Progression
There are three ways to get more capable in FallMOO.
- Skills — what you know. Earned through play, paced by a learn-by-doing system, and bounded by a lifetime XP cap that forces you to specialise.
- Augmentation — what you are. Permanent body modification through mutations and cyberware: stat bonuses, damage soak, and abilities that training alone can't reach.
- Ascensions — how far you can go. A remort track: reset your character to come back with a permanent bonus and a higher XP cap, climbing higher with every run.
| Skills | Augmentation | Ascensions | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | What you know | What you are | How far you can go |
| How you grow | Learn by doing | Install mutations / cyberware | Reset and run it again |
| What it costs | Earned XP | A permanent slot or commitment | Your accumulated progress |
| What it does | Raises trained skill | Lifts effective stats, soak, abilities | Permanent bonus + higher XP cap |
A trained-but-baseline specialist and a moderately-skilled, heavily-augmented operator can end up equally dangerous by different routes. Most characters blend all three.
All of it runs on XP. Skills spend it to improve, and the cap that gates a whole run is counted in it. The rest of this page is where it comes from.
How XP is earned
XP arrives through three lanes, and the Activity system caps how much each one can give you over a rolling week. The lanes a script could farm are kept small. The lane that needs other people is by far the largest.
| Lane | What it is | Weekly ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| Automated | XP from putting down dangerous foes, paid with no command to type. | up to 25% |
| Jobs | XP for completing structured work and contracts. | up to 35% |
| Roleplay | XP for genuine, witnessed engagement with other people. | up to 75% |
These ceilings overlap rather than carve up a pie. They sum to $135\%$, so no single lane is mandatory and none reaches a full week on its own. Above them sits one hard limit: once your week totals 100%, earning stops until the window clears.
The rolling week
A ceiling looks back over the last seven days, not at a weekly reset. The system totals what each lane has paid you across that window. When a lane reaches its ceiling it goes quiet, then frees up again as old earnings age past seven days.
Write $C_L(t)$ for a lane's total over the interval $(t - 7\text{d},\; t]$, with $M$ for your weekly maximum and $p_L$ for the lane's ceiling. Two limits run at once: one on each lane, one on the sum.
$$ C_L(t) \le p_L \cdot M, \qquad p_{\text{auto}} = 0.25,\; p_{\text{jobs}} = 0.35,\; p_{\text{rp}} = 0.75 $$
$$ \text{weekly XP}(t) = \min!\big(M,\; C_{\text{auto}}(t) + C_{\text{jobs}}(t) + C_{\text{rp}}(t)\big) $$
The lane caps decide where your XP comes from. The weekly total decides how much arrives. Hit the total and every lane falls silent together. Because the window slides, a heavy day three days ago is already healing as it ages out, so steady play beats a single binge.
What the ceilings reward
Two facts fall straight out of the numbers.
The grindable lanes are boxed in. Max out combat and jobs together and you still reach only
$$ C_{\text{auto}} + C_{\text{jobs}} \le (0.25 + 0.35)\,M = 0.60\,M $$
sixty percent of the week, with the door shut on more. There is no farming your way to a full week without people.
No single lane finishes a week. Roleplay tops out at $0.75\,M$ on its own and every other lane lower, so the last stretch to 100% always comes from a second lane. Roleplay can carry the bulk of a week; it leans on combat or jobs to close it out.
The shape rewards range, and it rewards people most. The activity hardest to automate is handed the most room, while the lanes a script could farm stay on a short leash.
The automated lane
Bring down a dangerous opponent and you are paid for it, with no command to type and nothing to claim. Tougher targets pay more, trivial ones little or nothing, and credit splits among everyone who helped on the kill, so a hard fight still pays each contributor. It is the steadiest lane and the easiest to repeat, which is why its ceiling is the lowest: past a quarter of your week, more kills stop paying until the window clears.
The jobs lane
Structured work pays a fixed reward on completion. Each piece has its own cooldown before you can repeat it, and many cap how many times they will ever pay, so the lane stays steady instead of farmable. Spread across what is open to you, jobs can supply up to a third of your week.
The roleplay lane
Roleplay is the largest lane, up to three-quarters of a week, and the one with the most rules, because it is the easiest to fake. The system keeps a running activity score from how you play and pays out from it on a timer.
Your actions feed an activity score. Talking, emoting, and engaging with the people and the scene around you each raise the meter. More expressive, more directed actions count for more: addressing someone directly beats a passing remark, which beats a poke.
You need company, and they have to be present. Activity only counts when someone else engaged is in the room with you, whether a live player or a hands-on puppet, and only if they have been active within the last hour. An empty or idle room earns nothing.
Spamming earns nothing. Within about five minutes, the meter credits only your single most engaging action. Repeating a line, or following it with something lesser, adds nothing on top.
Example. Say the same one-liner ten times in five minutes and the meter moves once, by that line's value. Follow it with a richer, directed exchange and the meter rises only by the difference up to the higher mark. Over a window it tracks your best moment, not your word count.
The meter resets daily. Each new day starts your score at zero, so a strong session yesterday does not coast you through today.
Payout is timed and gated. Roughly every half hour the system checks your score. Clear the threshold and you collect a slice of roleplay XP for the period; sit below it and the period pays nothing. Across the week these payouts stay under the lane's 75% ceiling.
The weekly throttle and the lifetime cap
Two separate limits are at work. The weekly ceilings throttle the rate XP arrives, and from where. The lifetime earned-XP cap limits the total you can ever bank in a single run; it starts at 25,000 and only rises when you ascend. The Skills page covers that cap, what raising a skill costs, and why 25,000 is not enough to master even one thing.
Why it works this way (conjecture). The two limits push the same way from different angles. The lifetime cap stops anyone grinding into an all-powerful generalist; the weekly throttle stops anyone reaching the ceiling in a weekend. With the lane shares on top, the design reads as built for a populated wasteland that rewards turning up over time, and it hands the most XP to the one activity you cannot do alone.
The exact percentages and the half-hour cadence are tuning values and will be retuned; the shape stays stable: a small automated lane, a large social one, and a hard weekly total over all of them. Today the combat and job payouts, the activity meter, the company and anti-spam rules, and the daily reset all run. The weekly ceilings and the timed roleplay payout are where the system is headed.
See also
- Progression: Skills — where XP goes: learning by doing, the cost curve, and the lifetime cap.
- Ascensions — resetting your character for a permanent bonus and a higher cap.
- Skill Checks — where all of it ultimately gets felt.