Do skills level up on their own, or only when I spend points?

Steps

1. Play for an hour without opening the skill screen, then open it. Skills you have been using should have moved without you spending anything.
2. Note which skills climbed by themselves. Both recordings describe frequently used skills growing on their own, including non-combat actions like sprinting, swimming and sneaking.
3. Spend points on the skills that did not move. The Gaming Plus TV video makes this the explicit lesson: points spent on a skill that is already climbing naturally are points wasted.
4. Read the trees that do not match your class before spending. That video reports a perk in the pickpocket progression granting 100 extra carry capacity, which is a reason for a fighter or a mage to open a stealth tree.
5. Re-check the screen after any long stretch of a new activity — a swim-heavy or sneak-heavy session moves different numbers than a fight-heavy one.
6. Read the tooltip on any skill before you commit to it. Four named tooltips have been read aloud and every one of them names something that happens at level 100.
7. Read past the first clause. A fifth tooltip, read by a third player, opens with the same two-health-one-stamina sentence the unarmed entry uses and only then says what the skill itself does — so the part that distinguishes one skill from another may be at the end.
8. Treat spent points as spent. One player presses a point into a skill to see what happens and reports that he cannot take it back.
9. Watch for skills that pay in something other than their own effect. One player notices his health rising as he levels sneak, and is told each level of it grants two.

The eighteen skills, as read off two screens

Two players on unrelated channels go through the skill list out loud on launch day, and produce the same eighteen entries in the same order: one-handed, two-handed, spears, unarmed, archery, blocking, armour, sorcery, channeling, psionics, acrobatics, sprint, swim, sneak, lockpick, pickpocket, alchemy and fishing. One of them prefaces it by saying he loves RPGs where using something makes you better at it, which is the rule the rest of this page is about.

Two independent readings agreeing on order is worth more than either alone, because it means the list is fixed rather than sorted by what each character happens to have. What it shows is how much of the tree is not combat: sprint, swim, sneak, lockpick, pickpocket, alchemy and fishing are seven of the eighteen, and three separate magic skills sit alongside them.

One of them then opens the entries and reads them. One-handed: wield one-handed swords, axes and clubs, keep your off-hand free — damage with one-handed weapons is increased by 1% per level, doubling at 100. Unarmed: raise your fists and shake them at the gods — damage is increased by 2% per level, tripling at level 100, and each level also grants two maximum health and one stamina. Blocking: each level cuts the stamina drained by blocking, down to half cost at level 100. Armour: each level grants more armour, with no figure attached.

What level 100 actually means, and what points are for

Three of the four tooltips read aloud name level 100, and no two of them promise the same thing. One-handed doubles its damage bonus there, unarmed triples its own, and blocking arrives at half stamina cost with no multiplier in sight. Level 100 is a shared milestone whose payoff is set per skill rather than a global bonus, which is the single most useful thing on this page for deciding where to push.

It is also worth noticing that these tooltips state their rate twice. One percent per level for a hundred levels is a doubling; two percent per level is a tripling. The per-level figure and the level-100 figure are the same promise written two ways, so a tooltip that gives you one has given you both.

Points exist alongside all this. One player states that a character level grants five skill points on top of whatever the character himself gains, and points can be pressed into a skill to raise it faster. Two separate recordings then find the same wall: one says he should have saved his points for sorcery now that he has spent them elsewhere, and another presses a point purely to see what the button does and reports that he cannot redeem it. Nothing in the sources cited here shows a respec.

Some skills pay in a currency other than their own description. Unarmed adds maximum health and stamina per level according to its tooltip, and one player watching his own bars remarks that levelling sneak is increasing his health, and is told each level of sneak gives two. So a stealth character is accruing something a combat character would recognise, and the skill screen is not the only place progression shows up.

A third player, on a channel unrelated to the other two, reads a fifth tooltip aloud and it makes that pattern look deliberate: each level grants two max health, one max stamina, and ten jump height. The first two thirds of that sentence are the unarmed tooltip word for word. The last third is not on any tooltip anybody else has read. So “two maximum health and one stamina per level” is not a property of unarmed — it is a clause the game reuses across skills, and the skill-specific payoff is whatever is bolted onto the end of it. That reframes the whole screen: reading one tooltip tells a reader less than it appears to, because most of what it says may be boilerplate.

