Entropia Universe has no character level and no experience bar. Instead your avatar holds a long list of individual skills, each with its own value, and each rising as you do the activity it belongs to.
This is the single most important structural difference from other MMOs, and it drives almost everything else about progression.
Skills rise through use
You gain a skill by doing the thing it measures. Firing a rifle raises rifle skill. Taking damage raises the skills that relate to surviving damage. Healing someone raises healing skills. Mining raises prospecting and extraction skills.
There is no way to train a skill without doing the activity, and there is no way to buy skill directly from the game. The only shortcut is buying skill from another player, which is covered in Skill chips and transfers.
Three consequences follow:
- Skill gain is a byproduct of spending. Because activities cost money, skills cost money. A skill point is not free time, it is a purchase you made while doing something else.
- Skills never go down. Nothing decays your skills and nothing resets them. Progress is permanent, which is why long-term players are genuinely far ahead.
- Diminishing returns set in. Early skill gain is fast and cheap. The same activity later moves the number by a much smaller amount. Getting from nothing to competent is quick; getting from competent to top tier is the work of years.
Skills are individually meaningless
Very few skills do anything on their own. What matters is that groups of them feed into a profession, and the profession is what actually changes your effectiveness.
For example, hitting things with a rifle draws on several related skills at once, and those skills combine into a rifle-related profession standing. Raise any of them and the profession moves; the profession is what determines how well you use a rifle.
This is why "what skills should I train" is usually the wrong question. The right question is which profession you want to raise, and then which activity raises the skills feeding it. Professions and profession levels covers that mapping.
Skill gain follows what you use
The game gives skill for the equipment and activity you actually used, so what you gain is decided by how you play rather than by a choice you make in a menu:
- A weapon that fires quickly for small damage and a weapon that fires slowly for large damage will not gain skill at the same rate for the same money spent.
- Doing the activity yourself gains the skill. Being carried through content by someone else does not.
- Support roles gain their own skills. A dedicated healer in a hunting team is progressing a real profession, not sitting out.
What skills are worth
Skills have a real market value, because they can be extracted and sold. That gives an odd but useful framing: as you play, part of what you spend converts into an asset you could in principle sell later.
Do not overread this. The transfer is lossy, the market for most skills is thin, and treating skill gain as an investment return is how people talk themselves into unprofitable activity. It is better understood as a partial rebate on the cost of playing than as a reason to play.
Where to look them up
Your avatar's skills are visible in the client. For what a given skill feeds into and where it sits in the wider system, the skills section of the wiki lists them with their descriptions, and the professions section shows what they combine into.
The practical advice
For a new player, the useful version of all this is short:
- Pick an activity you enjoy, because you are going to do a lot of it.
- Use equipment appropriate to your current standing rather than the most expensive thing you can afford.
- Do not chase skills for their own sake. Do the activity efficiently and the skills follow.
- Expect the first months to feel fast and everything after that to feel slow. That is the design, not a mistake you made.