Ascendustry

Your engineer earns levels in three skills as you play, and how you play decides what you get good at.

Combat: XP from your own kills. Levels add health.
Crafting: XP from manual crafts. Levels add a chance for a bonus item, up to a guaranteed double at level 100.
Mining: XP from ore you hand-mine. Levels add a chance for a bonus drop, up to a guaranteed double at level 100.

Skill trees

Every 10 levels gives a point. Each skill is a tree: an area has a root you invest in first, then branches that unlock off it. Points are scarce, so you go deep into a few branches and your build gets an identity. Respec is free.

Combat: Aggression (damage, shooting speed), Resilience (health, regen, Bulk Up and Tank), Warpath (run speed, reach, lifesteal, Speedster).
Crafting: Mass Production (output), Deft Hands (craft speed, inventory and trash slots, Caffeine), Artisan (quality, with quality-for-speed and quality-for-output trades).
Mining: Rich Veins (ore), Pickaxe (mining speed, reach, Jackhammer), Prospector's Eye (quality drops).

Trade-off nodes (more HP for less speed, faster mining for self-damage) let builds combine across skills: a Tank build is what makes Jackhammer worth taking. Open the window with CONTROL + L or the top button. All three trees show side by side, locked nodes included so you can plan, with tooltips on everything.

Deeper nodes add chance-based effects:

Combat: Executioner (crits), Glass Cannon (more damage dealt and taken), Thorns (reflect), Scrounger (recover a round on a kill), Scavenger (recover rounds as you fire), Aegis (a shield that needs no power and recharges itself).
Crafting: Salvage and Lucky Craft (refund a hand-craft's ingredients), Reckless (fast crafting that sometimes fumbles).
Mining: Conservation (patch survives), Motherlode (burst), Treasure Hunter (a find), Auto-Smelt (the ore's smelted form as a bonus).

Auto-Smelt reads your installed recipes, so it works with any modset and does nothing for ores with no furnace recipe. The Show debug messages setting (off by default) prints the reason whenever one of these effects skips.

Ascension

Max all three skills and ascend: reset them for a permanent tier of power that stays for good. Five tiers give you a kept slice of every bonus, free points for any tree, more reach and auto-pickup, a quality toggle, and a final capstone (the only route to 4x production, +100% health, or +50% weapon damage). Each tier raises the cap and speeds XP, so every climb back is faster.

Hardcore death (off by default)

A death penalty lets you lose the current level's XP, or reset skills to zero. Ascension survives death either way.

Compatibility

XP is the single source of truth, and every bonus is derived from it, so changing your modset, dying, or respeccing never corrupts progress. Bonuses add on top of other mods' modifiers instead of overwriting them. No prototype changes, no migrations, no quality-as-level.

Everything is configurable: curve preset and difficulty, per-skill and per-bonus toggles, caps, Ascension, and the death penalty.

Word of caution

This mod may make things much easier, but allows for greater customization of your character. Some bonuses also apply to turrets, potentially changing their balance. Other than that, it should only affect your character. It's slightly balanced in the way that even though some bonuses are extremely powerful, they only apply to you, not your machines. I have tested it with several mods from my own mod set that I usually play with and made sure many generic possibilities for breaking are addressed, but, if something breaks, there's a debug toggle that you can use to see the exact reason, potentially helping me debug things faster.

Testing

/asc-add-xp <combat|crafting|mining|all> <amount> adds XP without disabling achievements.