Since I was safely up a tree, it was time to answer some questions. Starting with fucking levels, fucking what?

Level 1 (Soft Cap 6 ⚠️) Experience: 90 / 4000 Job: None ⚠️

Attention: ⚠️ 5 Attribute Points ⚠️ 4 Skill Points ⚠️ No Job Selected

It had only took me a few attempts to figure out how to get the display in my head, just like the notices, it hovered on the edge of my awareness while not actually being in my vision. I could read it, but it wasn’t actually text I had to scan, I just scanned it mentally, almost like a spreadsheet I had memorized, but that still involved the process of reading it each time I looked for information. A strange feeling.

And it was a spreadsheet straight out of a video game. I decided to ignore the existential horror, leading into anxiety, that that was causing me to feel and just treat it like it was a game on my phone. A mind-numbing number goes up game or a brain burning puzzle experience of optimizing numbers… in my head–no, on my phone. Didn’t matter, it would be distracting.

First, levels and experience. It appeared that level 1 had taken 1000 experience, which had been subtracted leaving 90, and that level 2 now took 4000 experience. Quadratic maybe? Too little information to know for sure. The experience had been called “leadership experience” but it just said experience here, interesting.

It probably would be best to clear up some of the warnings.

Attributes first, the first in the order that was suggested. I would need an attribute allocation strategy, specific attributes to focus. But no matter what it was in the end I was confident I would want to dump at least 10 points in each attribute. Double the human baseline in every way? Yes, please.

Physique seemed the obvious first choice. First on the list. Highest adaption score (whatever that meant). Most likely to effect health, which I would need to survive.

I went with it, 5 points to Physique, I felt the mental clicks in my mind as I dialed the 5 points into it, the numbers on the display before me changing. And then I had to mentally push to confirm, like opening a locker padlock after putting in the combination.

Level 1 (Soft Cap 6 ⚠️) Experience: 90 / 4000 Job: None ⚠️

Attention: ⚠️ 4 Skill Points ⚠️ No Job Selected

One warning down.

That it had increased my total health was a win, that it had scaled my currently existing health an even bigger win. But that I didn’t feel any different was sort of disappointing. That adaption had gone down when I had taken it was a wash. I simply don’t know what that means yet, and I don’t think I have an easy way of figuring it out.

Upon reflection it wasn’t like having more health, the consequence of physique, would feel much different. So perhaps physique was an understated effect. Maybe my skin was better? My bones were stronger? It could be more subtle than I might first have imagined. Or perhaps attributes were just number, disconnected from reality. Something to experiment with later because focusing on how reality worked was not helping me distract myself.

Time for skills.

Oh. Maybe not.

There were so many of them! They were organized into groups, each group having at least six, split into two tiers, and there were at least a hundred groups, probably more. Groups like [Phase Evocation], [Sword Mastery], [Smithing], [Physique Perfection], [State Leadership], [Perception Awareness], [Geology]. The system refused to count groups or skills for me, but with more than a hundred groups, there were at least 600 skills, probably a lot more.

Okay, I would need to read all of these, work out some patterns, and categorize them at some point. But for now, what was useful.

Water, food, shelter or warmth, and self defense.

Self defense seemed problematic. Sure there were tons of options here, but if this world had levels, and I was near a level 17 dungeon (rooms full of monsters was definitely a dungeon)… Well it depended on the distance between levels.

Quadratic implied that… it would be 225,000 experience to reach level 15 from level 14, and if the encounter gave about 109,000 experience (assuming the minimum reward was 1% as implied by the notification), or split 6 ways… about 18,000 experience, then people would have to run that 15 times to level up, (or 95 force? what did the x7 do to these numbers?), or like 200 ish times to get to that level. But… that didn’t really help, too many assumptions would be required to get a useful estimate of relative power out of that.

Did the number of encounters required to level up increase as people leveled? What even was an encounter? Were there other sources of experience?

Too many open questions. Backing up, let’s think attributes. At 5 attributes a level, assuming that 10 was the base line and 20 was twice the baseline—an assumption I was mostly comfortable making—it would take 12 levels to get the 60 attribute points required to totally double my capabilities. Using 12 levels as a measuring stick, level 0 being 1 standard human capability, level 12 would be 2 human capability, and that would make level 18 a 2.5 human capability challenge. Which level 17 was just under.

Yea that was quite the distance. Double and half again a normal human? No way could I do that right now.

Ok, so, water, food, shelter or warmth, and hiding or running away.

With 4 skill points to do it in! One for each!

Easy.

