Your skills define what you can do, and how good you are at it. Items have skill requirements for using and/or equipping them, nano programs have skill requirements for uploading and executing them, and many actions demand a certain rank in a specific skill or two to have any chance of succeeding.

The Skill Window
Open the skill window by left-clicking the “Skills” button on the left-hand menu, or pressing u on the keyboard. This window contains a skill category list on the left, skills in the chosen category to the right, and an information box on top. Left-click on a category to bring up a list of skills in it.

The information box on top contains a message area, your current number of Improvement Points and Reset Points, and a button for resetting skills. We won’t be dealing with resetting skills in this guide. The message area contains your name, your title (see Experience and levels ) and your profession.

To increase your skills you use Improvement Points (IPs). You gain extra IPs every time you gain a level, and can store them for as long as you like. While experimenting is encouraged when you learn the game, you don’t want to spend IPs in too many skills on a character that you plan on playing for a long time.

The cost of increasing a skill depends on your profession. Some skills fall more naturally to an Agent than an Engineer, and vice versa. Also, for each rank you buy in a skill, the next rank will be more expensive. You can check the rank and cost of a skill by holding shift and left-clicking it in the Anarchy Credits Window.

Abilities
Abilities are skills that are dependant on your breed. There are six base abilities - Strength, Agility, Stamina, Intelligence, Sense and Psychic, and two secondary abilities - Body Development and Nano Pool. Base abilities have their starting values and IP cost determined by your breed. Secondary abilities have their IP cost determined by your profession, but the gain from increasing them depends on the breed.

The Atrox breed gains more health for each rank in the Body Development skill than other breeds, but also gains less increase in nano pool for each rank in the Nano Pool skill. The nanomage breed is directly opposite of the Atrox on this, while Solitus and Opifex have average gain from both Anarchy Credits.