Mastery

Mastery is a depth system layered on top of every skill: each individual action carries its own personal mastery level from 1 to 99, earned simply by doing that action. Mastery gives even a low-level action a reason to keep running it — every completion, no matter how basic, is progress toward a perk. On top of the per-action ladders, each skill has a shared Mastery Pool that pays out skill-wide bonuses.

Earning Mastery

• Every time an action completes, it earns mastery XP toward that action's own 1–99 ladder.
• The amount earned per completion is fixed for a given action: slower actions and higher-level actions earn more per completion.
• Because the award is tied to an action's base speed, any speed boost you have (gear, Pets, Museum wings, etc.) also raises your mastery gained per hour.
• Reaching mastery 99 on a single action takes roughly 90 focused hours at typical speeds — it is a long-tail goal.

Almost every action in the game has a mastery ladder: gathering, crafting, expeditions, delves, Arenas, and tames. (Farming is plot-based rather than action-based, so it has no mastery.)

Per-Action Perks

Each action's ladder pays out perks at mastery 25, 50, 75, and 99. The exact perk depends on what kind of action it is:

Mastery	Gathering / Crafting actions	Expeditions / Arenas	Tames
25	−5% action time	−5% action time	−5% action time
50	every 10th completion yields double output	+3 expedition score	+5% to the tamed creature's stats
75	−5% more action time	−5% more action time	−5% more action time
99	+25% to the primary output	+6 more score (+9 total)	+10% more stats (+15% total)

The mastery-50 "double output" trigger is deterministic — it lands on exactly every tenth completion, not a random roll. The time-reduction perks stack together. On Expeditions and Arenas, the mastery-50 and mastery-99 score perks now scale with the action's difficulty (about +3% of difficulty each), so the reward keeps growing on the hardest content instead of capping at the flat bonus.

The Mastery Pool

Every skill has its own Mastery Pool, a shared reservoir that fills as a side stream and pays skill-wide bonuses:

• Filling: a quarter (25%) of every mastery XP award also flows into that skill's pool — this is extra, nothing is taken away from the action's own progress.
• Capacity: the pool's cap scales with how many actions the skill has, so skills with big rosters (like Expeditions) take far longer to fill than small ones (like Delving).
• Checkpoints: the pool grants a bonus while it sits at or above each threshold:

Pool filled	Skill-wide bonus (while at/above this level)
10%	+10% mastery XP earned
25%	−2% action time
50%	+25% mastery XP earned
95%	−3% action time

• Spending: you can spend pool XP to instantly buy the XP an action needs to reach its next mastery level. This is the system's central tension — spending can drain the pool below an active checkpoint, switching that bonus off until the pool refills. Hoard the checkpoints, or cash out to push a favorite action forward.

Skill Mastery Milestones

Separate from the pool, each skill tracks how much of its total possible mastery you have earned — the sum of every one of its actions' mastery levels, against a maximum of every action at 99. Crossing three thresholds grants standing, always-on bonuses to that whole skill:

Milestone	Reward
20% of total mastery	+1% output on the skill's actions
45% of total mastery	−2% action time on the skill's actions
75% of total mastery	the mastery-50 "double output" now triggers every 8th completion instead of every 10th

Because these read the whole skill at once, they reward broadly levelling every action rather than perfecting a single one.

See Also

• Skills — the skills whose actions carry mastery
• Achievements — the Studied track (total mastery levels) and Virtuoso track (actions taken to 99)
• Museum, Pets — other sources of always-on speed bonuses

Primal Idle

SkillsSkills · Foraging · Logging · Mining · Fishing · Hunting · Farming · Cooking · Crafting · Smithing · Alchemy · Taming · Expeditions · Delving · Tool Ladders

CreaturesCreatures · Taming · Breeding · Imprinting · Companions · Stable · Player · Diets · Dino Gear · Pets

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EconomyHomestead · Ancestral Monument · Farming · Shop · Exotic Broker · Trading Post · Contracts · Dispatch · Villagers · Bank · Amber

ItemsItems · Equipment · Blueprints · Sets · Relics · Artifacts · Trophies · Treasure · Fossils · Food · Tonics · Crops

ProgressionTribe · Guardians · Museum · Mastery · Chronicles · Ascension · Ecology · Field Guide · Quests · Achievements · Changelog

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GuidesBeginner's Guide · Mid-Game Guide · Endgame Guide · Leveling Guide · Biome Progression · Spending Amber · FAQ