The codex is a per-creature progression track. Kill creatures of a given type and you fill a bar; fill the bar and you are paid in skills. Then the next rank of that creature's codex opens, with a higher requirement and a larger reward.

It is one of the more player-friendly systems in the game, because it converts routine hunting into guaranteed, visible progress that does not depend on loot luck.

How it works

Each creature type has its own codex entry with a series of ranks. Progress toward a rank comes from killing that creature, and larger maturities of the same creature contribute more toward the bar than smaller ones.

Completing a rank pays out skill points, and the payout grows as the ranks go up.

Why it changes how people hunt

Before the codex, choosing what to hunt was mostly about loot and cost. The codex adds a second reason to stay on one creature: your progress on it is banked, and switching creatures means starting a new track from the bottom.

In practice this means:

  • Hunters specialise. Picking a creature you can hunt efficiently and staying on it is the normal pattern, rather than roaming.
  • The reward is predictable. Loot is variable, but codex progress is not. A session that returned badly still moved the codex, and that is real value.
  • It rewards volume, not size. Killing a lot of a modest creature can progress a codex faster than killing a few very large ones, depending on how the maturities weight.

Picking a creature to work through

The considerations are the same ones that govern hunting generally, plus one:

  • Can you kill it efficiently with the gear you have? See Choosing a weapon.
  • Does its loot carry markup you can actually sell? See TT value and markup.
  • Is it available somewhere you like being, at a spawn density that keeps you shooting rather than walking?
  • And now: is the codex reward for it worth the number of kills it will take?

Where to look up a creature

Entropia Central's creatures wiki covers health, maturities and hunting data per creature, which is what you need to estimate cost per kill before committing to a long codex track.

You can also see what other players are actually killing and what it returns: the globals feed records loot events as they happen, and each creature's page aggregates the activity recorded against it.