System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Spells

Fourteen spells, six slots to cast from, and no mana bar anywhere — spells are paid for in cooldown instead

Levelling the Magic skill unlocks spells at fixed milestones — fourteen of them in total, from Spark at Magic level 1 up to The Unmaking at level 95. Every level in between still matters even when it doesn't unlock anything new: a spell's damage and cooldown both improve continuously as Magic rises, so levelling is felt on every single cast, not just at the handful of levels that hand you something new to cast.

The fourteen spells

Every spell's damage runs through the same live Magic damage multiplier the rest of the skill uses, and every cast is tagged as magic damage, so casting itself is what trains the skill that unlocks casting.

Six slots, fourteen spells to choose from

Only six spells can actually be bound to keys at once — by default Y, X, C, V, F, R — so once you've unlocked more than six, which spells you actually carry becomes a real loadout choice, freely rebindable at any time. Three of the six default keys (V, F, R) only ever fire a spell while you're not already using that key for something else — build mode, sparring, vehicle controls — so sharing them costs nothing outside those specific moments. The other three (Y, X, C) only start overriding their normal panel shortcuts once you've actually unlocked a spell to put there; until then, those keys keep doing exactly what they always did.

No mana bar, on purpose

There's no mana pool anywhere in this game — spells are paid for entirely in cooldown instead. Deliberately: a mana pool would have meant a new HUD element, a regeneration rate, and a new save field, none of which the spell system actually needed to work. Instead, cooldowns simply shorten as your Magic skill rises, so every point invested in the skill is felt directly in how often you can cast, rather than being locked behind a separate resource.

Version history

• Spellcasting introduced, directly on request: "allow the player to cast spells using the magic skill... add a spell unlock for every level if possible." Ninety-nine individual spells would only ever have been a handful of behaviours wearing many different names, so the design settled on fourteen genuinely distinct spells at real milestones, with every other level between them still raising power and cutting cooldown — a level that changes what you can feel, even on the levels that don't hand you something new to cast.

Trivia

• Mend and Siphon are the only two spells that heal you at all, and they do it in opposite ways — Mend spends its whole cast on a flat percentage heal with no target, while Siphon only heals you as a side effect of actually damaging something.
• All six of the default spell keys were already bound to something else in the game before spellcasting existed — the specific ordering chosen (build/spar/vehicle keys get the earliest slots, dedicated panel keys the latest) was picked specifically to avoid ever taking away a key's original job from a character who hasn't unlocked a spell for it yet.
• That design intent had a real gap for a while: holding a Charter Stake or Guard Post and pressing [F] quietly cast whatever spell was loaded instead of planting either one, since the game's own key-conflict guard didn't originally know about those two tools at all.
• An empty slot auto-fills with whichever spell you unlocked earliest, not your strongest or most recent — so a character who never opens the spell menu keeps casting Spark, Frost Nail, Ember Lash, Chain Arc, Mend and Tidewash (unlocked at Magic 1, 4, 8, 13, 18 and 24) forever, even after unlocking all fourteen spells at very high Magic levels, with much harder-hitting later spells like The Unmaking (base 260 damage, unlocked at Magic 95) sitting unused the whole time. That's confirmed as the current, deliberately unchanged behaviour rather than a bug — whether auto-fill should instead favour your newest unlocks is an open question the game's own design notes leave to the operator. Manually swapping a slot at any time sidesteps it completely.