How They Level

Sims level by killing things, and only by killing things. Experience is paid per corpse, priced off the monster that died, on exactly the table you are paid from. An outgrown camp pays badly because the arithmetic says so, not because a penalty was applied to it.

How fast

A sim gains roughly five levels a day — but that is an average, not a schedule. Because every level is earned a corpse at a time, how fast one actually climbs depends on what it can find and who it is with: a good camp, a party with a healer keeping it on its feet, or a run of player kills all pay better than grinding alone through something it has outgrown. Two sims of the same level on the same day can be a level or two apart by the next.

Hours matter as much as luck. A sim only earns while it is logged in, so the ones keeping longer hours genuinely pull ahead of their shift.

What a level buys them

The same things it buys you.

Trained skills

A sim spends the same train budget a character of its level, race and class would have — and it spends it the way that character would: weapon skill first, then its mastery, then the armour class it actually wears, then Block, Parry, Athletics and the rest.

This is not decorative. Those skills feed straight into the combat maths:

• Armour defence is multiplied by the armour skill on every worn piece.
• Weapon damage rises with the weapon skill and its mastery.
• Shield block scales with Block.

A trained level 42 warrior comes out around defence 880 and damage 85–203. A level 45 sim is genuinely harder to kill than a level 30 one, and it is not just a bigger number on a health bar.

Gear it can actually use

A sim only equips a weapon or a piece of armour its class can train for, so you will not meet a cleric swinging an axe it was never taught.

If a sim is wearing medium armour, it trained medium armour. What you read off a corpse is true about the character it came from.

Stronger versions of its powers

Power ranks scale with level, in two places: the rank itself rises with level, and there is a level cap on what a sim may cast — roughly rank 15 at level 25 against rank 40 at level 65.

They do not learn new powers as they climb. A level 60 caster knows the same spells it knew at 30, cast harder. See known issues.

The ceiling

At the top there is a queue. Twelve sims may hold level 65, and four more are permanent elders who appear about four times as often as anyone else — sixteen level-65 sims is the ceiling, ever.

A seventeenth to reach 65 retires instead: the name leaves the world for good, its gear with it, and a freshly named heir starts over at level 20. The lineage is kept.

A guild's ranking member does not reroll. The rest of the roster turns over at the cap, but the highest-level member of a guild holds at 65 instead of retiring — otherwise every guild would lose its best-known face at precisely the moment you had learned who they were, and no sim name would ever become familiar. They still occupy one of the sixteen top slots, so this does not smuggle in extra level-65 sims.

An honest caveat about the top end

The world's monsters effectively run out around level 49. There are roughly 2,800 in their forties, about 320 in their fifties, and sixteen above level 60 in the entire world.

So above about 50 there is very little left to farm, and the last stretch of the ladder is climbed mostly by fighting players and each other. A sim that kills a player is paid for it on the same table — and a player is the hardest thing out there, so it pays well.