Skill Trees: Megathread and Discussion

Devlog
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Day 5 Update

The fifth and final skill tree has been added to the thread. Today’s skill tree is the Attributes tree. Lot’s of information regarding this tree so please have read and let us know what you think.

Day 4 Update

The fourth skill tree has been added to the thread. Today’s skill tree is the Traits tree, which contains all the passive abilities you could upgrade your character with.

Day 3 Update

The third skill tree has been added to the thread. This time it’s the Abilities tree. Have a look and let us know your thoughts on this version.

Day 2 Update

The second skill tree has been added to the thread. Take at look at the Proficiency tree and let us know what you think.

Hi everyone!

As @james mentioned in his weekly Devlog, We’ve been working on our skill tree system for a number of weeks and it is time to share our progress with you.

Rather than post all our skill trees in a single day and send everyone into information overload, I think it is better to update this post each day with one of our 5 skill tees to give everyone a chance to dissect the information and give us feedback on each skill tree.

Once all the skill trees are uploaded, this thread will be where you can go to discuss our skill tree system, as well as keeping track on any new information regarding our skill trees.

Let’s get started!

The Skill Trees

Boundless Founder Tree.png1920×1080 382 KB

The Founder skill tree is our tutorial tree. All players will start off in this tree and the first skill to unlock will be the Beacon skill. Our tutorial will introduce players to the skill tree system, explain beacons and how to place blocks inside your beacon. This is why they are the first skills you will unlock in the game. Obviously, this tree will be fairly short and easy to complete.

Proficiency - Section 1.png1920×1080 405 KB

Proficiency - Section 2.png1920×1080 410 KB

Say hello to the Proficiency tree. It might look mental and not exactly like a tree, but that’s because this tree is actually flat and you upgrade each category (Hammer, Axe, etc). So rather than seeing all 70 skills in a single UI screen, you’ll see one skill from each category to upgrade.

For example, if you wanted to increase how much damage you would do with your Hammer you could upgrade your hammer proficiency 1 to 5 times, or if your hammer was made from Wood you could upgrade your Natural material proficiency 1 to 5 times. Or, you could upgrade both of these to do even more damage with your Wooden Hammer. Simples. :stuck_out_tongue:

Boundless Abilities Tree.png1920×1080 450 KB

The Abilities tree is all about unlocking access to actions or things you need to interact with. There are few unannounced elements here, so take a moment and have a look at the proposed skills and abilities. In this tree you will start from Jump Height, Charge Weapon and Block Recipes, it is up to you which one you invest in first.

Boundless - Traits Tree.png1920×1080 491 KB

The Traits tree focuses on passive abilities which cannot be activated like items in the Abilities tree. Traits are perks or abilities which are performed in the background permanently or when certain conditions are met. The start point for this skill tree is the Libra skill.

Boundless - Attributes.png1920×1080 383 KB

Attributes are core the stats each character will have in Boundless. Players can upgrade their attributes to make them more effective in a particular area(s) and combine these attributes with different traits, abilities and skills to make interesting builds.

Vitality - Increases the amount of Health Points and Crafting Energy to craft harder items
Endurance - Increases the amount Stamina Points (stamina is used for actions, jumping, etc)
Power - Increases the amount of damage dealt to creatures and blocks, and it also improves crafting skill to improve crafted item stats
Intelligence - Increase crafting speed and healing potency
Strength - Increases throwing and block placement range
Agility - Increases movement speed and critical chance to deal more damage per action
Dexterity - Increases action speed and block placement speed
Luck - Increase chance of items dropping and critical chance to craft powerful items

##How does all this work?
How do you unlock skills?
To unlock a skill you need two things.

  1. You need to have the necessary Skill Points to cover the cost of unlocking the skill.

  2. The skill needs to be available for you to unlock. This is done by unlocking the parent skill linked to it in the tree.

How much does a skill cost?
Each skill will have its own Skill Point value based on how useful the skill is. Some skills will require a single Skill Point to unlock and others will require 10s or 100s of Skill Points to unlock.

How Do I get Skill Points then?
Skill Points are earned by levelling up a profession. The amount of Skill Points awarded will increase as your profession reaches higher levels.

If I reach max level with all my professions can I unlock every skill?
No. But you will certainly have enough points to get a lot of skills and maybe complete a tree or two.

FAQ

Why can’t I see any of this ingame?
Skill trees have not been implemented into the game yet. We want to add skill trees to the game and these will likely arrive after we’ve implemented our attributes system.

Can I reset my skill tree?
Yes, but we need to set up the rules and cost for this. We are also considering an option to unlearn skills instead of a blanket reset.

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The idea of a dedicated tutorial skill tree is quite neat and innovative, kudos for that.