At least an hour later I gave up on the idea that it was easy. The skills were sprawling, and so many of them were tantalizingly promising, but also so far away from useful.

And some were just straight up not useful:

I could already see that that was a non-starter. To begin with, it didn’t start fires (heh). And while I could inspect “SR” to know it meant “Skill Rank”, which implied it got better as it’s rank improved (something I had gleaned from other skills), the implication that only 10% of Insight (or worse if it rounded up?) added to it seemed pretty… well not great. Especially at 5 Aether, of which people only got 30 a day by default? That was a total of 12 damage, not even enough to bring me back to (what I assumed was) a baseline human’s health.

I was definitely missing something here.

More tantalizing was something that might allow me access to shelter:

I might have the health to use something like that to build a structure, though again 5 health seemed steep, especially for like 5 minutes of building time. How long did it take to build this stuff, and what would even be available? At least this ability implied that skill ranks would reduce the cost of health.

Also, it said it provided knowledge and ability. Was the ability the bit it listed at then end? And if so, would it then grant me actual knowledge of how to do it the hard way?

The list of tags also bugged me because while I could inspect them, the impressions they gave were vague at best (and I couldn’t inspect individual parts of descriptions, just the whole thing for a vague impression of what I was already reading). They were also mostly as expected.

Channel and Crafting were self evident, it was a channeling power that crafted something. Tools implied I would have to have the necessary tools. Materials implied I would have to have the materials. Land implied I would have to have a piece of appropriate land on which to place it. Stable was the weird one, it seemed to imply effort, then time, and then effort again in a repeating loop. I took this to mean that it was resumable. That I could spend 10 health on it, wait for it to regenerate, and then repeat the cycle 10 health at a time, and it would still make progress, but I couldn’t be sure. Convenient if my impression was correct.

It was certainly the most promising under the heading of shelter. Tools were an issue of course, which brought me to the helpfully named Survival skill group:

I mean, I’ve played Minecraft, I know what one is supposed to do. Punch a tree and make shelter before the monsters come back. The reason you punched the tree was to make the tools to make a better shelter (and I didn’t think covering myself in dirt was going to be as effective). Probably with less tree punching thanks to what this skill implied. And hopefully with a bit of flexibility on the definition of tool: spears are tools, right? I wouldn’t say no to a weapon of some kind.

Ah, fuck it. I’m taking it. It seems like it would answer a lot of questions. It seems designed for this exact situation. I’m just suffering from analysis paralysis on everything, but this one seems perfect for dipping my toe in the water. I selected it with a push of my mind, that clanged in successful response.

I didn’t feel different.

I checked my new skill, from my status:

Ok, so it was rank 0 of 10. With 1000 experience required to get to the next rank, which I was really hoping wasn’t a quadratic expansion. And some adaptation percentage again that I was ignoring for now. But how did I use it?

‘Maybe like everything else, dummy’, I thought to myself before simply pushing in my mind at the idea of activating [Improvised Tools]. In response I got resistance. Not the gentle resistance I had gotten of a mental button a few times before—where I could feel it depressing slightly before it actually “thunked” into place successfully. This was the resistance of a stuck mental button that would not budge at all. I tried a few more times before trying to inspect the stuck button.

I felt pretty frustrated and stupid when I got a feeling back. It gave me a vague feeling, almost exactly like inspecting a tag. A vague feeling that the button wasn’t a button, that I had to choose an option as I pushed it. Well, that made enough sense, I would have to choose the tool I wanted it to make.

But how would I know what improvised tools I could make?

And there I felt stupid again. Simply thinking the question, one tangentially related to the question of what improvised tools I could make, had given me the answer. Duh.

The skill seemed confused, or maybe I just was, but it seemed to be that I could maybe make a fire starter (grab some specific rocks or grab some small sticks and a specific kind of wood), and maybe make a crude hand axe (stick a stone in some wood). Also lit fire pits counted as a ’tool’ I could make, though it required a fire starter. Unfortunately no weapons were in the list of tools, and most of them wouldn’t be possible in this environment. These descriptions came with vague impressions of what I was looking for, what kind of places to find it (pine needles are under pine trees, thanks skill), and how to distinguish quality choices from sub par ones.

Not bad, I might have been able to figure these out. But knowing how to choose the right kind of rock or stick would certainly save me time. Checking my energy and skill description I saw I still had full energy, and no experience. But my adaptation for the skill had gone up to 4%.

So adaptation is how good I am at using the skill? Or maybe how used to using it? A measure of how naturally I could make use of the knowledge it gave me? (and what about the ability?)

How does it apply to attributes? In the same way?

