Passive Skill Gain

Passive skill gain allows certain skills to improve naturally through meaningful play, without requiring repetitive or artificial actions. It is designed to reward real engagement while keeping progression intuitive and balanced.

Visibility

Passive skill gain operates quietly in the background.

Players do not see internal calculations.
Any messages showing points, chance, or banking are staff-only diagnostic output.
Players will only notice normal skill gains occurring over time.

How Passive Gain Works

Passive gain happens in a few simple stages.

1. Meaningful actions earn passive credit

When you perform actions that are relevant to a skill—such as participating in combat, issuing appropriate pet commands, or otherwise engaging in situations that can reasonably teach the skill—the system may award passive credit.

Not all actions qualify equally. Credit is influenced by:

Whether you are actively participating
Whether the situation is trivial or meaningful
Whether the action is appropriate for learning at your current skill level

Trivial or inappropriate situations yield little or no credit.

2. Credit and chance are evaluated together

Each passive opportunity is evaluated immediately using two factors:

Raw credit – how much learning opportunity the action represents
Chance – how appropriate that opportunity is for producing a gain

These are combined right away:

effective credit = raw credit × chance

Only the effective portion is added to your passive bank.

Chance is not applied later—it directly determines how much credit is stored.

3. The bank accumulates progress

The bank represents accumulated effective credit toward your next gain.

A higher bank means you are closer to a gain attempt
The bank is not skill itself—it is stored progress

4. Skill gains consume the bank

When enough effective credit accumulates, the system performs a gain attempt.

On a successful gain:

The skill increases normally
The bank is consumed or reset for that gain cycle

This prevents stockpiling large amounts of progress and ensures gains occur gradually through continued play.

Difficulty and Learning Range

A core principle of the passive system is that **difficulty is evaluated as your skill versus the creature’s difficulty tier**. It is *not* based on your pet’s strength or the outcome of the fight.

This keeps the system focused on what your character can reasonably “learn” from the situation.

In general:

Too easy → very low effectiveness
Appropriate challenge → best results
Far outside your learning range → reduced effectiveness

Scaling is smooth rather than based on hard cutoffs, which keeps the system natural and discourages artificial training setups.

Examples

The following examples illustrate how the system interprets challenge. These are not meant as training guides, but as demonstrations of how your skill interacts with creature difficulty.

Assume a player with approximately **57.5 Animal Taming**:

Black Bear – Difficulty tier around 55

Slightly below the player’s skill. Still within the learning zone, producing modest passive credit.

Grizzly Bear – Difficulty tier around 59

Slightly above the player’s skill. A good match, providing noticeably stronger passive credit.

Ogre – MinTameSkill is 0, so difficulty is estimated from power (mid-50s)

Also in the learning zone and capable of producing meaningful passive credit.

Harpy – MinTameSkill is 0, difficulty estimated around the mid-40s

Too easy at this skill level. The system will award tiny “crumbs” of passive credit that do not meaningfully accumulate.

Dragon / Ogre Lord – Difficulty far above the player’s current level

These are outside the effective range for passive learning. Interactions award little or no usable passive credit.

These examples show how the system naturally shifts your “learning targets” upward as your skill improves. Creatures that once taught you will eventually become trivial, while higher-tier creatures become newly appropriate.

Design Goals

Passive gain is designed to:

Encourage real gameplay instead of grinding
Reward engagement, cooperation, and survival
Prevent trivial or automated progression
Feel intuitive rather than mechanical

Players should not need to understand the math to benefit from the system—simply playing well in meaningful situations is enough.

Summary

Passive skill gain quietly banks scaled progress from meaningful play and converts it into normal skill gains over time. Internal calculations are hidden, and progression is tuned to reward appropriate challenge rather than repetition.

Passive Taming

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