Human progression is handled through our skill system. There are currently twenty-four skills across four categories; combat, crafting, gathering, and survival. As you probably guessed, the combat skills deal with various types of weapons, the crafting skills are associated with specific trades, gathering skills include harvesting resources from the surroundings, and survival skills encompass aspects of basic survival.
Humans begin the game with zero mastery with all the skills and they earn experience for a skill by performing a related action. Each time they rank up a skill, the tasks related to that skill become more successful. This is especially true for crafting skills, where increased skill lowers the overall crafting difficulty of the related items.
As humans earn ranks in their skills they are awarded skill points, which can be used to increase the related Disciplines for the skill. Disciplines allow the player to choose how their skill is improved. For example, the running skill has two disciplines: Speed and Endurance. Speed increases how fast the character moves while running, while Endurance reduces the amount of stamina drained each second while running. They both may result in similar outcomes (reaching the other side of the island faster than without a discipline), but there are situational differences. If you find yourself running away from enemies, the extra speed may allow you to break line-of-sight to hide. Meanwhile the reduced stamina cost of running would mean you would not need to stop to rest while chasing down a fleeing Sabretusk.
The player can invest up to ten skill points into a discipline, and the more skill points that a player invests, the greater the benefit becomes for them. This is based on exponential growth, so though the first skill point will not be very noticeable, the payoff of the 10th skill point is appreciably larger than the 9th.
Players can continue to earn ranks in a skill until they have fully mastered all available disciplines. The more disciplines available to a skill, the faster it will improve. That being said, the more ranks a skill has, the more difficult it becomes to improve it, so players should choose their disciplines wisely.
There are many more skills we want to add to the game for humans as we continue to add content, such as fishing, tracking, and mace combat. What kinds of skills would you like to see for humans? Share with us in the comments below!