A while ago we wrote about how skills and masteries were meant to work. They are in the game now, and they work the way we promised: your hero gets better at the things they actually do.
Open your character sheet and there is a Masteries tab. What you find there depends entirely on how you have played.
Weapons: Learned by Fighting
You start with the weapon you chose when you made your hero. Its mastery does not exist yet. It begins the first time you strike a blow with it in a real fight — not before, and not because you picked it from a list.
The same goes for every other weapon. Pick up an axe you have never swung and you will not find an Axe mastery waiting for you. Fight with it once and you will. Your sheet is a record of what your hero has done, not a menu of what they might do.
Magic: Learned Where It Can Be Taught
Magic is rarer, and it does not start in your hands.
The first step is Mana Manipulation: feeling the thin current that runs under everything and learning to take hold of it. Somewhere in Ashfall there is a place that can teach it. We are not going to tell you where. Examine the right thing and you will know.
After that come the four elements — Fire, Water, Earth and Air — each taught somewhere of its own, somewhere that fits it. None of them can be learned before Mana Manipulation. If you find one of those places too early, you will feel that something is there and that it is just out of reach. That is your cue to come back.
Practice, and the Medals
Once you can manipulate mana, Practice opens on the same tab. Each training session improves a mastery you have learned. Training an element costs mana; training Mana Manipulation itself, or a weapon, costs stamina. Practice does not cost actions — your hero's reserve is for the world, not for drills — but mana and stamina only come back with time and rest, so a long session still has to be earned.
Every mastery wears a medal that changes as it grows: bronze when you first learn it, then silver, gold, and finally mithril for the few who keep at it long enough. The medal is the quickest way to read your own sheet: you can see at a glance what your hero has spent their life on.
What Comes Next
On the Practice screen there is a Combine panel that does not work yet. That is deliberate. The next step is putting masteries together: a weapon and an element into a skill you can use in a fight, two elements into a spell. Everything you practise now carries over.