Skills and the journal

Skill Recovery Journal is the mod that lets you write your progress into an item and read a portion of it back on a new character. The exact fraction is whatever the server’s config is using the day you die. Do not plan your life around a number you heard on a different server. Plan it around the habit: transcribe after you gain something you would be angry to lose, and leave the journal where your next body can reach it.

Where it lives

On a shared base, the journal sits in a container the safehouse can open, not in a pocket, not in the van, not in a “secret” crate one person knows about. The hall table habit is written up in the journal thread because someone once packed it for a loot run and then died in a field. The new character spawned into a house with no book and a group that could not find the book. That is the whole lesson.

Your journal is yours. Another player does not read it to “save you time,” and they do not take it as a souvenir. If you die on a shared run, people may carry the journal back to the base. They may not start a new character and read it.

Books and magazines

Has Been Read marks volumes you have already used, which stops two people from fighting over a book that is useless to the person who grabbed it. Put finished books back in the crate. Someone else’s carpentry is not your bookmark.

Gyde’s Trait Magazines add magazines tied to traits. Read the cover before you assume it is a skill book. They are not a second journal. They do not bring back a character. They are loot, and they follow loot rights: world loot is free, crate loot is labeled.

What to write down, practically

• After a long reading session, transcribe before you go outside.
• After a VHS or a show that moved a skill, same thing. Do it in the room, not “when we get back.”
• If the journal is full or the mod asks you to bind it, do that step while you are safe. A half-bound journal in a coat is a rumor.
• Tell the base in chat when you have moved it, even across the room. People check the old spot first.

A new character with no journal is a legal character. Playing them is fine. Looting your own previous corpse is fine. Looting someone else’s previous corpse without a word is the fastest way to stop being invited on runs.