Mastery

Overview

Mastery is the endgame layer that sits on top of the skill tree. Where the skill tree hands out rewards as you level, mastery lets you spend a currency and materials to buy permanent, stacking upgrades - deepening a specific skill or a specific ability exactly how you want.

Mastery points

Mastery points are a currency. With the Mastery Pack installed you earn them as you level - by default one point per skill at every 15th level (15, 30, 45, …) - so the deeper you push a skill, the more you can invest in its mastery. Server owners can retune where and how many points are granted (it is just a command reward), and some tracks also cost raw materials such as Life Essence on top of points.

Both the Mastery Point and Life Essence wallets are shared-library currencies: content lives at Server/ZiggfreedCommon/Currencies, owner overrides at mods/ziggfreedcommon/currencies.json, and /mmocurrency is a thin alias over the shared /zigcommerce command. See Currencies.

Tracks & nodes

Each mastery track targets one skill or one ability and contains a set of purchasable nodes:

• Tiered nodes unlock in order - buy tier 1 before tier 2, and meet the node's skill-level requirement.
• Choice nodes offer mutually exclusive picks - take one and the other locks out until you respec.
• Eternal nodes are repeatable: buy them again and again for a small, stacking bonus, with the cost growing each purchase.

A node's upgrade is expressed as one or more modifiers - for example a flat or percent bonus to a skill stat, or a tweak to an ability's damage, radius, cooldown, or duration. Ability mastery modifiers feed the same system the skill tree uses, so the effect applies transparently the next time you cast.

Since 1.6.0 A track can also target a whole damage school instead of a weapon skill or a single ability - a node reads "+5% Fire damage" or "+4% Void resistance" rather than naming one thing. The free MMO Skill Mastery Pack ships seven school tracks: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Water, Arcane, Void and Poison. There is no Life or Physical track, so those two schools are reachable through gear and the skill tree but not through mastery.

What locks a node

A track or a node states what you must clear in the same requirements block every quest, shop entry and board uses, so one spelling covers every kind of condition. A skill level is a bound on that skill's level reading; an earlier node is a reading of its own (the track and node it belongs to); a permission, a completed quest, an earned achievement or an unlocked feature all sit beside them, and any of groups let a node open behind either of two earlier picks.

When you cannot buy something yet, the detail pane lists every unmet requirement at once, not just the first one it tripped over, so you can see the whole shopping list in one read.

Costs & sacrifices

• Currency - every node costs mastery points, and often a second currency like Life Essence.
• Raw items - some nodes also consume Hytale items (e.g. crystals) straight from your inventory.
• Stat sacrifice - a few powerful nodes ask for a permanent trade-off (for example -Max Health) in exchange for the bonus. Sacrifices are validated and re-applied on join, and removed if you respec the node.

Buying & respeccing

1. Open the Mastery page in-game with /mmomastery (or the Mastery tab, shown only when mastery content is loaded).
2. Pick a track, then a node you can afford and whose requirements you meet - a locked node lists every requirement you have not met yet.
3. Confirm to purchase; the cost is deducted and the bonus applies immediately.
4. Changed your mind? A respec refunds a configurable percentage of what you spent and frees the node up again.

Commands

/mastery is an alias for /mmomastery.

For server owners & pack authors

Author your own tracks (or retune the Mastery Pack's) as a content pack: one JSON file per track under Server/MMOSkillTree/Masteries/. See Mastery content types for the track/node schema, Parent reuse from an Abstract base, and the generator files that keep a dozen combat tracks down to one table each.

mods/mmoskilltree/mastery.json is the owner-side overlay, not the authoring surface: it turns mastery on or off, sets the default respec refund percentage, floors the stat-sacrifice knob (statSacrifice.minRemaining), and retunes any loaded track per leaf under tracks (the same schema a pack authors; see the owner overlay). Points and material currencies are defined as currencies.