Which skill that fifth tooltip belongs to is not recoverable from the recording. The player says only “look at skills”, reads the line, and moves on to remark that levelling sprint grants walk speed. Ten jump height points at acrobatics and the sequence — he had just landed an unusually high jump — points the same way, but the caption never names it and this page does not assign it. What it does establish is the boilerplate, which does not depend on knowing the skill.

A fourth channel then reads the same clause, which settles that it is a clause. At 00:50:30 of an unedited session on a channel sharing nothing with the other three, a player working through his level-up screen reads “max health, max stamina, plus ten jump height” — the same three items, the same order. Eight seconds earlier he has said the word “Acrobatics” aloud while scrolling. He never states that the clause belongs to it, so this page still does not say so. What changed is that the clause is no longer one caption on one channel: two pipelines produce it independently, and the jump-height tail is real.

The same player supplies the third skill carrying the shared clause, and it is not a combat one. At 02:25:14 he reads “pickpocketing gives me max health and stamina”, then “plus five max health”. Unarmed, an unnamed skill and pickpocketing now all pay in maximum health and stamina, with a different tail bolted on each time. That is three of the eighteen, which is not enough to call it universal — but it is enough that a reader should stop treating the health on the unarmed tooltip as a reason to punch things.

One-handed carries the clause too, and the reading that shows it is the same player who read the one-handed tooltip at the top of this page — eighty minutes later, on a different screen. At 01:42:38 he says what he is about to gain: “it increases my weapon damage by 1% per level, plus three maximum health per level”. The damage half is word for word what he read off the tooltip earlier. The health half is not on that tooltip at all, and the number is three, where unarmed gives two and pickpocketing five.

Four skills, four different amounts of maximum health, and no way to predict the fifth. This page previously concluded that the health clause is boilerplate and the tail is what matters. The tail is still what matters, but the boilerplate is not constant either, and nobody has read enough of the eighteen entries for the pattern behind the numbers to be visible.

The same passage raises a harder question, which is why it is on the page at all. “I’m trying to think what I should get my points into,” he says at 01:42:13, and then weighs sprint against an unnamed entry against unarmoured before settling on one-handed — and reports “I’m up to 160 HP now” once he has. That is a player spending points on skills, on a page whose entire premise is that skills rise through use. Ten seconds earlier he is reading perk effects aloud, so the likeliest reading is that this is the perk screen and the entries are named after the skills they boost. The recording never settles it, and this page will not settle it for him: use-based levelling is well sourced and stays, but a reader should know there is a screen in this game where points go somewhere, and that nobody in the source pool has explained what it is.

Requirements / limits

• Everything on this page is recorded play, not documentation. NerveLabs has published no progression or skill document in any changelog cited here.
• The rate is unrecorded. No source cited here gives numbers for how much use raises a skill, or whether the rate changes at higher levels.
• The 100 carry-capacity figure has one source. Only the Gaming Plus TV video reports it; treat the number as unconfirmed even though the general point about off-class trees is not.
• Both recordings date from 18–19 August 2026, before Update 7 on 21 August, and Update 7 did touch progression. NerveLabs lists an increase to pickpocket and lockpicking experience gain, and a fix making acrobatics correctly prevent damage from high falling velocity. Neither is quantified, and the changelog says nothing about the other sixteen skills.
• The comparison to Morrowind is a player's phrasing, not a NerveLabs claim. It describes the pattern the recording shows, not a promise of identical mechanics.
• The list has two readings; the tooltips have one each. Two players read the eighteen skills in the same order, but every numeric tooltip quoted here comes from a single player reading a single screen, and none has been checked against a second recording.
• The two-health-per-sneak-level figure has one source. It is stated to one player by another during a co-op session, not read off a tooltip on camera. It is consistent with the shared clause two other tooltips carry, which makes it more plausible without making it verified.
• The fifth tooltip is unattributed to a skill. A third player reads out two max health, one max stamina and ten jump height per level without naming the entry he is looking at, so the numbers are recorded and the skill is not. A fourth player reads the same clause and says the word “Acrobatics” eight seconds earlier without connecting the two. Two channels for the clause; still nobody for the attribution.
• The one-handed health figure has one source, and that source is paraphrasing what he is about to gain rather than reading a tooltip aloud. It is recorded rather than published as fact because the damage half of the same sentence matches his own earlier tooltip reading exactly, which makes the health half worth writing down and still not worth stating as the game’s wording.
• Whether the points he spends at 01:42:38 are perk points or a separate skill pool is unresolved, and no figure on this page depends on the answer.
• One player tested whether crouching alone levels sneak, and it is a thirteen-second test. At 02:24:14 he asks aloud whether he gets experience “for sneaking with the eye closed”, reads his sneak progress as 63%, waits, and at 02:24:34 concludes “no, we don’t”. That is one player, one skill, one short look at one number, and it is reported here at exactly that weight. It is evidence that idling in a crouch is not free progress; it is not evidence about what does count as using sneak.
• No source cited here shows a respec. Two players describe points as unrecoverable; neither of them looks for a way to reset them, so the absence of one is not established.
• Carry capacity is still contested, but less so than it was. A recording reports a pickpocket perk granting 100 extra capacity, and another player says flatly that capacity is tied to overall level and cannot be boosted. The third claim — that lizardfolk start with 50 extra — now has a likely explanation: two readings of the character-origin screen show one origin granting higher carry weight along with better swimming and an archery penalty, and players call that origin’s people lizard folk. That makes it a starting bonus rather than a perk, and it does not settle the other two.

