The controls

Turning the dials

Nothing about the grind is baked in. Every rate, curve and threshold is a live control you can change from inside the game—no restart, no rebuild, no touching the server. Change one, go hit something, see what happened.

One command

Everything runs through /sg-dial. There are three ways to use it:

// see every control and what it's currently set to
/sg-dial

// narrow the list to anything matching a word
/sg-dial summoning

// look at one control, with the full explanation of what it does
/sg-dial skill_gain_multiplier

// change it — takes effect immediately, for everyone
/sg-dial skill_gain_multiplier 1.5

Values are plain: numbers like 1.5 or 40, and switches take true or false.

The numbers below are shipped defaults, not necessarily what is running. Several have been tuned in play already. /sg-dial <name> always tells you the live value—trust that over this page.

Changes apply the moment you press enter and stick across restarts. Every change is recorded with the name of whoever made it—not to police anyone, just so a surprising number can be traced back to the change that caused it.

Start here: what actually moves the needle

Two things are worth knowing before you start turning things, because they are genuinely counter-intuitive.

The obvious dial is the weakest one

skill_gain_multiplier looks like the master grind control, and it is the first thing anyone reaches for. Turning it up sixteen-fold moved a level-100 character’s weapon skill by about 11%. It changes how long the climb takes, not how strong you end up.

The reason is that the system corrects itself: gain faster → your skill is higher → you go fight harder things → the difficulty ratio returns to where it was. Use it to set pace. Don’t expect it to set power.

The dials with real teeth

skill_gain_difficulty_floor — how much a trivially easy target still pays. This is the anti-farming control. Raise it and grinding weak things stays viable forever; lower it and you’re pushed to fight things that can hurt you.
skill_gain_difficulty_cap — how much a single win against something far above your weight is worth. Raise it to reward punching up.
skill_overcap_rank_cost — what each rank costs once you climb past the old retail ceiling. This governs the entire late game.

The two paths

Every character walks one of two lanes. The default is the hard path—the long, honest grind—and it carries a mark: a † before the name, shown in chat and appraisal. The fast path trades that mark for speed.

Hard (default). Roughly a two-to-three-year climb to the true top. Keeps the † and a place on the honour roll.
Fast. Roughly two months to the same place, at the same final power—only the calendar differs. Costs the † and the honour-roll spot, permanently.

Switching is a player choice—/masochist on for the hard lane, /masochist off for the fast one—but touching the fast lane even once forfeits the mark forever. Coming back to slow never restores it. That is the whole point: the mark records the road taken, and both roads end at the same power.

Control	Default	What it does
`progression_speed_hard`	9	Speed for the hard lane—multiplies skill gain, attribute gain and level XP together. About 9× the raw baseline, which puts the true top around two to three years.
`progression_speed_fast`	100	The same, for the fast lane. About 100× puts the true top near two months. Higher only compresses the calendar—it never raises final power.
`progression_marker_enabled`	true	Whether the mark is shown at all. Turn off and hard-path characters look like everyone else—the lane still works, it just stops being visible.
`progression_marker_prefix`	†	The mark worn by hard-path characters, prepended to the name. Live-editable—but it must be a single CP1252 character (a Unicode glyph would corrupt the name packet, not just mis-render).

Because a lane multiplies skill, attribute and level in step, level stays an honest measure of power—a fast-lane character is an earlier high level, never a hollow one.

Overall pace

Control	Default	What it does
`skill_gain_multiplier`	1.0	Global speed for all skills. 0.5 is half speed, 2.0 double. Mostly affects time, not final power—see above.
`attribute_gain_multiplier`	1.0	The same, for attributes. Separate so body and skill can be paced independently.
`attribute_gain_mental_multiplier`	1.0	Extra speed for Focus and Self only. The original vision had the mental attributes slowest to master; this is the dial for that, shipped neutral.
`skill_gain_magic_multiplier`	1.0	Extra speed for the magic schools. Casters are genuinely starved in the starter tier and roughly at parity after—so raising this helps beginners and overshoots everyone else.
`spec_gain_multiplier`	1.25	Retired. Specialization is permanently off (see `disable_specialization`), so this does nothing.

The shape of the curve

Every gain is scaled by how hard the thing you just beat was, relative to how good you already are. These control that relationship, and they are where the real character of the grind lives.

Control	Default	What it does
`skill_gain_difficulty_floor`	0.05	The least a trivial target can pay, as a fraction. Grinding chickens never stops working outright—it just becomes negligible. Raise to be kind, lower to force people upward.
`skill_gain_difficulty_cap`	2.0	The most a very hard target can multiply one win. Also what lets a neglected skill catch up quickly.
`skill_gain_min_award`	1	Floor on a single award, so every action is worth something.
`attribute_gain_difficulty_floor`	0.05	The same floor, for attributes.
`attribute_gain_difficulty_cap`	2.0	The same cap, for attributes.
`attribute_gain_overlap_factor`	0.25	How much a secondary attribute gets when an action trains two—e.g. a heavy weapon swing builds Strength fully and Coordination by this fraction. Set 0 to make every action train exactly one thing.

