Mastery Gems

Experience alone does not raise a skill mastery. Every level also costs items, and there are six of them: gems, prisms, souls, totems, fragments and relics. Three drop from monsters, three are made by a tinker from the other three, and which mastery a piece belongs to is written in its colour.

The six types

Item	What it is for	Where it comes from
Mastery Gem	Levels 2–7, and the raw material for a Prism	Monster loot
Mastery Prism	Levels 8–14	Tinkering: 2 gold ingots + 1 Gem
Mastery Soul	The raw material for a Totem	Monster loot
Mastery Totem	Levels 8–21	Tinkering: 4 gold ingots + 1 Soul
Mastery Fragment	The raw material for a Relic	Monster loot
Mastery Relic	Levels 15–21	Tinkering: 6 gold ingots + 1 Fragment

Souls and fragments are never spent on a level directly — they exist to be turned into totems and relics. Only gems have a double life, as both a level-2-to-7 cost and the feedstock for prisms.

The three tinkering recipes sit in their own groups in the crafting menu and need no learned recipe:

Craft	Tinkering	Materials
Mastery Prism	50 – 100	2 gold ingots, 1 Mastery Gem
Mastery Totem	60 – 110	4 gold ingots, 1 Mastery Soul
Mastery Relic	70 – 120	6 gold ingots, 1 Mastery Fragment

Each craft keeps the mastery of the item you put in — a Ruby gem makes a Ruby prism.

The colour is the mastery

A mastery item's hue is derived from its skill, so you can read a pile of gems at a glance without opening a single tooltip. All twenty are below, rendered from the game's own art and hue tables.

	Mastery		Mastery
	Alchemy		Meditation
	Animal Lore		Musicianship
	Archery		Parry
	Arms Lore		Poisoning
	Eval Intelligence		Stealth
	Fencing		Swords
	Inscription		Tactics
	Macing		Mining
	Magic Resist		Lumberjacking
	Base Mastery (character enhancement)		Skinning

The colours are the special hues — Alchemy is Amber, Macing is Blood, Mining is Sapphire, and so on — so a mastery gem and a pigment of the same rarity share a palette.

Aether — the universal kind

Aether items are the wildcard: they count for any mastery. They have their own art rather than a hue, so they are easy to pick out of a pile.

	Item	Level range
	Aether Mastery Gem	2–7
	Aether Mastery Prism	8–14
	Aether Mastery Totem	8–21
	Aether Mastery Relic	15–21

There is no Aether soul or fragment — those two only exist to be crafted into totems and relics, and the Aether totem and relic are bought or found ready-made.

Aether is spent last, automatically

When you level up, the game takes your matching items first and only reaches for Aether to fill whatever is still missing. You never have to choose, and you can never waste an Aether item on a level a coloured one would have covered.

Where they come from

Monster loot. Gems, souls and fragments drop from creatures — fragments are the rarest, gems the most common, and a corpse yields at most one of the three. Two things bend the odds your way:

Luck raises the chance, up to +50% at 100 effective luck, scaling linearly.
Roughly a third of drops are tailored to you — rolled against one of your active masteries instead of the general table. Within those, one in four comes out as a Base Mastery item. Everything else is a weighted roll that can land on any mastery, yours or not.

The citizenship town shop. The gathering masteries can be bought outright with Town Export points, and Aether items with Influence or Defence points:

Item	Points
Mining / Lumberjacking / Skinning Mastery Gem	20
Soul of a Master Miner / Lumberjack / Skinner	50
Mining / Lumberjacking / Skinning Mastery Fragment	100
Aether Mastery Gem	50
Aether Mastery Prism	100
Aether Mastery Totem	200
Aether Mastery Relic	300

Gathering procs. Mining, Lumberjacking and Skinning can turn up their own mastery gems, souls and fragments while you work — the only way to earn those three without fighting.

What a level costs

Level 1 is free. From there the requirement shifts type twice, and each band starts heavy on the cheaper item and ends heavy on the dearer one:

Level	Gems	Prisms	Totems	Relics
2	2
3	3
4	4
5	5
6	6
7	7
8		7	1
9		6	2
10		5	3
11		4	4
12		3	5
13		2	6
14		1	7
15			7	1
16			6	2
17			5	3
18			4	4
19			3	5
20			2	6
21			1	7

Totems carry the whole way from level 8 to 21, which makes souls the resource to hoard early.

A full run from 1 to 21 costs 27 gems, 28 prisms, 56 totems and 28 relics for a single mastery. The prisms, totems and relics have to be tinkered first, which is another 28 gems, 56 souls and 28 fragments plus 448 gold ingots — so the real bill in dropped items is 55 gems, 56 souls and 28 fragments.

Storing them

Keep them in a Mastery Gem Almanac

Six types across twenty masteries is 120 different stacks — more than a bank box will take. The Mastery Gem Almanac holds all of them in one book, sorted by category.

Skill Masteries — the system these items feed, with the XP tables and every mastery's perks
Almanacs — storage for the whole collection
Tinkering — the skill that makes prisms, totems and relics
Luck — why it matters for drop rates
Citizenship — the town shop that sells the gathering and Aether items