Common mistakes

• Treating every low number as a problem to fix with points. The skills you use will move without them.
• Skipping a tree because its name does not match your build. The one specific perk anybody recorded is in a tree most combat characters would never open.
• Assuming only combat skills grow through use. The recording names sprinting, swimming and sneaking specifically.
• Crouching in a corner to farm sneak. The one player who checked watched his sneak progress sit still while undetected and stopped doing it.
• Reading grinding tricks as intended design. One recording mentions repeatedly punching an early NPC to raise unarmed; that is a player's observation about what the system permits.
• Writing off a weapon skill because the early gains feel small. The one tooltip anybody has read says the bonus doubles at 100, so the curve is not flat.
• Taking any carry-capacity claim as settled. Three sources give three accounts, and only one of them now has a plausible origin.
• Spending a point to find out what the button does. One player did exactly that and reports the point is gone.
• Reading a negative starting number as a bug. One player finds himself at minus eight archery and minus four acrobatics, blames his shield, and is told by his chat that his chosen origin carries an archery penalty.
• Judging acrobatics by a pre-Update 7 build. NerveLabs lists a fix so that acrobatics correctly prevents damage from high falling velocity, which means anything written about the skill before 21 August describes it not working as intended.

Still unverified

• How fast do skills rise through use?Not verifiedNeither recording gives a rate, a formula, or a cap, and no NerveLabs source cited here discusses progression at all.
• Does a pickpocket perk really add 100 carry capacity?Single unconfirmed reportReported once, in the Gaming Plus TV video. No second recording and no developer source confirms the figure.
• Did Update 7 change any of this?Developer changelogPartly. NerveLabs raised pickpocket and lockpicking experience gain and fixed acrobatics so that it correctly prevents damage from high falling velocity. No figures are given, nothing is said about the other sixteen skills, and both recordings on this page predate the update.
• What determines carry capacity?Not verifiedThree sources give three incompatible accounts — a pickpocket perk worth 100, a flat statement that it is tied to character level and cannot be raised, and a claim that lizardfolk begin with 50 more. None is a developer statement.
• Do the remaining fourteen skills state rates like the four read here?Not verifiedFour tooltips have been read aloud — one-handed, unarmed, blocking and armour. Armour states no number at all, so it is not safe to assume the rest do.
• Can spent skill points be recovered?Not verifiedTwo players state independently that they cannot take a point back. Neither searches for a respec, so this records their experience rather than the absence of one.
• How many skill points does a level actually grant?Single unconfirmed reportOne player says five per character level, in the same breath as describing use-based growth. No second recording states a figure.
• Which skill grants ten jump height per level?Two independent public sourcesTwo unrelated channels now read the clause; neither names the skill it belongs to. One of them says “Acrobatics” eight seconds before reading it, which is suggestive and not a statement. One player reads the clause off a tooltip without naming the skill. Acrobatics is the obvious candidate and no recording confirms it.
• Is the two-health-one-stamina clause on every skill?Not verifiedIt appears verbatim on the unarmed tooltip and on one unnamed tooltip read by a different player. Nobody has read enough entries to say whether it is universal, common or coincidental.