Perks & Prestige

Turn levelled skills into permanent gameplay bonuses, then push past the cap with prestige.

Levelling a skill is only half the story. Every skill you train feeds a perk tree, and every perk tree turns into real, permanent bonuses — less wear on your lockpicks, faster crafting, bigger payouts, tougher tolerance windows. This page covers how you earn perk points, what the trees look like, how to respec if you change your mind, and what prestige actually does once a skill tops out. For how skills gain XP in the first place, see Skills & Progression.

Where Perks Live

Skills aren’t spent one at a time — they feed up into ten broader discipline pools: Fitness, Vitality, Crafting, Survival, Criminal, Civilian, Metabolism, Mental Resilience, Narcotics, and Cooking. Every skill that contributes to a pool gets its own perk branch inside that pool, and every point you earn in that discipline can be spent on any of its branches.

You manage all of this from the same place you view your skills — open the radial menu and go to Character → Skills, then flick over to the Perks tab. From there every pool you’ve touched is reachable; you don’t need to track down a specific NPC to browse or spend, only to respec (more on that below).

The Perks tab won’t open until your skill data has finished syncing. If it refuses to load, wait a moment and try again.

Earning Perk Points

You don’t spend XP directly on perks. Instead, every bit of XP a skill banks also feeds its parent pool’s “mastery” total in the background — you don’t manage this number yourself, it just accumulates as you play.

Actual spendable points are handed out at fixed level milestones as you climb — a steady trickle every few levels rather than one lump sum — plus one extra point whenever you prestige a skill (see below). The higher and more often you play a discipline, the more points you’ll have banked to spend across its branches.

The Shape of a Perk Branch

Each contributing skill has its own five-node branch:

Bonuses vary by branch and skill, but they’re always a concrete, practical improvement to the activity that skill covers — a bit less durability loss on your tools, a shorter task duration, better yield, a reduced chance of tripping an alert, that kind of thing. A Mastery capstone is more powerful, but within a pool, only one skill’s Mastery node can be active at a time — picking one locks out the others until you respec.

Later nodes in a branch also require you to have actually reached a certain skill level, not just have the points spent — the game unlocks generic Specialist, Expert, and Master tiers as you level a skill up, and those act as an additional gate alongside spending prerequisites. So a node can sit there fully affordable in points and still be greyed out because your skill level hasn’t caught up yet. Keep playing the activity, not just banking points.

Spending Points

From the Perks tab, pick a pool, pick a branch, and spend a point on the next available node — you need the points banked, the previous rank in that branch owned, and (from the second node onward) the matching skill-level ability unlocked. There’s no cost beyond the point itself; this is pure progression, not a cash sink.

Respeccing

Committed to the wrong branch? You can respec a whole pool at once — every point you’ve spent in it is cleared and refunded, ready to reassign. It isn’t free: expect an escalating bank charge that gets steeper the more times you’ve respecced that same pool, and there’s a cooldown of about a week between respecs on the same pool, so plan your build rather than chopping and changing on a whim.

Respeccing also isn’t self-service everywhere — you’ll need a short-lived token from whichever activity offers it (a gym trainer is a common example), and that token expires quickly, so have your pool picked out before you ask for it.

A handful of pools currently carry one free respec each, with no fee and no cooldown — but it’s tied to a limited-time window, so don’t leave it too long if you want to use it.

Prestige

Once a prestige-eligible skill reaches a high level, its panel offers a prestige option. Confirming it resets that skill’s level, XP, and any progress counters back to zero, but in exchange:

• Its prestige tier goes up by one, permanently.
• A stacking stat bonus applies to that skill from then on, on top of anything the perk tree already gives you.
• You bank one extra perk point for the parent pool.
• Some skills also pay out a one-off reward at certain prestige tiers.

Not every skill can be prestiged — broad organisational nodes generally can’t, only the specific leaf skills underneath them (Strength or Cannabis Cultivation, say, rather than “Fitness” or “Narcotics” as a whole). Prestiging resets the skill’s raw level, but every perk point you’ve already spent in its branches stays put — you’re not losing your build, just resetting the climb.

Where It All Applies

Perk bonuses aren’t cosmetic — they change real outcomes in the activity resource that owns them. A Fitness perk changes your gym results, a Crafting perk changes your workbench output, a Vitality perk changes how quickly you recover from injury, and Civilian perks change the pace and payout of whichever job skill they sit under. Wherever a skill shows up elsewhere on this wiki, assume its perk tree is quietly shaping the numbers behind the scenes.