System mechanic

Skill Tree (Perks)

Opened with Caps Lock · one point per 50 Total Level · no respec

This system exists entirely outside the normal skill-training loop and isn't mentioned anywhere else in the game — no in-game explanation of what it does, how points are earned, or that Caps Lock does anything at all. Every other letter key was already taken by something else by the time this was built; Caps Lock is genuinely the only key left on the whole keyboard.

How it works

Spend points on permanent, passive perks across six branches. Each branch is a real chain — every node past the first requires its parent already bought. There is no respec. Points cannot be refunded once spent — the game's own source states the reasoning directly: "a choice you can undo is not a choice."

The full tree

Fully maxing every branch costs 38 points total — at one point per 50 Total Level, that's Total Level 1,900 to buy the entire tree. Body, War, Arcana and Footwork are three-node chains costing 7 points each; Menagerie and Roguery are shorter two-node chains costing 5 points each — cheaper per branch, and efficient to commit to early if you want value from few points rather than saving toward a distant capstone.

*All three Footwork perks are currently dead weight. They tune the double-tap dash's cooldown and distance, and the dash itself has been switched off at the operator's own request ("remove the dash for now") since it was one of two suspects in a bug report about the player getting flung at high speed off the edge of ramps. The dash isn't deleted — one flag turns it back on and every number these perks write stays exactly where it left off — so Footwork isn't necessarily a bad long-term investment, but spending points on it today buys nothing you can feel.

How it actually applies its effects

Four core stats (max HP, melee, ranged, magic damage) are read from a multiplier table this system maintains internally. Everything else is applied by calling into the specific system each perk touches — the dash system for Footwork, spellcasting for Arcana's Quick Tongue, the summon system for Menagerie, and the crime/law system for Roguery. No perk reaches into another system by guessing at its internals, so a perk whose target system hasn't finished loading simply does nothing that moment rather than erroring — the same mechanism that keeps Footwork's writes safely inert now that the dash itself is switched off.

Version history

• The tree itself — framework, all six branches, and the point-per-50-total-level rule shipped together.
• Several perks actually wired up to the systems they affect: Field Surgeon to healer strength, Quick Tongue to spell cooldowns, and Roguery's two nodes to the crime-decay and jail-sentence numbers on the Crime and Law page.
• The dash switched off, taking Footwork's effect with it. Requested alongside two unrelated bug reports the same session — a glitching mouse cursor and a speed boost off the edge of ramps — as one of two suspects for the ramp bug. Turned off at its single entry point rather than deleted, so every tuning number Footwork writes, the double-tap detector, and the underlying test seam all still exist untouched, ready to come back the moment one constant flips.
• Extra Leash confirmed to have never actually worked, and the summon cap rewritten to ignore it outright. A full search of the build by both name and behaviour found nothing — no skill tree code, no perk, no item — that ever wrote the value the perk was supposed to grant; it had been silently inert since it shipped. Rather than finally wire it up, the summon cap itself was simplified on request to a single flat rule (one summon, plus one for every 250 Total Level, capped at 10) that no perk or item can add to at all — closing the gap by removing the promise rather than quietly fulfilling a years-old typo. Extra Leash still costs a real skill point and still appears in the tree; it just doesn't do anything.
• Fixed the panel lying to brand-new characters. A fresh character opening this panel would see something like "points 0 of 9 earned, 0 spent" — reads as the game owing you nine points and refusing to pay. You'd actually earned zero (the first point needs Total Level 50); the header was printing Total Level into the slot meant for earned points.
• Fixed a deeper bug that had been shortchanging every character above roughly level 50. The function calculating how many points you should have was reading a field named lvl from each skill, but a real save stores the level under _lvl — so the check always failed and silently fell back to a less accurate levelling formula that diverges hard from the real one at high levels. Measured on one affected character: Total Level 1095 by every other readout in the game, but this system only believed it was 208, handing over 4 points on a 38-point tree instead of the 21 actually earned — seventeen points simply missing, worse the higher a character's level. If you played through this stretch on a high-level character, it's worth re-opening Caps Lock — you may have unspent points the game previously refused to acknowledge.

Trivia

• Caps Lock was chosen because it was the only key left on the entire keyboard with nothing else bound — Alt was ruled out because browsers and Windows intercept it before the game sees it.
• The no-respec rule means picking a first branch is a genuine commitment — there's no in-game way to walk back a wrong Body-vs-War choice made early except by living with it.
• Extra Leash is spent on the promise of "+1 summon at once," but currently does nothing at all — the summon cap was deliberately rewritten to ignore every perk and item that used to (or was meant to) add to it. Skip it if you're optimising a build; it still costs a real point for no effect.

See also: Heaven's Fence — a different, non-permanent way of changing how your character levels, tied to a questline rather than a spent point. Also A Day's Work — a separate, unrewarded tracker for actually using all nine of these skills in one sitting, rather than raising any of them.