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-skill-something, especially trade or technique, requiring special training or manual proficiency.
Skills are one of the most important ways to interact, survive, and adapt within the game. They are a direct subset of Traits and are the fine tuned, specific focus products of your traits. Your character will probably start with two or three basic level skills. You will have the ability to level up your skills from basic to advanced to master with practice and repeated use/trial and error. You also will be able to learn new skills and how to advance your skills by studying under more experienced characters in that particular skill such as an apprenticeship. If you would rather, you have the ability to attract, recruit, or hire other characters with different skill sets so you could focus on a specific skill and have a team with highly specialized and highly diversified skill sets. You could also attempt to become a one person master of all skills.

Skills are things like:
Mechanic - your ability to fix and build vehicles and other machinery
Weapon smith - your ability to manufacture and augment/modify weapons
Ammo smith - your ability to manufacture and customize ammunition
Medic - ability to heal/treat wounds for yourself and other characters
etc.

skills will develop in a fashion of leveling up from say attaching things with duct tape to welding to full mechanical/electronic integration.

OFFLINE

Qualification

In order to advance in your skills or learn new ones, you will not level up. You will instead qualify in that particular skill. There will be multiple ways to accomplish this such as if you wanted to qualify as a marksman, you would either shoot at the rifle range until you qualify, or you could go out and get battle experience to qualify as a marksman. Qualification in a skill unlocks your character's ability to do perform the actions associated with that skills and opens up the qualification option for the next level in that skill.