How Skills Work
Special Skills
- Carcass Harvesting
- Cooking
- Fire starting
- Ice fishing
- Rifle Firearm
- Archery
- Mending (clothes)
There are 5 levels to each special skill. Each level increases your ability to perform the skill. For instance, leveling up firearms or archery helps steady your aim, while increasing firestarting improves your percentage chance of success.
There are two ways to level up each skill. 1) Perform an action over and over again (the main method) and 2) research books you find in the game. Books are rare and require precious daylight hours to read. But they are very valuable when/if you find them. Most books you find will not be skills books and are only good for burning. Skill books show up in the crafting category of your inventory and have actual titles.
You can see the level of your skills by opening the journal from your quick menu or pressing [J] on the keyboard, then selecting the skills icon on the top.
Other Skills
- Sharpening (hatchets and knives)
- Repairing (other tools)
- Rifle Cleaning
These other skills also improve with use but the levels do not work the same way. And there are no books for them. As of this writing, they level up once each time they're used and top out at 100.