Past the old ceiling

Control	Default	What it does
`skill_uncap_ranks`	true	Whether skills continue past retail’s ceiling at all. This is what makes “effectively unlimited” true.
`skill_overcap_rank_cost`	1,000,000	Cost of the first rank beyond the old table. This governs the whole late game. Lower means more ranks available; higher means fewer, harder ones.
`skill_overcap_growth`	1.0	How much each rank past the ceiling costs relative to the last. 1.0 is flat; above that the climb keeps steepening.

There is a hard ceiling you cannot tune past: the game stores skill progress in a field with a fixed maximum. Setting skill_overcap_rank_cost very high doesn’t make the late game longer—it makes it shorter, because fewer ranks fit in the space that remains.

How a character is built

These define the world’s character rules. They apply to everyone the next time they log in, so changing one reshapes existing characters, not just new ones.

Control	Default	What it does
`all_skills_trained`	true	Every skill usable from the start. Turn off and untrained skills can never rise by use—which removes most of the point.
`disable_specialization`	true	No skill can be specialized. What you become is decided purely by what you do.
`attributes_start_at_ten`	true	Everyone starts at 10 in all six attributes, so nobody is permanently ahead because of a character-creation choice.
`attribute_max_value`	290	The shared ceiling every attribute can reach through use. 290 matches retail’s true maximum.
`specialty_gain_from_use`	true	Master switch for the skills that fire constantly in play but used to train nothing—Recklessness, Sneak Attack, Dirty Fighting, Deception, Dual Wield, Salvaging, Assess, Arcane Lore, Loyalty, Leadership and Summoning.
`specialty_gain_from_pet_kills`	true	Summoning trains from your pet’s share of a kill, weighted by how much of the fight it did. Without this, the only way to train Summoning is casting the device itself—far too slow to ever reach the higher tiers.
`skill_gain_usage_only`	true	Pooled experience can’t buy skill ranks. Turn off to restore the normal game.
`attribute_gain_usage_only`	true	The same, for attributes.
`vital_gain_usage_only`	true	The same, for health, stamina and mana.

The individual paths

Every playstyle has its own route to growth. These tune each one on its own, without disturbing the rest.

Carrying weight → Strength

Control	Default	What it does
`burden_strength_gain`	true	Strength grows while overburdened. A normal load pays nothing.
`burden_strength_divisor`	50.0	How much overburden converts into progress. Lower is faster.
`burden_capacity_floor`	3000	Carrying capacity everyone gets regardless of Strength, so a caster is never stranded unable to carry loot.

Effort and injury → Endurance

Control	Default	What it does
`endurance_damage_multiplier`	0.35	The big one. Endurance from taking damage, which is by far its largest source. Left ungoverned it earned six times any other attribute—you get hit far more often than you land hits. Lower to slow Endurance, raise to make tanking pay.
`endurance_from_exertion`	true	Endurance also grows from spending stamina, not just from being hit—otherwise an evasive character can never toughen up.
`endurance_exertion_multiplier`	2.0	How much spent stamina is worth. Not a flat rate—the award shrinks as your Endurance grows, so 12 stamina pays about 4 xp at Endurance 20 and under 1 at Endurance 100.

Travel → Quickness and Run

Control	Default	What it does
`movement_gain_difficulty`	30	Worth of one qualifying stretch of travel.
`movement_gain_min_displacement`	40.0	How far you must actually get from where you last earned. Running in circles or standing still pays nothing.
`movement_gain_max_distance`	300.0	Beyond this it’s treated as a portal, not travel, so recall-hopping isn’t a shortcut.
`movement_gain_indoor_cells`	3	Rooms you must pass through underground before it counts—distance can’t be measured properly in dungeons.
`jump_gain_difficulty`	40	Worth of a full-power jump. A tap is worth proportionally less.

The arts and the odd skills

Control	Default	What it does
`coordination_spell_factor`	0.25	Coordination from landing a spell—aiming a bolt counts like firing a bow. Without it a pure caster has no route to Coordination at all.
`summoning_gain_summon_multiplier`	1.0	The smaller Summoning path: simply casting a pet device. Devices carry few charges, so this alone cannot level the skill—the divisor below governs the real pace.
`summoning_gain_xp_divisor`	10.0	Summoning grows from what your pet earns you, weighted by how much of the fight it actually did. A golem parked in a corner earns nothing. Lower is faster.
`arcane_lore_gain_multiplier`	0.25	Deliberately slow. Arcane Lore is what lets you use magic items—if it outruns the character, everything unlocks far too early.
`salvage_gain_per_workmanship`	8	Salvaging value per point of an item’s quality, so breaking down good gear teaches more than junk.
`loyalty_gain_xp_divisor`	10.0	Loyalty from experience passed up to your patron.
`leadership_gain_xp_divisor`	10.0	Leadership from adventuring alongside your own vassals. Having vassals isn’t leadership; fighting with them is.

Loyalty and Leadership shipped deliberately untuned—calibrating them needs far more play than one or two people can generate. Treat their numbers as a starting guess.

A suggested way to work

Change one thing at a time. These interact, and two changes at once will hide which one mattered.
Write down the old value. /sg-dial <name> before you change it. There is no undo.
Expect the pace dials to disappoint. If you want a different world rather than a faster one, the difficulty floor and the overcap cost are where to go.
Trust play over arithmetic. Nearly every real problem in this build was found by someone playing it, not by anyone reading the numbers. If it feels wrong, it probably is—even when the maths says otherwise.