Mastery

Mastery measures your skill in five branches. Each workbench, and most things you can work on, belongs to one of them, and plenty of recipes carry a mastery requirement. Mastery decides three things: whether a job can begin, how much progress each tool swing makes, and, for autopsies and cooking, the quality of the result.

In game the branches appear only as coloured icons:

Branch	Tools that count	Jobs it covers
Building	Axe, pickaxe	Most tree felling, mining, junk clearing, carpentry, masonry, pottery
Farming	Shovel, fishing rod	Garden beds, cooking, brewing, stumps and bushes, fishing
Smithing	Hammer, small tools	Furnace, anvils, smithy, jewellery, glass
Book writing	Books, talismans	Writing desk, paper, printing, the Study Table
Anatomy	Surgical kits, alchemist’s kits	Autopsy, embalming, alchemy, resurrection

Where mastery comes from

Four things stack together:

Talent. Each branch starts at 0 and rises with the nodes you buy on the talent tree; every branch’s first node is “Branch mastery +1”. You earn the talent points for those nodes by levelling a branch through inspirations.

Toolbar tools. Every tool on the toolbar that belongs to a branch adds to it, whether or not it’s the one you’re holding.

Tool material	Bonus (axe, shovel, pickaxe, hammer)
Rusty	1
Bronze	2
Iron	4
Steel	6

There’s one toolbar slot per tool kind, so equipping a bronze axe bounces the rusty one to your backpack. With two tool kinds per branch, no more than two tools ever count toward a branch.

Perks that grant mastery, but only on the specific recipes they name.

Food, lasting 7.5 minutes (one in-game day):

Dish	Bonus
Vegetable salad	Anatomy +1, +2 or +3 by star grade
Bowl of sauerkraut	Book writing +1 to +3
Muffin	Farming +2
Pumpkin soup	Building +2
Soldier’s stew	Smithing +2

The salad is the earliest you can cook; the other four each need a Cooking technology of their own.

Being under the requirement

The effect of falling short depends on the job:

Job type	Below the requirement
Ordinary recipes	Won’t start.
Autopsies and star recipes (most cooking)	Can start with 1 or more mastery in the branch. Each swing then succeeds with odds of roughly mastery ÷ requirement. Misses still push the job along, so it completes, just with fewer successes: fewer stars, or a botched autopsy. Item Stars lists every recipe’s star lines.
Garden beds and fishing	Planting or casting needs Farming 1, regardless of crop or fish. Harvesting a ripe bed needs nothing. Digging a fresh bed is the odd one out at Farming 2.

Meet the requirement and no swing fails: autopsies always extract cleanly and dishes always come out with three stars.

For instance, skin removal wants Anatomy 1, 3 or 6 for low, middle and top quality. At Anatomy 2, a middle-quality skin lands roughly two swings out of three.

Faster work, less energy

Beyond the requirement, extra mastery speeds things up. Each swing advances the job by mastery ÷ requirement steps, rounded down, capped at 3. Since energy is billed per swing rather than per step, working at double the requirement halves both the swings and the energy.