Dedication

Dedication is the first tab of the altar menu. You offer bone items (the remains of defeated Sendril-infected creatures) and the altar turns them into experience for your Altar Level. It is the only way to gain experience in the game: kills give none. The screen's own description says every character receives stat points after a level-up, and that is literally true, because the level is shared by all heroes. This page covers the action itself; the curve, the drop sources and the death penalty are in Leveling.

What you can offer#

Quest flags 12019 to 12022 control which rows are listed; picking up a bigger bone also completes the smaller bones' flags, because the item rows list them together (for example Filthy Core completes 12022, 12021, 12020 and 12019). Anthozoan Bones, Dominator Crystal and Spectre Mushroom sit in the same code list but have 0 experience and are never shown (see Currencies).

Offering gives slightly more than selling: a Filthy Core is worth 7,500 XP, while selling it brings 260 Bone Fragments, which are worth only 6,500 XP.

Doing it#

1. Open an altar, choose Dedicate, pick a bone. The right panel shows the bone's count and your experience bar.
2. Press the confirm button once to offer one bone. The altar plays its dedication animation only when exactly one bone is offered.
3. If you have none of the chosen bone, the game says "Not Enough Bones". At level 99 it says the Altar Level has reached its maximum and refuses.
4. Each level crossed gives one attribute point to every hero and shows the attribute-point notice (see Attributes). Reaching level 2 opens a tutorial popup (once).

Hold to repeat#

Holding the F key (or the controller's Y-position button, BY in the code) repeats the offer. The timing is counted in frames and compared with a frame-rate figure taken from your graphics setting (the "unlimited" setting counts as 144). Speeds therefore scale with the setting:

If your real frame rate is lower than the setting, the thresholds take proportionally longer, because the counter advances once per rendered frame. Holding is only available for Dedicate; crafting asks for a separate press. Offers are always limited to the number you hold.

What each level costs#

The experience needed for level n (from level n - 1) comes from the HeroExp table: level 2 needs 125, level 3 needs 275, level 4 needs 450, level 5 needs 650, and from there each level needs 200 more than the one before (level 6 is 850). Level 99 costs 19,450. Rows continue to level 500 in the table, but the cap in the code is 99, so they are never used.

The four "(all)" columns show how many of that single bone type the running total equals, rounded up; they are not a mix. For scale, one Filthy Core (7,500) covers 78% of the cost of level 50 (9,650).

Hidden mechanics#

• One level for everybody. The code runs the same experience through every hero in your save, including heroes you do not play. A level-up always adds one attribute point to each of them, so team choice never changes your level.
• Jerold follows Terrence. When a save is loaded without a stored Jerold entry, his level and experience are copied from Terrence's (fs_herolist.lua:84-95), so the shared level also covers the DLC hero.
• Excess carries over. Offering one Filthy Core (7,500) at level 2 can cross several levels in one go. The leftover stays on the bar.
• Waste only at the very top. At level 98 the game limits the offer to the number of bones that finish level 99 (it rounds up, so one bone may overshoot slightly). At lower levels the six-item ticks are not limited. A tick that spans the cap discards the surplus (inferred from the level-up loop, which simply stops at 99), so on the way from 97 to 99 hold only briefly.
• Only the shown hero is checked for the cap. The "level 99" refusal and the near-cap limit read the level of the hero on screen; since all heroes share the level this is the same number.
• Bone Fragments are also your money. Every shop price is paid in the same item (see Bone Fragment and Merchants), so what you spend is what you do not dedicate. Dying costs a random 25% to 35% of the Bone Fragments you carry (Death and respawn#When the whole team falls), which is the reason to dedicate before a boss.
• Potion of Wealth doubles bone pick-ups for 600 s (Currencies#hm-the-potion-of-wealth-doubles-the-four-sizes), which stacks nicely with a farming trip before a big Dedication session.
• The altar also reacts. The animation plays only if the altar is open (lit) and only when a single bone is offered, so the single-bone ticks of a hold animate and the multi-bone ticks (after 3 s) do not.
• The tutorial order. The Dedicate guide (quest 15034) is shown before the Alchemy guide (quest 15035); see Alchemy.

Sources#

• luascript/ui/controller/playerinfoctrl.lua:7564-7625 (confirm logic: level 99 refusal, hold limits, Filthy Core cap, near-cap clamp), :7868-7993 (Dedicate tab and which bones are listed), :9709-9754 (hold-to-repeat timing), :10547-10613 (experience loop for every hero, attribute points, tutorial at level 2), :5715-5719 and :5748-5769 (experience bar).
• luascript/structdata/ms_itemdata.lua:121-129 (ItemID_ExpAddList), :149-155 (ExpItemQuestIdList 12019-12022, ExpItemMax 4), luascript/structdata/ms_herodata.lua:17 (HeroLevelMax 99), luascript/structdata/ms_heroexp.lua:7-25.
• luascript/logic/scene/altar.lua:81-93 (dedication animation), controllerstorymode.lua:1877-1894 and ms_itemdata.lua:158-160 (death drop of 25-35%, 30% round-up chance), controllerstorymode.lua:4606-4608 (Potion of Wealth doubling of picked-up bones), fs_herolist.lua:84-95 (Jerold level sync).
• Tables: ItemData rows 70-76 (ids 40001, 40002, 40003, 40004, 40011, 40021, 40031: Param1, Price, NumMax, CompleteQuestId), HeroExp (ids 1-500), StoryGuide rows 1-2, GameText UI_ALCHEMY_MAIN_TYPE_DEDICATION, UI_PLAYERINFO_LACK_OF_EXPITEM, UI_LEVEL_MAX.