Skills and the Codex

Press E. The Codex lists everything your class can learn, the skills you know and the ones still to come, with a tab for each school of magic.

Clicking a skill in the Codex never casts it. The Codex is where you find and bind skills; you use them from the bar.

Each class starts with one skill. Every other skill is learned by reading its book, so two characters of the same class and level can know quite different things.

1. Find the book. Monsters drop them, and book sellers in town sell them: Isaac in Bichon Town sells books for every class, a tab each. The Codex shows the level each book needs.
2. Right-click the book in your bag to read it. You can't read on horseback.
3. The skill appears in the Codex at level 0, ready to bind and use. The book is used up.

• A book for another class, or one you aren't high enough for yet, is refused and stays in your bag. Keep it or sell it.
• Reading the book of a skill you already know gives that skill 100 experience instead, so a second copy is still worth picking up. A skill at its top level refuses it.
• Book sellers won't serve a character with a red name.

Skills get better by being used. Your character's level decides when you can read a skill's book; after that, it's all about how much you use the skill.

• Every use that works earns 1 to 3 experience. A spell that hits ten monsters earns the same as one that hits one: it's paid per cast, not per target.
• A few skills learn from being hit rather than used: Defensive Mastery, the warrior's immunities, Defiance and Raging Wind while they're up, Advent of Demon and Advent of Devil, Evasion and Willow Dance. These earn at most once a second.
• The Choker of Learning necklace triples what each use earns. Premium adds 10%.
• Each skill has its own top level. Most of the core attack spells go to 30, many skills to 20 or 10, and some to just 3. The Codex shows you when you're there.
• Levels get steadily dearer. Fire Ball needs 300 experience for level 1 and 486,153 for level 30, so the first levels come quickly and the last ones are a long road.
• A skill's level doesn't depend on your character's. Once you've learned it, it can climb as high as you take it.

Every skill level unlocks one thing: more power, a cheaper or quicker cast, a longer buff, a new version of the spell. There's nothing to choose and nothing to spend. A skill at level 8 has everything from levels 1 to 8.

1. In the Codex, click the arrow at the right of a skill's name.
2. Its levels open underneath, one line each. Levels you've reached are ticked, the next one is highlighted with the experience it needs, and the rest are dimmed.
3. A line marked new on your bar gives you a new version of the skill, with a row and a key of its own.
4. Click the arrow again to close it. Only one ladder is open at a time, and the Codex remembers which one for each tab.

• Hover a line to see whether you've reached it, or at what skill level you will.
• When a skill levels up, the chat log says what the new level unlocked: Fire Ball reached level 6 - Multi-shot.
• The last level of many skills is named, such as Fire Ball's Inferno at 30. It's the big one.
• Your levels are never taken away. If a skill's ladder is ever shortened, your skill works at the new top level, and the levels you earned come back if it's lengthened again.

Press Ctrl+E to show the magic bar. Your first twelve slots are on F1 to F12, and those keys work whether or not the bar is showing.

Putting a skill on a key

• Drag it. Click a skill's icon in the Codex to pick it up, then click a slot on the bar.
• Hover and press. Hold the pointer over a skill's icon or key box in the Codex and press an F-key.
• To take it off, click the icon or key box of a bound skill in the Codex.

Passives can't go on the bar, and nor can skills you haven't learned. Your bars are remembered for each character on this computer. A slot bound to a version of a skill you haven't reached yet is drawn dimmed and won't cast.

Not every skill is thrown. The tooltip on a skill's icon says which kind it is.

Toggles and charges can't be switched from horseback.

As Fire Ball and Adamantine Fire Ball level up, each unlocks two extra versions of itself. Each version is a separate row in the Codex with its own key, so you choose which to cast for the fight in front of you.

• Ring skills. Two rings lend a skill of their own while you wear them, to any class. The Fierce Dragon Ring gives Dragon's Fire, a fire ball, and the Signet of Vigor gives Vigour, a heal. Each appears on a Codex tab named after its ring, levels and climbs its own ladder, disappears when the ring comes off and comes back exactly as you left it. It never touches your class's own skill of the same kind.
• The menagerie. The Menagerie tab lists the horses and companions your account owns. Put one on the bar like a skill and its key mounts or dismounts, or calls your companion out and sends it home. See Companions, pets, mounts.

A few landmarks from each class's list, with the character level each book can be read from. The Codex shows the whole list for your class, and Magic / Skills has every skill on a page of its own.

Everything that's temporarily true about you sits in a strip of icons in the top left: your buffs on top, and anything wrong with you on a row of its own underneath.

Moving and sizing it

Point at an icon and a frame appears round the strip. Drag anywhere on it to move it, and drag its corner to change how many columns and rows it has. A tall, thin strip makes a column down the side of the screen.

When the clock stops

• Logged out, every timed buff stops.
• In a town or standing on mining rubble, elixirs and other item buffs stop, along with blessings. Skill buffs keep running.
• Buffs that aren't buffs at all, from your guild, your companion, your horse, a complete set, your passive skills and Premium, sit at the end of the strip and never run out.

Afflictions

An Elixir of Purification clears the afflictions that can be cleared.

Drink an elixir for an hour of one extra stat. They come in six families, each in five grades.

• Different families stack: you can have Life and Haste at once.
• Within a family, a higher grade replaces a lower one, and the same grade adds another hour. A lower grade is refused and you keep the bottle.
• The clock stops in towns, on mining rubble and while you're logged out.

The third bar on the bottom panel, under health and mana, is IP. It fills while you hunt. When it's full you're given a blessing, and sometimes other players are too.

Filling the bar

• It fills with time spent hunting: about one hour of hunting fills it.
• You count as hunting while you're damaging monsters that would pay you, or have been paid for one in the last 5 minutes. Healing a group that's killing counts too.
• It only fills while you're alive and outside a town. Otherwise it waits where it is. It never fills while you're offline.
• Every character has its own bar.
• Hover the bar for what it is and how full the community meter is (see below).

The blessings

When the bar is full it empties, and you're given one of these at random, as a buff with a clock.

Who else gets it

Players blessed by somebody else get the shared strength. Your own alts never count as strangers.

How long it lasts

• Your own blessing lasts 10 minutes, and filling the bar again with the same one adds 10 more, up to 20.
• A shared one lasts 5 minutes, up to 10.
• A stronger blessing replaces a weaker one of the same kind. A weaker one is refused, so a gift never cuts short your own.
• Different blessings run side by side. Like elixirs, their clocks stop in town.

The community meter

Every bar anybody fills adds a point to one meter for the whole server. At 25 points everyone online is given a Community Blessing for 10 minutes, at shared strength, and the meter starts again. It can bank up to 50, but a community blessing still waits for the 30-minute gap between world events. The IP bar's tooltip shows the meter: Community Blessing: 18 / 25, or that it's ready.

Events apply to everybody online. They start and stop on their own, come round on the same dates every year, and show as an icon on the buff strip while they run.

• An event's clock is the calendar: it doesn't pause in towns and isn't saved with your character.
• If two events that change rates overlap, the one that started later is the one that applies.
• Event bonuses add to your own. The Wisdom blessing (see the IP bar) during Double Experience is worth having.