Experience & Leveling¶

Experience is earned by hunting and by practicing your craft — healing, boxwork, raising the dead, and the other service arts all teach. Crossing a threshold raises your level automatically and instantly. The level cap is 100.

Earning experience¶

Kills do not bank experience directly — they fill your field experience pool (your "mind"), which drains into real experience on the recovery pulse. This creates the classic hunt-then-rest rhythm. EXPERIENCE (or EXP) is the dedicated readout: level progress, field experience, mind state, and unspent training points. The web client shows the same in its Experience panel.

Pool capacity = 800 + Logic + Discipline. Kills that land on a saturated mind are lost — when your mind fills, return to a rest point.
What a kill teaches: an even-level kill grants 100 field experience, whoever you are and whatever the creature — the creature's level does all the differentiating (see the level-gap rule below). About nine or ten even fights fill a fresh mind.
Absorption speed: the mind absorbs in small pulses about once a minute — fastest on a recovery node (greater nodes faster still), quick in town, slowest in the wilds. Higher Logic, a deep backlog, and hunting grouped all speed it up. A full mind takes roughly half an hour at a node to run clear: that pause is the game's breathing room — sell the loot, work the boxes, talk to people. Hunting cannot rush it.
Group share: when a groupmate lands a kill, every other group member standing in the room earns half the kill's base experience through their own level curve — presence is the contract, so the empath keeping the swinger alive earns without ever drawing steel. The killer's own award is untouched: a pair banks ~150% of a solo kill while hunting faster and safer.
Kill experience scales with the level gap: even fights pay the full 100, easy prey pays 10 less per level below you (nothing at ten levels below), daring kills pay 10 more per level above (capped at 150, five levels up).

Mind states¶

Your mind's fullness is what EXPERIENCE reports, shifting as you hunt and absorb:

Pool fill	Your mind is…
0%	clear as meltwater
under 25%	bright and quick
25–50%	steady
50–62%	crowded
62–75%	clouding over
75–90%	fogged
90–100%	aching for rest
full	brimming over — new kills absorb nothing

Beyond the kill — the service arts¶

The rule: the work of your craft teaches. Every award below feeds the same mind pool as kills (a healer's day saturates a mind just like a hunter's), and each activity carries its own natural limit:

Activity	Experience	Natural limit
Healing (`TRANSFER`)	Per wound absorbed — deeper wounds teach more, old scars half	Real wounds only; the empath carries them
Raising the dead (spell 318)	The cleric's great service — scales with the level of the life restored	Someone must actually be dead
Picking locks (`PICK`)	3× the lock's difficulty	Once per box
Disarming traps (`DISARM`)	4× the trap's difficulty	Once per box
Picking pockets (`STEAL`)	Scales with the take, capped	The purse empties; botches turn the mark hostile
Foraging (`FORAGE`)	A small award per find, scaled by the herb's difficulty	A room holds ~5 finds before it is picked clean
Tending (`TEND <someone>`)	Scales with how hard the wound bled	Your own wounds teach nothing
Bounty writs (`BOUNTY`)	The writ's payout on turn-in	One writ at a time

The experience curve¶

The cumulative experience required to be a given level is:

ExpForLevel(L) = Σ (for n = 2..L) of 2500 × max(1, n − 2)

This produces a curve whose per-level cost rises by 2,500 each level:

Level	Total exp	Gain from previous
2	2,500	2,500
3	5,000	2,500
4	10,000	5,000
5	17,500	7,500
6	27,500	10,000
7	40,000	12,500
8	55,000	15,000
9	72,500	17,500
10	92,500	20,000
11	115,000	22,500
12	140,000	25,000
…	…	+2,500 / level

(Our display level runs one ahead of the internal numbering, so our level 11 equals 115,000 experience.)

What a level-up grants¶

Leveling is checked whenever experience is awarded, and applies the instant you cross a threshold — even mid-combat. You see an advancement message.

A level-up grants:

Grant	Detail
Training points	A fresh PTP and MTP batch (see Skills & Training)
Stat growth	Stats rise slowly on their own schedule — profession and race set each stat's growth rate
Raised rank caps	Every skill's cap rises by its trainings-per-level
Recomputed pools	Mana, Spirit, and Stamina maxima are recomputed for the new level

It does not grant, automatically:

HP — that comes only from training Physical Fitness.
Spells — those come from training your profession's spell circles.

Leveling is a budget, not a reward. The advancement is just the announcement; the benefit is what you choose to train with the new points.

Training points for skipped levels are back-granted (tracked by tp.granted_level), so a new or under-trained character receives everything it is owed on its next kill. After leveling, your caps have already risen — run TRAIN to spend.

Death and experience¶

Dying takes no banked experience, though any field experience your mind had not yet absorbed slips away with your body. What you carry back is the grave-chill: absorption runs at a quarter rate until the chill is worked off (the withheld share thaws it), so death costs pace, not progress. Departing early doubles the chill, and a banked deed waives it entirely (HELP DEEDS).

See Death & Respawn for the full consequences of dying.

GM shortcuts¶

/award <player> <exp>     grant experience (negative removes); runs level-up + TP
/levelup <player> [n]     advance n levels instantly
/set <player> level <n>   set level (sets exp to threshold, grants TP up to it)
/config expscale <pct>    speed of the absorption clock alone (100 = canon ~60s
                          pulse, the default). Body recovery rides the separate
                          /config regenscale and does not touch the mind.

See the GM Guide.