the lock are published and the name is not.

Four more sit unnamed for want of a second reading: the maximum-one perk, the resting perk, the armour perk, and the quick-draw and blocking perks read by the newest source. The effects behave differently from the names throughout. “Take no fire damage but double lightning damage” and “move, jump, and attack faster while nothing is equipped” come through separate pipelines word for word. A sentence describing a mechanic survives machine transcription; a coined proper noun does not.

One correction is worth recording, because it is exactly what a third source is for. Working from a single channel, an earlier version of this page described a perk as making enemies more likely to come for you — a reading of the captioned phrase “enemies draw more meat” as garbled threat text. A third recording read the same entry as “Chef: enemies drop more meat”, which is both a real effect and a joke that fits the rest of the list. The earlier paraphrase was wrong and has been replaced.

One perk your race cannot take

A player scrolling the list stops at one entry and reads what the game tells him: “Your kind cannot take this perk.” He moves on without comment. It is the only line of its kind anywhere in the pool, and on its own it establishes something the rest of this page does not — that the perk list is not the same for every character.

What makes it worth a section is the second channel. On an unrelated recording another player reads the same entry, in the same list position, and gets its effect instead of its lock: increased damage against beastmen. And the player who is refused is playing a lizardfolk character, which he says at character creation and confirms twice later in the session when another player calls the two of them lizardmen.

So the reading that fits both recordings is that a perk which targets beastmen is barred to a player who is one. Neither recording says that. What each says is half of it, and the halves fit.

The page publishes the lock as fact, because a player read it off the screen, and publishes the explanation as a reading, because it is one. The alternative — that “your kind” means something other than race, such as a class or an allegiance the player had already taken on — is not ruled out by anything on record. What is ruled out is planning your build from a list you saw someone else scroll.

How the locked ones unlock

One player scrolls past the perk his build is aimed at and finds it greyed out. He reads the requirement line: character level five, and a second perk. “Is there a way to get these unlocked? Requires level five. Requires a chef” — and Chef is one of the two perk names this site had already confirmed, sitting at the top of the same list.

That makes this a tree rather than a menu. A perk that requires another perk is a prerequisite, and the page states it that way while flagging what it rests on: one caption track, one requirement line, read once. The alternative reading — that some skill called chef exists — is ruled out by the skill list, which two channels read in full and which contains no such entry.

He draws the practical conclusion himself: the next batch opens at character level five. Later in the same session, further along, he says a couple more will unlock when he hits five and that he is four hundred experience away. Nothing here shows what arrives at that level or how many.

Set beside the alchemy perk that wants skill 80 and character level 20, the pattern is that requirements mix character level, skill level and other perks, in some combination this pool cannot map. Two data points is not a system.

Requirements / limits

• Thirty-two is what four players read aloud, not the size of the list. One of them stops and says there are far more.
• Twelve of the thirty-two rest on a single recording. They are published because a player reading a screen aloud is describing the screen, but they carry less weight than the twenty with two or more.
• Three simultaneous perks is a floor, not a cap. It comes from one player listing his own build aloud; no recording shows the slot count, or what opens a new one.
• The prerequisite reading rests on one requirement line in one caption track. What is certain is that the line named a level and something else; that the something else is the Chef perk is the only reading the skill list allows.
• Nothing establishes whether an active perk can be swapped. No source changes one.
• The level gate is one line from one recording: alchemy 80 together with character level 20. Whether that pattern is general is unknown.
• The stamina perk is on record with two different numbers. One channel reads 40% faster and names it Olympian; a fourth channel, four days later, reads 20% faster. Nothing decides between them. They may be two perks, two builds of the game, or one caption error, and this page prints both rather than picking the one it likes. The 20% reading is the one recorded on the day Update 7 shipped, which makes the patch explanation available without making it demonstrable.
• The race lock is one line on one channel: a player is told his kind cannot take a perk. That much is read off the screen. That the perk in question is the beastman-damage one, and that the bar is his lizardfolk race, comes from setting two recordings side by side and is labelled as a reading throughout.
• Three of the four recordings predate Update 7. The fourth was recorded on 21 August 2026, the day that update shipped, and never says which build it is running — so this page cannot tell you whether its readings come from before or after the patch. The changelog does not mention perks either way, which leaves the question open rather than closing it.

Common mistakes

• Treating perks like skill points to be banked. The screen sorts them into active and inactive, which is not how a bank works.
• Choosing by name. The names are jokes; one of the effects reduces you to a single point of health.
• Reading only the first half of the sentence. Most of the good ones put the cost after the comma.
• Assuming a skill number alone unlocks a perk. At least one is gated on character level as well.
• Assuming this list is complete. It is what four players got through before moving on.
• Planning around a single slot. One player is running three at once, and says more open at character level five.
• Ignoring a greyed-out perk because you assume it needs a skill. At least one is waiting on a character level and on another perk.
• Expecting to undo the choice. Nobody has recorded swapping an active perk, so plan as though it sticks.

Still unverified

• How many perks can be active at once?Single unconfirmed reportAt least three: one player names three he is running while recapping his build. No recording shows the slot count itself, or a cap.
• What opens a new perk slot?Not verifiedCharacter level is the obvious candidate, since one player reads level five off a locked perk, but nothing on record connects a level to a slot rather than to an unlock.
• How many perks require other perks?Single unconfirmed reportOne requirement line names character level five and, on the only reading the skill list permits, the Chef perk. No second requirement line of that shape is on record.
• Can an active perk be swapped?Not verifiedNo source in this pool changes one on camera.
• How many perks exist in total?Not verifiedThirty-two effects are on record across four recordings. One player says there are a ton more and stops reading.
• Are all perks gated on character level as well as skill?Not verifiedOne perk is read as requiring skill 80 and character level 20. Whether that pattern is general is unknown.