Skills that grow with practice

After a long season at the river, the line goes taut, the reel sings, and a toast rolls across the screen: Legend of the Deep. Your name wears it now, and the Moonstone Rod's recipe is yours. Every skill in TATAZO has a ladder like that one, five titles tall, and the only way up is to keep doing the thing you love.

How it works: use it, and it grows

You have seven skills, and each one grows by doing it:

• Melee and Distance grow from landing hits, Magic from casting spells, Shielding from blocking.
• Fishing grows with every catch, Gathering with every chop, mine and dig, Farming with every seed planted, watered and harvested.

Each new skill level takes a little more practice than the last. Along the way sit five milestones per skill. Reach one and its title is yours for good, with a toast to say so. The number is the skill level it needs.

Fighting skills give titles only, on purpose. Your Melee, Distance, Magic and Shielding levels already make your hits and blocks stronger (see Levels and power). Their titles never add a second bonus, so trying a second weapon never weakens your first.

Fishing, Gathering and Farming pay you back as you climb:

• Fishing: every tier makes rare and better fish 3% likelier to bite, so the top tier adds five times that. The last tier also teaches you the Moonstone Rod.
• Gathering: every tier adds a 2% chance of a bonus material from each gather, five times that at the top. The last tier also teaches you the moonstone pickaxe.
• Farming: at Harvest Sovereign, every crop you plant grows as if freshly composted, even without compost. Word also reaches you of three rare seeds from far realms: frost turnip, desert melon and moon bloom.

What you can do about it

• Play your class's style. Knights and Monsters train melee, Shooters distance, Ninjas both, and Mages magic. Your class learns its own style fastest (see Levels and power).
• Fish, gather and farm for the long game. Those three skills pay you back directly, so the climb to their top tier is worth chasing even once you've stopped needing the XP.
• Check the SKILLS page. Open the character menu (Tab) and turn to SKILLS. The row of pips under each skill shows every tier, the level it needs and its reward, reached or not.

Where next

Put a skill to work: Farming and cooking and Fishing for the two skills with the clearest long-term payoff, Levels and power for how skills and levels fit together, and Combat and elements for what actually makes your hits land harder.