Skills & XP

Every skill in Taro Bay has its own level, from 1 to 99, and its own pile of experience points (XP). You earn XP by doing the thing: each swing of the axe, each dive, each harvest banks a fixed amount toward that skill. Higher levels unlock deeper zones, better recipes and new crops.

There are eighteen skills in three families — six gathering, six processing and six combat. See the full list on the Skills page.

Reading a skill's action list

Open a skill and its actions aren't one long roll — they're sorted by what you can actually do about them:

• Ready sits on top: everything you can start this second.
• Prepare first comes next: your level is high enough, but something else is missing — the materials a recipe eats, a plot that's still ripening, or the tool the task wants (the row then reads Tool needed). These stay in plain sight, because they're the jobs a quick trip to the market or the forge turns into ready ones.
• Locked closes the list: the actions your level hasn't reached yet. They're folded away behind a Show … more line, but your next unlock stays visible above it, so you always see what the coming levels are worth.

Inside each part, actions climb from the lowest level requirement upward, with the quicker one first when two ask for the same level. Long lists get a second layer of order and are split by what the action makes — Materials, then Weapons, Armour, Gear and Tools, the same shelving the wiki uses, with armour grouped by set.

In short: at the top is what you can do now, below it what you're still missing something for, and at the bottom what you can't do yet — sorted within by the kind of thing you make and the level it takes.

A skill opens where you left it. Whatever you are working on right now claims the workbench. Otherwise the skill opens on the action you last worked here — its head then reads Last used · 12m ago — and only when there is no such run, or you can no longer start it (a tool you sold, a field with nothing growing), does it fall back to the first Ready action. This picks which action is open, never where a row sits: the list keeps the order described above, so what you learned yesterday is in the same place today.

On a phone the workbench comes first. The panel you actually work from — the chosen action with its amount picker and the Start button — sits at the top of the page, and the action list follows underneath it, so you can start something without scrolling past a single row. Where an action lets you pick an ingredient, those tiles become a strip you swipe sideways, with the ones you already own leading. On a wide screen the two panes keep their places — list on the left, workbench on the right — but the list now scrolls inside its own pane instead of stretching the page, and the Ready / Prepare first / Locked heading you are currently under stays pinned at its top while you scroll. The workbench and its Start button therefore stay in view no matter how long the list is.

How XP becomes levels

Each action lists the XP it grants per repetition (you can see it on any Skill or item page). Those points add up; when your total crosses the threshold for the next level, you level up. Levels never go down.

XP also keeps its own tally forever, even after level 99 — which is why the leaderboard ranks by lifetime XP rather than by level, and why two divers on the same level are never quite tied.

The thresholds follow a smooth geometric curve. The total XP needed to reach level n is:

XP(n) = 100 × (1.1^(n − 1) − 1) / 0.1

In words: every level costs about 10% more than the one before it. Level 2 needs 100 XP, level 3 needs 210 XP total, and by the time you're chasing level 99 the numbers are in the millions. That gentle 1.1× step is what turns the last levels into a long-term goal rather than an afternoon's work.

Level table

Total XP is the cumulative amount to reach a level; the last column is the extra XP that single level costs over the one before it.

Level	Total XP	XP for this level
1	0	—
2	100	100
3	210	110
4	331	121
5	464	133
6	611	147
7	772	161
8	949	177
9	1,144	195
10	1,358	214
15	2,797	345
20	5,116	556
25	8,850	896
30	14,863	1,442
35	24,548	2,323
40	40,145	3,741
45	65,264	6,024
50	105,719	9,702
60	275,801	25,163
70	716,952	65,269
80	1,861,182	169,289
85	2,998,063	272,642
90	4,829,021	439,093
99	11,387,936	1,035,358

Gathering vs. processing

Gathering skills (Diving, Fishing, Aquaculture, Farming, Woodcutting, Mining) draw resources out of the world and usually need no input — you can run them endlessly. Processing skills (Smithing, Weaving, Carpentry, Cooking, Brewing, Artisan) consume materials to make finished goods, so a processing action stops the moment you run out of inputs.

Two skills — Farming and Aquaculture — are special: their crops ripen in real time, off the queue. You earn most of their XP by harvesting the plots you plant (planting itself gives none), but you can also level them actively with field work — actions like Weed the Rows or Mend the Nets that both ripen your growing plots faster and pay their own XP while they run.

Material ladders

As you climb, new materials open up in steps that line up across the whole game. The big jumps land at roughly the same milestones in every profession — level 25, 40, 60 and 85 — so reaching one of those levels usually unlocks a fresh rung of raw goods to gather and a matching recipe to refine them.

Those same four milestones are also where each craft asks for its next tool tier: from level 25 on, an action needs the matching tier of its profession's tool, so a task your level cleared long ago can still be out of reach until you forge or buy it. Such an action never vanishes from the list: it waits under Prepare first, marked Tool needed, and steps up to Ready the moment the tool is in your hands. See the tool section of Equipment & Slots.

Three material ladders run in parallel, each pairing a gathering skill with the processing skill that works its output:

• Metal — Mining digs the ores that Smithing smelts into bars: copper down low, then bronze and iron through the middle, steel higher up, and tamahagane at the summit.
• Fibre — Farming grows the plants that Weaving spins into yarn: asa and cotton early on, then silk and, right at the top, the premium Nishijin brocade.
• Wood — Woodcutting fells the timber that Carpentry saws into planks, from bamboo slats up through hinoki to the rare Jindai boards.

Two gathering skills also turn up extra finds beside their main harvest. Woodcutting collects Kampō herbs — from humble yomogi low in the woods to the prized mannentake mushroom deep among the old trees — which Brewing steeps into remedies for the hunt: decoctions, salves, blade oils and incense (see Provisions). And Mining chips out whetstones, the sharpening stones a blade-worker keeps at hand. (These are steady second harvests. Fishing has luck of a different kind — rare treasures and lucky materials rather than a reliable extra line; see Fishing & Rare Finds.)

The upshot: whichever craft you favour, its inputs and its recipes climb together, so levelling the gathering side and the processing side hand in hand keeps you self-sufficient.

Combat skills

The six combat skills are trained a different way again — by hunting, not by a skill-specific action. The weapon you have equipped decides which style skill earns the XP (Blades, Archery or Onmyōdō), while three passive stats — Vitality, Defense and Spirit — grow alongside it. Combat XP is banked per victory rather than per fixed swing, so winning matters. The full mechanic — damage types, the numbers behind your health and hits, and how to pick a hunt — has its own guide: Combat & Hunting.

Levelling faster

Level up quickly by chaining the highest-XP action you can reach and keeping the queue full so no time is wasted. A speed buff — from a mackerel or reef-fish dish, or a cup of green tea — and better equipment both shorten your action time, which means more repetitions (and more XP) per hour. See Provisions: Food, Drink & Kampō.