This is a quick guide to leveling in the game’s current state. As you might know, experience is currently scarce since its main source has not yet been implemented.
What skills are best for leveling
Putting aside what you want to be, in order of importance:
Power (at least 2 points)
Bulk and mass crafting
Power & hammer mastery
Hammer mastery (max)
Dexterity & agility
Also of note are the jump skills.
General stuff useful for leveling
Torches. They make light. In caves, get lots to track where you’ve mined.
Grapples. They make cave navigation possible.
You’re not alone. Trade. Use OTHER PEOPLE’s buying/selling baskets to get stuff to level with.
Build your beacons where people are. Once per settlement per day when somebody walks over one of your beacons you get coin. If you build far away from everyone this won’t happen. It adds up quickly if you have a few easy to walk over beacons. Please don’t be the guy to block roads/cities with this knowledge.
Level 1 - 10
Objectives & feats
It is worthwhile to complete all the objectives you possible can. Buy the resources you require - unlocking the machines to make these yourselves is a complete waste on a low level character. This gives a solid 7 levels of experience. Buy the chisel, buy the portal conduit (and resell it afterwards), buy the spark core, etc. You get enough coin from the objectives to pay for all of these (expect the portal conduit, you’ll need to farm a bit to pay for it).
Complete the easy to do feats. Don’t bother with the rest unless they fit your progression style.
Level 10+
XP from here on up is hard to get and requires significant investment. I outline the two best sources (you can use both of course):
Passively: Crafting stone
You can get bulk + mass crafting around level 13. This is needed to make this actually be passive - before that stick to active. These require no recipes and give the most xp per coin / time spent farming.
Buy rock, craft stone.
Use stone and refine (if you have the skill). This can be sold again - so you get to recover some cash, but it has additional skill requirements.
Use stone and craft slabs, stairs, etc. This requires no skills - but the materials are basically a write-off.
Passive XP gives you
1 xp per rock to stone
1 xp per stone to other
This nets you 1 xp per 1 coin’s resources. At lower levels, this is a major source of experience. You can get entire levels by having this run in the background.
By mining Unskilled
Regardless of your profession mining is currently the best active XP source. At low levels the important thing is to keep on hitting (even if its rock). You get 4 xp per rock and 16 xp per ore - but looking for ore without tools and jumping skills costs a lot of precious time.
A rock takes 4 hits with a copper hammer and no skills (3 hits with 2 power skill - recommended on all builds). You can easily make 2000+ xp per hour by just mining rock with no skills. Converting it nets you another 1000+ xp per hour. All the ore you hit is bonus (and will pay for your tools).
Just to compare, nothing gets close to this in XP. A wildstock is worth 15 xp. It is much easier to find 20 copper than to find 20 wildstock. A tree is 4xp per trunk - but there is no chance for ore in between and they are much less dense. Dirt/sand comes close if you want to alternate a bit.
If you can get diamond hammers they are very good XP wise (assuming for some power and hammer mastery). With maxed hammer mastery, power and swing speed you can get 8k+ xp per hour with a diamond hammer.
Summary
Leveling at the moment does not offer a lot of variety when it comes to optimizing XP. Farming coin to level with rock might be more interesting.
And of course, if anybody has a better approach or feedback for players looking to level - please share
Have been wondering for some time now what is more effective: Power or Mastery.
Does it scale with each other or is it just additive?
It’s also interesting to have 1 point in vitality. Since it bumps up your HP from 600 to around 2000. But its only good against being ripped by Mobs since fall damage and lava damage seems to be percental to your max hp.
I also spend one point in HP reg. It does take a while but it fills your HP back up while crafting or building and you don’t have to waste food items every time you take fall damage while building. cough
Edit: Oh, you might want to add that mining for xp ist most efficient on starter worlds with the recent changes to block hp.
DOH! just saw this after I posted a question about leveling! I am sure I will receive the snarky comments about not looking at this first LOL Thanks for this info, @OmniUno!
Mostly everything in the guide is still accurate at the time of this post. Some activities have been made rewarding, still none get close to XP of just mining and refining rock.
With patch 182 vitality still offers very little incentive. Are you referring to patch 183?
in 182 having a few thousand hp for little skill points is something to do if you are to explore, or even build on harder planets; makes sense to be able to survive a few blasts rather than die with one cuttle/spitter shot
in 183 looks like things might be different but I won’t dare to predict how its gonna work
what means its more expensive to get the same result
either way I see vitality as the first thing to get - when you have a fresh alt and spitters might attack even on starting planet, its better to have more hp and be able to survive several shots
Keep in mind this info is outdated. I know at the very least block xp is now 2 xp instead of 4 xp now. And wildstock now gives 60 xp per kill instead of 15. The rest im not sure about 100%
That was indeed my very first resource of YouTube information on this game. I was planning to do a series myself on my YouTube channel but @Jiivita already did a better job than I could ever do.
Chiselling refined stone (i just use refined as im pretty sure it gives more xp per placement) in your home beacon can net you upwards of 80k/hr with max dexterity, power and energy regen epic. This is of cources around level 18, but even before then maxing dexterity or going 4/8 in power and dexterity early on can still give 20k+/hr. Hunting can give 120xp per mob on higher tier worlds upto the max available of around 600xp per mob from elite enemies, and enemies are frequent on most planets so can still be very good xp to throw together a hunter and farm them on lower level planets
This is exactly how I managed 10 levels in the first hour or two of my ALT character.
I started by maxing power and building process materials. I filled a plot or two with just stones at first and then continued the game.
I think this is still Valid though. Accomplishments still give you frequent and alot of exp. so I suggest just playing the game and mixing it up. I have heard of people being able to gain 15 lvls in an hour so im sure there’s a better recipe to it but im not that hardcore.