Checking my attributes again the basic idea of how well or how used to using it I was seemed to track. I had never been good about thinking on my feet, so my adaption to Legerity and Acuity was lower. I was more of an observe, plan obsessively, and then work the plan until it works or fails sort of girl, so my higher adaption to Insight and Reception fit there. I did work out a lot and eat healthy enough, that was a straightforward work the plan solution to me, I felt like I was probably pretty close to peak physical fitness, even if I could probably be stronger if I did more weight based workouts. An originally near perfect Physique and high Vigor adaption fit well there too.

Another mystery down. Or well, half… down, solved, whatever. I knew what Adaption represented now, and how to improve it then seemed mostly self evident. What it did was still an open question. Perhaps just the obvious of making it easier to use? Some hidden improvements? Something else?

I also felt like I had a pretty good handle on the “knowledge and ability” language now. I definitely gained knowledge, and there was also now an ability not-a-button in my mind that I could push. Pushing it now with the hand-axe in mind gave a different vague problem that I wasn’t capable or prepared to move around enough to activate the skill, probably because I wasn’t on the ground. But I was sure that I had gained two separate things here.

Which game me enough confidence in taking the next skill that I had been considering, so I took it:

Hah, take that, I already knew some things about plants. Vanishingly little—I spent an hour in my mom’s garden once a week for a few years in my teens—but it seemed to count for a whole 9% adaptation.

Anyway, that was hopefully food and warmth solved. I was actually starting to get chilly in my jacket—it had been the start of winter, so I had thankfully put one on before leaving for lunch—so I was glad this would be the last night I would be in the cold.

I didn’t really know what other skills to pick.

There was a [Survival] skill for finding natural features like water sources, but I wanted to actually look around before buying it. I might actually just be able to find water by tripping over it.

And there were some running away and hiding options, though none seemed very useful. I definitely still felt like I was missing something there. In the worst case I could quickly buy one and try to use it, which was a benefit of keeping skills open. But I was planning to avoid that problem.

Time to resolve the final warning about jobs, ‘jobs’ not ‘classes’. A weird nomenclature difference between some games. I wasn’t sure if I could remember the difference. Jobs tended to mutate into more specialized or specific variants of themselves right? Where as classes were usually more of an inviolable thing. A paladin class was always a paladin, but a swordsman job might become a crusader, and then a paladin, and then something else. I think classes and jobs both allowed mixing and matching, though jobs tended to be more flexible about it?

Well lets see what was on offer.

The first impression I got when going to the list was that at the moment I could change my job freely without worry. Good to know. And since there were only three of them, and they all followed the same pattern, that made it an easy choice.

The other two options were [Warrior] and [Leader], which followed the same basic pattern but with “Combat skills” capped by “damaging enemies” and “Support skills” capped by “defeating encounters” (respectively). The 10% level experience (and in my mind it was crystal clear that it was a set experience to 10% and not a bonus like the others that added a percentage) from combat experience and leadership experience was present on them too, but swapping crafting experience for combat experience on [Warrior] and for leadership experience on [Leader]. They were all exact mirrors of each other.

I didn’t feel like I would win any fights at level 1, besides I wasn’t really sure I wanted to fight. And there was no one around to lead, I didn’t even speak the language! However most of the skills I considered getting were crafting oriented and labor skills. With this job choice [Plant Identification] already displayed 2-22 Aether instead, a small benefit, but given the other options were no benefit, I would take it.

Maybe the job system was what I was missing. The skill scaling bonus was small now, but if this job evolved and improved that bonus… well maybe [Heatbolt] would do three whole damage. Actually that was worth checking, I quickly changed my job to Warrior to see the number. Well tried to, apparently I could freely change it, just only once every 24 hours, and I had already done it in the last 24 hours. Fair enough I guess.

Most interesting was how this changed the level math from earlier. I strongly suspected that if I had been a [Worker] when the notifications happened I would have only gotten 109 experience applied to my level. That meant for a [Warrior] (or a [Worker]) it was no longer 15 encounters it was now more like 150 to level off of encounter experience, 1,800 divided into 225,000 painted a much bleaker picture. Of course, in theory, Warriors would be getting a big bonus to combat experience. It made a certain amount of sense, trade in 180% experience for things you were bad at for an extra 200% experience in the areas you were good at.

But until I defeated a monster in combat, I didn’t really have anything else to go off of level math wise.

Level 1 (Soft Cap 6) Experience: 90 / 4000 Job: Worker

Attention: ⚠️ 2 Skill Points

Now to take these skills out for a test drive.