Skills and levels

You grow in three ways, and none of them is ever lost when you die.

• Survivor level comes from everything: quests, kills, bosses, contracts, crafting and building. Each level gives a skill point and a little more health, carry weight and stamina. Levels never stop, but skill points do: a survivor earns eighty in a lifetime. The same infected over and over teach you less and less in a short while; specials, bosses and new work always pay in full.
• Skill proficiency goes up by doing: shooting trains Firearms, treating wounds trains Medicine, cooking and gardening train Survival, and so on. It makes you a little better at that thing by itself (steadier sights, quicker searches, better healing), but it never locks a skill: only skill points do.
• Weapon mastery comes from kills with a class of weapon, and it tames recoil and sway.

Press K to open your skills and spend points. Each tree is a web: you learn a node by pathing to it from one you already have, and hovering any node shows what it does and how many points away it is. The capstone sits at the far end. Deeper tiers open on the points you have already spent in that tree: tier II after four.

Every tree makes you choose. At tier III the web forks into two diamonds, and you may learn only one of them: the other side grays out and stays locked until you reset. The fork opens once you have spent eight points in that tree. At the far end sit three skills, the two tier IV nodes and the capstone, and you may take two of the three: the first after ten points in the tree, the second after twelve. The third stays locked for good. The smallest trees ask for every rank they hold before each of those points instead. Eighty points across eleven trees of nearly two hundred ranks means nobody learns everything, so build the survivor you actually play.

What used to be survivor perks are nodes in the trees now, bought with the same skill points: Strong Back and Haggler in Scavenging, Long Legs, Second Breath and Warm Blooded in Fieldcraft, Careful, Resilient and Stubborn in Medicine, Sound Sleeper and Cast-Iron Gut in Survival, Cold Blood in Firearms, Hard to Put Down in Melee and Iron Lungs in Fishing. If you had any, they are still yours, and every perk point you had earned became a skill point.

If you change your mind, the skills screen has a Reset the web button. A reset is all or nothing: every point you spent in every tree comes back, every fork and end pick clears, and your proficiency and mastery are untouched. The first reset of a survivor's life is free. After that it costs scrip for every point currently spent, taken from your pockets first and then your Exchange wallet, and the screen tells you the exact cost before you confirm.

A skill is competence, never power. No node makes a bullet hit harder or your skin thicker: the trees are about steadier sights, quicker hands, a quieter step, a cleaner wound, a lock that gives, a fire kept right and a machine that lasts. The nodes that were perks are the survivor you are: a strong back, cold blood, a cast-iron gut.

The Firearms tree ends in Dead Calm. Aiming, press C and let your breath out: the sights go still for four seconds. It costs stamina, and your breathing takes twenty seconds to settle before you can do it again. (It used to share X, which is the key that stops an emote, a cast or a job. If you had moved it to a key of your own, you keep it.)