There are hundreds of skills in Mortal Online and raising them is quite unlike other MMO games, and can be more easily compared to the Elder Scrolls games. Skills are raised mainly through action, you must actively train up in the world to master a certain skill. However, books can also be used to raise skill level over time and these can be bought around the world in libraries and from special vendors.

Most your character development will be based around skills. Each character has a skill limit of 1100 primary skill points, which means you can really specialize in 11 skills (trained to 100). With added attribute bonuses (explained above) you get some “free” skill points, effectively giving you around 1200 skill points to use. I would suggest you specialize rather than be a jack of all trades, that way you will get most out of your skills. Rather have more specialized characters than one know it all. If it’s your first time playing MO and are still deciding what to do you don’t have to worry. Just try as much styles and skills as possible to find what you like, and with time start to abandon skills you don’t like, shaping your character with time.

Skills are divided into a tree structure and each skill is either a Primary skill or Secondary skill. Primary skills count toward your skill point cap, while Secondary skills are “free” and you can have as much of them as you want. For that reason you also can’t unlearn a Secondary skill, since it has no effect on your skill cap.

Each primary skill has a “+” sign next to it at first. This means it can be increased with training (or reading books). When you press “+” it will turn into “-”, which indicates that the skill will start to decrease, if another “+” marked skill would increase and you have reached your skill cap. You can lock a skill clicking on “-” sign which will prevent it from raising or lowering. To instantly decrease a skill, press a red “-” next to it, which will instantly decrease it for 1 point. This is useful if you’re over 100 effective skill and you want to lock it at certain number.

Many skills have prerequisites that you need to have it’s parent skill (a skill higher in tree hierarchy) at certain level. At the very least you need to at least learn about the parent skill to be able to learn about it’s child skills. How much you need will always be written in skill description, so make sure you meet the requirements before trying to level up a skill. Training a child skill will also increase your parent skill, so you can use that to your advantage by training difficult to train or expensive skills. For example, you don’t need to train Soft Armor Crafting to 100, as soon as possible start training Laminated Armor Crafting (requires 50 Soft Armor Crafting) and it will also increase Soft Armor Crafting. Do note that your skill will be limited by your parents skill, so if you have a parent skill at 50 and you train child skill to 100, you will only be able to use it as effective level 50, which is the main thing that limits you when building your character and requires you to specialize.

Many skills can be learned by doing an action that is related to the skill (for example, swimming will increase your Swimming skill). If the skill can be learned by using actions, it will say so with green text, and it will also state there what are the prerequisites if any. If it doesn’t say it can be learned through actions, you need to read a book about the skill to at least start to learn about the skill. Later you can keep reading the book or train by action once you know at least 0 points for that skill.

As mentioned, skills can be learned by reading a book. Books will most of the time train your skill to 70. The time spend reading a book will depend from skill to skill and some can take many days to finish reading. Not all books can be bought at every librarian and some are quite hard to find, but most what you need at start can be acquired from librarian in the starting city.

There are some librarians that don’t accept money as payment, those usually sell unique skill books. As an example is Arx Meridius in starting city, vendor that greets you when you get out of tutorial area and tells you to bring him undead heads. He sells many useful books (and some starter equipment) which you can buy by trading Walker heads to him. You get those heads from undead walkers in graveyards (the reason why everyone farms graveyards so much) and he only accepts those as payment. Each normal walker head is worth 8 silver to him and there are stronger undeads that are worth more as well. Those books can also be bought from different librarians for money if you prefer search for them and buy them that way.

Later in the guide I’ll describe more about certain skills, how to use them and where to get some rarer books for them. So if you’re interested in any at this point, you can find that under “Making a living” and find it under certain profession (if need to know about gathering skills for example, check “Gatherer” profession that describes Mining, Woodcutting and skills associated with them).

When reading a book, you will keep reading it even if you’re offline, so you should always have some book reading. To see how much time is left, hover your mouse over a book icon in the lower right corner of your screen. By right clicking on that icon you can also stop reading the book, but the book will be gone if you do.

There is a great list of books with locations and prices, but it may be slightly out dated