Huh? What happened to the Explorer, Hunter, Defender, Builder, Miner, Gatherer, Trader and Crafter skilltree?
Are those separations within the Attributes-, Abilities-, Traits- and Proficiency-tree, or did you drop them?

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We talked about it previously but I forget which post it was, but yes, we are replacing the class based skill trees with the trees listed above. We are letting players choose if they want to increase their attributes, proficiency or unlock new abilities and traits rather than forcing them to only unlock skills in the professions tree. This way we hope to see a lot more experimentation between builds.

It should be a lot clearer when the other trees are uploaded.

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I kind of like this. I think it’ll be scary for some players and forum users going from typical systems that confine you to a certain role/class to something a bit more freeform but I’m excited for the opportunities here.

Edit: Not to mention, you’ve just made @KuroKuma extremely happy. He can do everything now, given enough time! Unless there are hardstops in place to prevent filling out all of the trees still?

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But you will have the option to reset all trees at a cost, but the amount and any restrictions on frequency you can do this are to be decided. There might also be a way to unlearn a skill rather than a complete reset, but again the rules and restrictions are to be ironed out. :wink:

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was gonna ask that question myself,good to hear there’s atleast an option,also like the idea of the new skill tree setup :slight_smile:

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Oh, totally missed your part of that hahaha. Thanks for linking it Luke!

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I was excited because I read @Clexarews post first but then I read the initial post and the answer from @luke-turbulenz and sadly the plan of limiting the players didn’t change.
I still think that this throws away a lot of potential and is unnecessarily restricting.

Anyway since the thing this first part of the post is focused on is the founder tree, I have to say it’s a really good idea to make it a tutorial.
But I have some questions. The player starts in those “temples” where he also gets a tutorial right? So does a player have to complete the founder tree before he can move on from this starting area?
And if so will it be something like: “Click now here to unlock your ability to place blocks”, meaning the player doesn’t really decide in which order he completes the founder tree?

Another thing is, I know some of us including some devs would have liked to have certain features, especially in the HUD, linked to ingame objects you have to craft. Things like the compass or the entity information.
What’s the reason you decided to put those into the skill tree?

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The tree is unlocked after the temple sequence and you are in the live world. So you don’t have to complete the tree in a linear way.

The reason they aren’t physical assets is because you only need them once, which made them a single craft item which you only did once then never need to craft them again. They don’t break, wear or disappear and adding a reason for them to vanish felt a little forced. Plus it takes up an extra inventory slot and we would need a Ui screen for you to customise, slot items in and so forth.

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Day 2 tree has been added. Say hello to the proficiency tree. :slight_smile:

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Since this topic is making me very excited and I’m sure alot of other people I’m just curious, since the founder tree seems to go hand in hand with the tutorial world. Which is hopefully going to be released before the end of the year. Does that mean… that this may also be an update very soon?

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I don’t want to get your hopes up and say yes, because there are a number of things which need to happen first.

  1. Add the Attributes system to characters, tools, creatures and blocks so unlocks actually change something
  2. Add new abilities and traits which are not in the game and lock current actions behind the skill tree so you need to unlock them

Once those elements are in we will be in a stronger position to add the skill tree to the game.

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“Brew” / “Bomb” ??

suhweeeet :sunglasses:

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To be honest I really like the proficiency tree, especially with the skill cap we’ll have. Since the proficiency doesn’t unlock new things and just makes you better at already existing things it doesn’t really restrict the player if he can’t max out every part of this tree.

Now I hope that you can sacrifice enough of such “non-new-stuff-unlock”-skills to be able to put your points into every skill that unlocks things. That way the level cap wouldn’t be a restriction it would just make it much harder to have everything unlocked because you’d have to sacrifice a lot of efficiency.

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Huzzah! :scream: :smiley: :wink: :champagne:

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I might should have said because of the skill cap^^ It doesn’t mean that I like it per se but it works good together so it seems like it won’t be as bad as I first anticipated^^

Good job anyway, I’m curious about the rest of the trees now^^

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I feel like the end of each proficiency tree should have a special unlock that encourages people to max a tree rather than spread points evenly.

(I’m not saying that just to annoy @KuroKuma!)

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@luke-turbulenz: Sorry to say that, but in my opinion the proficiency tree looks really boring. As @Havok40k said, there should be at least a “teaser” to max out a tree segment.

I also think there should be a few “cross-connections” and dependencies between skills. E.g. “If you unlocked Slingbow III and Bomb I you get a special attack”.

The current tree looks a lot like “grinding” to me.

EDIT: I also don’t like the linear increase. I think the skills become much more expensive down the road from I to V ? I think they should also give more advantage.

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@Havok40k @Heurazio I totally agree with you and it would be great to see those things but only without a skill cap^^

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Good points. But let’s get all the trees up and review as a whole. Still 3 more to go. :wink:

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