During your time in Elysium, you will probably learn a lot of different skills. Although you can only learn six 'core skills' (More on that shortly), you can switch these around later on, forgetting skills you no longer require to make space for new ones, and there are other skills which you can learn regardless of how many core skills you learn. You can also learn one 'higher skill' which we'll touch on further down in this section.

Types of Skill

When most players of Elysium think about skills, they'll probably be thinking primarily about core skills; Each player can learn up to six of these, and they tend to be powerful or highly useful, effectively allowing you to shape your character through your choice of which core skills you learn.

In addition to your six core skills, you can also learn common skills; There are no limitations on how many common skills you can learn, although a handful of them won't work without an associated core skill. However the majority of common skills are usable by everyone; Common skills tend to cover more mundane abilities that may be useful but won't make your character a powerhouse - Things like sewing or cookery, or perhaps silversmithing.

The finaly type of skill is higher skills; Each character can only learn one of these, from a selection of six, and the options each character has will be influenced by their core skill set - For example if you want to learn the death magic higher skill, you'd need a number of dark themed magical skills in your core skill set. Higher skills tend to made up of broader abilities which can have an effect on your other abilities, though sometimes they also contain more unique abilities which you can't learn elsewhere.

Learning Skills and Abilities

You can learn new skill groups, and abilities from skills you already know, in a variety of ways; The most common are from a guild, from another player, or from an NPC teacher. All of these options have one thing in common, they require you to spend lessons. Learning from a guild is the cheapest option in terms of lesson costs, with a 50 percent increase in cost when learning from a player or NPC teacher outside a guild.

The number of abilities in core skills is usually 15, plus one special ability called an '85' by most player, although some skills may have more or less abilities. Common skills can have any number of abilities, with some only having half a dozen, and others having many more. High skills have five abilities each. For most skills, you need to learn in order of lesson costs; If you have only learned two lessons worth of abilities in a skill, you can only learn abilities costing two lessons each. However once you learn one two lesson ability on top of your original two, you can then choose to learn another two lesson ability, or skip ahead to a three or four lesson ability. Though you'll probably end up learning all the abilities in your favourite skills, you can skip some of them and still progress to the more powerful and expensive ones. In terms of higher skills, you have to learn them in the order they are presented however. The '85' abilities mentioned earlier are slightly different, in that you can only learn these once you have learned the 54 lesson ability in the skill group, and you can only learn three '85' abilities total, so need to choose which of your core skills you will fully learn.

54 and 85 lessons might sound a lot to you at the beginning of your adventure in Elysium, but you will soon find your lessons accumulating quickly; You'll gain lessons just by playing and spending time in Elysium, but you can also boost your lesson gain rate by completing 'challenges', simple small tasks where you're given an objective like hunting an NPC or visiting a specific location. The challenge system also takes into account how active you are, encouraging you to do a variety of different things to maximise your lesson gain.

Improving Abilities

Spending lessons is not the only way to get more powerful; Once you've unlocked an ability, you may find that you can improve it through mastery as well. Not all abilities have mastery - Check the 'skills' command to see, if there is a percentage listed after the ability it has mastery, if not it does not - But if an ability does have mastery, you can improve its power by using it - Every time you use the ability, there's a chance of gaining a mastery point, with mastery affecting different abilities in different ways - For example a weapon attack might do higher damage with more mastery, while a magic spell to levitate you might last longer before it needs recasting. Your chances of increasing mastery are better if you mix things up and use other masterable abilities inbetween, rather than just using the same ability over and over.