Mastery
Mastery is your skill in one of five branches. Every workbench and most things you work on belong to one branch, and many recipes have a mastery requirement. Your mastery decides whether you can start a job, how fast each swing of your tool moves it along, and, for autopsies and cooking, how well it turns out.
The game shows the branches as coloured icons, not names:
| Branch | Covers | Tools that add to it |
|---|---|---|
 Building |
Chopping most trees, mining, clearing junk, carpentry, masonry, pottery | Axe, pickaxe |
 Farming |
Garden beds, cooking, brewing, stumps and bushes, fishing | Shovel, fishing rod |
 Smithing |
Furnace, anvils, smithy, jewellery, glass | Hammer, small tools |
 Book writing |
Writing desk, paper, printing, the Study Table | Books, talismans |
 Anatomy |
Autopsy and embalming, alchemy, resurrection | Surgical kits, alchemist’s kits |
What adds up to your mastery
Your mastery in a branch is the sum of:
- Your talent value in that branch, raised by the nodes you buy on the talent tree. Every branch starts at 0, and the first node of each branch is “Branch mastery +1”.
- Every tool on your toolbar that belongs to the branch, not only the one in your hand. A rusty axe, shovel, pickaxe or hammer adds 1, bronze 2, iron 4 and steel 6.
- Perks that add mastery, but only for the recipes they list.
- Food. Some dishes raise a branch for 7.5 minutes (one in-game day): Vegetable salad Anatomy +1, +2 or +3 depending on its stars, Bowl of sauerkraut Book writing +1 to +3, Muffin Farming +2, Pumpkin soup Building +2 and Soldier’s stew Smithing +2. In the demo only the Vegetable salad can be had; the other four have no recipe the demo unlocks, and no demo trader sells them.
Talent tree nodes cost talent points, which you get by levelling up a branch through inspirations.
The mastery requirement
What happens below the requirement depends on the kind of job:
- Ordinary recipes: you cannot start the job at all.
- Autopsies and recipes with stars (most cooking): you can start as long as your mastery in that branch is at least 1. Each swing then only has a chance to count as a success: about mastery ÷ requirement. Failed swings still move the job forward, so it finishes, but with fewer successful steps, which means fewer stars or a failed autopsy.
- Garden beds and fishing need at least 1 Farming mastery, whatever the crop or fish.
At or above the requirement every swing succeeds, so an autopsy always removes the organ cleanly and a dish always gets three stars.
Example: removing a skin needs Anatomy 1 for the lowest quality, 3 for the middle one and 6 for the highest. With Anatomy 2, a middle-quality skin succeeds on about two swings in three.
Speed and energy
Above the requirement, higher mastery makes the work faster. Each swing moves the job forward by mastery ÷ requirement steps, rounded down, up to 3. Energy is charged per swing, not per step, so a job done at twice the requirement takes half the swings and half the energy.
Notes
- Keep your tools on the toolbar. Every tool there adds its bonus, even when you are holding something else.
- Anatomy starts at 0, so you cannot remove organs at the start. Picking a corpse’s pockets has no requirement and always works. In the demo, surgical kits cannot be made, so Anatomy comes only from the talent tree and from vegetable salad.
- A shovel on the toolbar lets you plant. Garden beds need at least 1 Farming mastery, and a shovel adds it. A fishing rod adds Farming too, which is why fishing works as soon as you have a rod.
- Not every tree is a Building job. Four kinds of old tree count as Farming, so your axe adds nothing to them. Most trees are Building.
- Workers use their own mastery. Zombies have their own talents and do not use yours.