Your Five Stats

Five numbers describe your soul. You begin with 5 in each, 9 points to spend at creation, and 3 more every level.

What each one actually does

Speed makes you move faster and gather faster. Every point shaves half a percent off the time a gather takes, down to a hard floor of half a second.

Resistance is health and armor at once. Every point is +2 max health, so you start at 110. It also reduces every hit you take, on a curve: at 100 resistance you take half damage.

Power is damage. It scales with half your power, so ten points of power is five more damage on every swing before multipliers. Power used to be a key as well, the gate on gathering bone; bone is no longer gathered from nodes at all, so today Power is damage and nothing else. The way to bone is the way to everything else in the wild: kill for it.

Wits is quality and crits. It tilts the rarity roll on everything the workshop makes, and it raises your critical hit chance from a 5% base by 0.4% a point, up to a 35% ceiling.

Stamina is the pool everything spends from. The base is 50 and every point is +2, so your starting 5 puts a fresh soul at 60. It comes back a little faster with each point too.

The soft cap is 140, and nobody can reach it

Points are not worth the same forever, on paper. Up to 140 in a stat, every point pays full value. From 140 to 210 they pay half, and past 210 a quarter. The cap is four times the level ceiling, so it moved from 100 to 140 when the cap went to 35.

Here is the honest arithmetic: 34 levels of 3 points plus your starting 9 is 111 spendable points. Even a pure specialist pouring every one into a single stat lands at 116 with the base 5, well under 140. So today every point you spend pays full value, always, and the taper is a rule waiting for a taller world.

Gear sits outside the cap either way. A charm's bonus lands on top of whatever your points add up to, in full.

What to spend on

There is no wrong answer, but there are two moments worth planning for:

• Power is how fast the wild pays. Bone, hide, scrap and the relics all come off kills now, so damage is the throughput of the whole earning loop, not just a combat stat.
• Resistance is what stops the wild killing you, and dying is the most expensive thing that can happen to you. If you are unsure, this is the safe point.

There is no respec, except one

You cannot un-spend a point. There is no trainer, no reset item, and no gloo price for changing your mind.

Except that every time you die, every point you have spent is knocked loose and handed back. You wake at one of the three safe hubs with a full pool of unspent points and you spec from scratch.

So the world's only respec is a death, and it costs you your entire bag. It is not a plan. But it does mean a bad build is never permanent, and that is worth knowing before you agonise over your first 9 points.