Elin's PEAK

Level Up Everything!

PEAK already gives you a mountain full of terrible decisions, near-death climbs, overloaded backpacks, poison, cold, heat, exhaustion, and the occasional extremely avoidable fall. Elin's PEAK makes your character actually learn from all of it!

The idea is simple: if you keep doing something, you should get better at it. Carry too much stuff and you slowly become better at handling the weight. Climb constantly and your climbing improves. Run everywhere, jump everything, survive awful falls, push through bad conditions, or keep moving while starving and those experiences start turning into permanent progression.

It is heavily inspired by the use-based progression of Elin: there is no single character level deciding what you are good at, and you do not spend a pile of generic points after a run. Your skills grow because you actually used them!

Elin's PEAK currently adds 22 persistent skills, each with a default maximum level of 999. Progress belongs to your player, is stored locally, and carries between sessions instead of letting the lobby host decide everyone's progression.

What can I level?

A lot!

Get stronger, faster, and harder to kill

• Strength — Carry weight while moving to train it. Higher Strength reduces the effective Weight affliction from what you are hauling.
• Endurance — Spend stamina to train it. Endurance increases your actual maximum stamina and improves stamina regeneration.
• Athletics — Walking trains it; sprinting trains it faster. Athletics improves normal ground movement, sprint movement, and sprint stamina efficiency.
• Agility — Jump! Agility improves jump impulse, jump stamina efficiency, and gives you a little more control while airborne.
• Resilience — Surviving legitimate fall injuries trains it. Higher Resilience reduces future fall Injury.

You are not picking a build from a menu here. If you are the person sprinting across every flat surface, you naturally become the better runner. If you insist on carrying half the mountain in your backpack, your character eventually starts adapting to that too.

Climbing gets its own progression

Climbing is split up because a wall, a rope, and a vine do not behave the same way!

• Wall Climbing — Improves wall-climbing speed and reduces wall-climbing stamina cost.
• Rope Climbing — Improves rope-climbing speed and stamina efficiency.
• Vine Climbing — Improves vine-climbing speed and stamina efficiency, while also preserving more vine momentum.
• Wet Grip — Trains while climbing slippery walls. It reduces slippery downward pull and related climbing drain without simply making you immune to Cold.
• Climbing Tenacity — Trains while you continue wall climbing below 20% regular stamina. It reduces the nasty low-stamina climbing penalty, so repeatedly pushing those desperate last few meters actually makes you better at doing it!

The mountain can train you too

Repeated exposure to conditions creates its own progression instead of being rolled into one generic resistance stat.

• Toxicology — Reduces incoming Poison buildup.
• Cold Tolerance — Reduces incoming Cold buildup.
• Heat Tolerance — Reduces incoming Heat buildup.
• Drowsy Tolerance — Reduces incoming Drowsy buildup.
• Spore Tolerance — Reduces incoming Spore buildup.
• Hunger Tolerance — Trains by continuing to move while at 30 or more displayed Hunger and reduces future Hunger buildup.

There is also a completely separate set of natural recovery skills:

• Poison Recovery
• Cold Recovery
• Heat Recovery
• Drowsy Recovery
• Spore Recovery

These improve how quickly the matching condition naturally recovers. Direct cleansing does not count as natural recovery XP, so repeatedly using an item to wipe a condition away is not the same thing as your character learning to recover from it.

Pack Rat: yes, you can carry more stuff

This one deserved more than a tiny bullet point!

Pack Rat is the inventory progression skill. It unlocks additional inventory slots over time, but the extra space is not just free power from level 1. Carrying items beyond PEAK's vanilla capacity creates extra Weight, movement, and stamina penalties, and Pack Rat gradually learns to mitigate those penalties.

Main inventory unlocks

Pack Rat level	Extra main slots
10	+1
50	+2
100	+3
200	+4

Backpack unlocks

Pack Rat level	Extra backpack slots
20	+1
40	+2
70	+3
120	+4
200	+5

Vanilla capacity is treated as 3 main-inventory slots and 4 backpack slots. For every occupied item beyond those vanilla limits, the default overflow penalty starts at:

• +10% Weight
• -5% movement force
• +5% stamina cost

Pack Rat reduces all three penalties as it levels. So yes, you can eventually become the person carrying an unreasonable number of things—but you have to earn being good at it!

Do not use MoreSlots or BackpackCapacity alongside Elin's PEAK. Their functionality is already built into Pack Rat and the inventory systems will overlap.

Your progression is yours

Your skill progression is player-owned and stored locally. Joining somebody else's lobby does not mean the host gets to decide that everyone is suddenly level 4, level 50, or level 999.

That also means your character can continue growing across different sessions and groups. The progression system is intended to feel like your long-term character history rather than a temporary server setting.

XP is disabled in the Airport/lobby, so standing around before a run does not progress skills. Custom-run XP is also disabled by default, although that can be changed through configuration.

Skill menu

Elin's PEAK adds skill information directly to the pause menu, split into multiple sections so all 22 skills are not crammed into one unreadable block.

You can see your skill levels, progression, and current bonuses, with hover explanations for what the skills actually do. The goal is for you to be able to look at a skill and understand why it is leveling and what the next levels are doing without needing to keep this README open on another monitor.

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Technical details

Everything below is the more exact implementation/scaling information. You do not need to know any of this just to play the mod.

Progression curve

By default, all skills share a maximum level of 999.

