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Masteries
August 17, 2026 at 04:00 PM
Embedded the Mastery tree capture showing the Physiology branch, its tier gating and the Desperation talent
Masteries are how a Living turns levels into a build. Every character advances from level 1 to 100, and the points earned along the way are spent inside deep Mastery trees holding over a hundred talents between them. Abilities are not locked to a character in a rigid way: the Mastery system is what lets two players running the same Living end up playing very differently.
The Mastery screen is one of the tabs on a character's own menu, sitting beside Inventory, Abilities, Experience and the rest of the character screen. Each tree is drawn as a lattice of talent nodes connected by lines, arranged into numbered tiers.
Element | How It Works |
|---|---|
Tiers | Talents are grouped into numbered tiers, shown as I, II and III on the trees revealed so far. Lower tiers sit at the top of the tree and unlock first |
Tier gating | A tier stays sealed until enough points have gone into the tree above it. The interface states the requirement plainly, for example that three additional points must be spent to unlock the next tier |
Talent ranks | Talents take multiple ranks rather than being a single on or off purchase. The nodes shown so far cap at five ranks, displayed as a current-over-maximum figure on the node itself |
Mastery Points | The currency spent on the tree. A running total sits beside the tree, and an upgrade costs one point per rank |
Rank preview | Selecting a talent shows both its current value and what the next rank will give, so the cost of the next point is visible before it is spent |
Because ranks are incremental and tiers gate on total investment, spreading points thinly across a tree delays access to its deeper talents. Committing to a branch is what opens the lower tiers.
The studio has named four trees so far. Other branch names circulate in community lists, but only the following have been confirmed by the developers or shown in the game itself.
Tree | Focus | What Is Known |
|---|---|---|
Martial | Ranged combat | Originally the combined combat tree. It now covers ranged fighting only, after the melee half was split out into its own path |
Arms | Melee combat | Created by splitting the former Martial tree in two, so melee progression develops on its own terms rather than competing with ranged talents for the same nodes |
Survival | Traps and field craft | Holds the talents that make Traps easier to detect and disarm, including the Turncoat Mechanism, which lets a survivor take ownership of a trap placed by someone else |
Physiology | The body under strain | A tier I through III tree covering physical resilience. Its Desperation talent increases how fast a downed player crawls, rising from ten percent at the first rank to twenty percent at the next |
Beyond the named trees, the developers have described masteries built for scavengers and explorers that permanently improve how quickly a character identifies the contents of a container, which ties the system directly into Looting. Talents that specialise a character into early flintlock and ramrod firearms are also part of the tree, and they are what keep starter weapons viable deep into a character's life.
Masteries are the main lever for playstyle. Stealth builds can push toward quieter movement and lockpicking, ranged specialists toward reload speed and weapon handling, and support-minded players toward armour repair and healing teammates. Because a build is an investment rather than a preset, players who want to try a radically different approach are expected to use an additional character slot rather than reset an existing Living.
The voluntary Prestige mechanic is the exception. Prestiging returns a character to level 1 and clears their Mastery trees outright, trading a finished build for exclusive legendary cosmetics that cannot be obtained any other way.
The Mastery system has been rebuilt more than once during development. The third technical test shipped revamped trees with new masteries in them, and afterward the studio began a comprehensive balance pass across the entire system alongside every character ability. The stated problem was that some abilities had come to define a playstyle while others, designed much earlier, had fallen behind as the rest of the game moved on.
Two structural changes have come out of that work. The Martial tree was split into Martial and Arms so that ranged and melee builds stop competing for the same progression, and a number of early melee bottlenecks were removed because the first hours of melee combat felt unnecessarily restrictive. The studio has also said it wants to narrow the power gap between a new character and a developed one, so that early-game players feel capable before the key masteries arrive, without flattening the sense of progression.
A note on judging talents: the developers have asked players not to evaluate every mastery purely through the lens of Expeditions, because dedicated player-versus-player battlegrounds, player-versus-environment Trials and large-scale boss encounters are planned to arrive during the first year of Early Access, and some talents are built with those activities in mind.