Experience required for the next level is:

XP(next) = round(100 * level^1.21)

The curve intentionally keeps progression going for a very long time. Early levels arrive quickly enough to make a new character feel like they are learning, while later levels become increasingly expensive instead of letting every skill casually hit 999.

The maximum level is configurable locally, but it is part of the player's progression/save configuration rather than something selected by a multiplayer host.

Default XP sources

The current defaults use the following underlying work values:

Skill	Default XP source
Endurance	2 XP per normalized point of raw stamina requested
Strength	2 XP per raw Weight × movement meter
Wall Climbing	2 XP per intentional climbing meter
Rope Climbing	2 XP per intentional climbing meter
Vine Climbing	2 XP per intentional climbing meter
Athletics	0.5 XP per qualifying walking meter
Athletics while sprinting	2 XP per qualifying sprinting meter
Agility	4 XP per successfully executed local jump
Resilience	100 XP per normalized point of raw fall Injury
Condition resistance skills	100 XP per normalized point of actual incoming matching status
Natural recovery skills	100 XP per normalized point naturally recovered
Hunger Tolerance	1 XP per displayed Hunger point × movement meter while Hunger is at least 30
Pack Rat	2 XP per movement meter × qualifying carried overflow load
Wet Grip	2 XP per slippery climbing meter, weighted by slipperiness
Climbing Tenacity	2 XP per intentional wall-climbing meter while regular stamina is below 20%

These values can be changed in the generated BepInEx configuration.

Effect scaling

Positive bonuses such as stamina capacity, regeneration, movement speed, jump impulse, air control, vine momentum retention, and natural recovery scale linearly from the configured per-level values.

Default positive scaling includes:

Effect	Default scaling
Endurance maximum stamina	+0.5% per level
Endurance stamina regeneration	+0.1% per level
Wall climbing speed	+0.3% per level
Rope climbing speed	+0.3% per level
Vine climbing speed	+0.3% per level
Vine momentum retention	+0.05 percentage points per level, capped at 75%
Athletics ground movement force	+0.1% per level
Athletics sprint movement force	+0.2% per level
Agility jump impulse	+0.15% per level
Agility air-control responsiveness	+0.025% per level
Matching natural condition recovery	+0.3% per level

Reduction-style effects use an anchored reciprocal curve rather than simply subtracting a flat percentage forever. This applies to systems such as Strength Weight reduction, climbing/sprint/jump efficiency, Resilience, condition resistance, Pack Rat overflow mitigation, Wet Grip, and Climbing Tenacity.

With the current default reduction rate of 0.003, the curve reaches the old level-999 reduction target by approximately level 500, then continues scaling toward 99.9% reduction at level 999. This keeps very high progression meaningful without allowing a basic linear formula to cross zero and turn a penalty into nonsense.

Stamina implementation

Endurance expands real base stamina capacity rather than only drawing a fake larger number on the HUD. The stamina bar backing and outline can extend beyond the vanilla range when the option is enabled.

Endurance currently increases capacity and regeneration. General stamina-cost reduction from Endurance itself is intentionally disabled; activity-specific efficiency comes from the skill related to that activity instead, such as Athletics, Agility, or the individual climbing skills.

Condition handling

Resistance is applied to incoming status before the game adds it to the local character. The associated resistance skill receives XP from the amount that actually gets through after modification, with Hunger handled separately through movement-based training.

Natural recovery skills only apply when PEAK reports that the matching condition is decreasing naturally. Item cleanses and other non-natural reductions do not train the recovery skill.

Save data and backups

Progression is stored at:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\LandCrab\PEAK\PEAKUsageSkills\progression.json

The mod uses safe/atomic writes and keeps five rotating backups in the adjacent backups directory. Progress is not written on every individual XP tick; dirty progression is saved periodically instead.

Configuration

The generated BepInEx config includes controls for:

• Master enable/disable.
• XP gain enable/disable.
• Gameplay effects enable/disable.
• XP in custom runs.
• Maximum skill level.
• Save interval.
• XP rates for individual skill families.
• Per-level effect scaling.
• Pack Rat overflow penalties.
• Stamina-bar extension.
• Diagnostics and debug options.

The defaults are the intended balance for the current release, but most of the underlying progression and effect values are exposed for people who want a faster, slower, harsher, or completely absurd long-term progression curve.

Installation

Install through a Thunderstore-compatible mod manager such as Gale or r2modman.

The package declares the following dependencies:

• BepInEx-BepInExPack_PEAK-5.4.75301
• PEAKModding-PEAKLib_Core-1.7.2
• PEAKModding-PEAKLib_UI-1.6.1

Compatibility and current limitations

• Built for PEAK 2.1.a.
• MoreSlots and BackpackCapacity should remain disabled because Elin's PEAK includes its own main-inventory and backpack expansion.
• PeakStatsEx may continue showing its own cached/rounded Weight number even though gameplay Weight is recalculated immediately.
• Hunger intentionally keeps PEAK's normal 2.5-point display increments.
• Multiplayer progression is designed around locally owned player saves, but final multiplayer runtime validation is still pending.
• Broader anti-farming and diminishing-return systems are intentionally deferred for now. Basic action validity is already used in several places so obviously unrelated actions do not simply award the wrong XP.

Source and issues

The source is public, and issues/technical reports can be submitted here:

https://github.com/kunrian/Elins-PEAK