Loamward Leveling Guide

Read This First: No Classes, No Levels — By Design

Loamward has no classes and no levels, and no skill list, rate or cap was published by the developer — until the official wiki. The wiki now loads, and it publishes the full list of 42 skills with what each does. Where a number is still not published, this guide says so instead of inventing one.

Loamward is a free-to-play online sandbox about working the land, from Bramblewright Games, a veteran-owned studio. It launched on Steam on November 11, 2026 — five days earlier than the November 16 open-alpha date first announced — and it is an open alpha on a single server. The official site warns players to expect rough edges, changes, and the odd world wipe, so treat anything you build as temporary for now, and keep the game folder safe: your character is tied to your install.

There are no quests telling you where to go. You start in Alderbrook with a few tools, and the rest of the island is yours to work: every hill can be dug down, every forest cut, every field tilled, per the official site. You get better at what you do, one dig, one swing, one stitch at a time — and that sentence is the entire leveling system. There is no class to pick, no level to chase, no XP bar to fill. There is only the work, the skill it trains, and the quality of what your hands make.

This guide is the leveling half of the pair. It covers the first hours on Firstfurrow Isle, the starting kit, how skills actually grow (with the only published gain rates in the game), the full 42-skill list, the characteristics behind the skills, quality as the real level bar, Hearthrest and titles, and settling down. Our Loamward Farming Guide covers turning all of that work into coin — the trader, the daily bounty, fallen stars, refining, and the settlement economy.

First Hours: Firstfurrow Isle and Alderbrook

New characters wash up on Firstfurrow Isle, a small island off the south coast kept by Old Harl, a gruff old warden who talks you through the basics. The island is a course of fifteen stations, walked arch to arch: the landing, the spring (drinking and your vitals), the supply crate (taking, combining and dropping things), the tool rack, the dig plot (digging, raising a corner, flattening), the grove (felling and chopping), the workbench, the bramble patch (foraging), the stones, the fence line (building), the study (skills and key bindings), the sheepfold (leading an animal), the fishing pond and the training ring (both optional), and the beacon. A task box at the top of the screen shows Harl’s words, what to do and what you have done; the gold light and your compass point to the next goal, and an arch turns from red to gold when its station is done.

The island is forgiving by design: fires cook ten times as fast, foraging always finds something, the water is clean, and you can’t drop below half your health. Treat it as the tutorial the game does not otherwise give you, and finish it before you wander off to stake a claim. At the beacon, Set out earns you the Islander title, a little coin and a few hours of Hearthrest, and Harl sends you across to Alderbrook. Already know the ropes? Skip at the landing takes you straight there — without the reward. Characters made before the island existed are offered a visit once, at their next login.

Alderbrook, the start town, is a grassy clearing by a river in the Loamwood, ringed by a palisade with a gate on each side. Its token — a tall stone settlement pillar with a gold glow above it — stands in the middle. Around it stand Alderbrook Hall, two cottages and a workshop with its paddock, Old Tamsin the trader under his stall, and the town’s five guards. A forge, a field and a home of your own you build yourself. One rule governs the town: it is protected, so nobody can dig, cut trees or change the ground inside its borders. Walk out through a gate to work.

Before you leave the island, learn the shape of the world you are entering. One island, sixteen kilometers across, with its own coves, peninsulas and offshore isles, sailable all the way round. Mountain ranges rising to 1,524 m, with bare rock above the tree line. Two dozen river systems winding to the sea, with lakes on their way. Around ninety ponds tucked into hollows at every height. Forests of oak, pine, willow, birch and orchard trees that grow, seed and fall. Seasons that turn with the real calendar — snow in winter, golden woods in autumn. Thousands of animals, from sheep and horses to wolves and bears. It is a lot of island for one player, and that is the point: there is room to find your own corner of it.

Your Starting Kit: Nine Tools at Quality 10

Every character starts with the same kit, each tool at quality 10, plus a set of wanderer’s clothes. Knowing what you start with matters, because the kit decides what you can do on day one — and its limits decide what you should build first.

Two facts about this kit shape your first week. First, the tools are quality 10, and quality caps what you can make: digging gives loam at your Digging skill, never better than the spade’s effective quality, and a new tool comes out no better than a fifth of your skill. Second — and this is the trap — the starter tools can be repaired but NOT improved. Only repaired. The moment you can make or buy an ordinary tool, do it: the trader in Alderbrook keeps ordinary copies of the starting tools at QL 30 that, unlike yours, can be improved. Your starter kit is a loan, not a loadout.

Your clothes are wanderer’s gear, each piece dyed in a natural colour of its own: head wrap, vest, arm wraps, trousers and wrapped shoes. They are not armor and they are not a build — they are what a newcomer arrives in. Better clothes come from tailoring, and better tools come from smithing, and both come from the skills below.

How Skills Actually Grow

Skills start at 1 and go up to 100. You raise a skill by doing the work it covers; each finished action can add to it. Gains are bigger for longer actions and for work that is hard for you, and smaller for easy work. They fall off steeply as a skill climbs, and no single action gives more than 1.00 — twice that with Hearthrest. Skills are shown to six decimals, so you can see even small gains, and the skill tracker keeps the skills you choose on screen while you play.

The wiki publishes exactly one worked example of gain rates, and it is worth quoting in full because it is the only hard leveling curve in the game: steady digging on flat ground takes you to 20 in about an hour and a half, to 50 in about nine hours, and to 70 in about thirty. Read that curve carefully. The first twenty points are fast — ninety minutes. The next thirty take seven and a half hours. The next twenty take twenty-one hours. The curve is steep at the top and flat at the bottom, and that shape governs every skill in the game: early levels come quickly, late levels are a commitment, and the last thirty points are a project, not an evening.

Three things change how fast you learn. First, stamina: work while worn out teaches you very little — below a fifth of your stamina your gains shrink sharply, and tired work is slower too. Rest now and then. Second, food: good nutrition adds up to about 5% to your gains. Third, and biggest, Hearthrest: while it lasts you learn twice as fast. Hearthrest is banked by sleeping in a bed, a cup of acorn brew or tea, or Old Tamsin’s daily bounty, and it is spent as you work — each action that trains a skill uses up as many seconds as the action took. Bank it, then spend it on the hard work, not the easy work.

Higher skill makes most actions faster — down to a quarter of the time at skill 100 — and a better tool helps a little more. It gives better quality results, and it opens up harder work: steeper slopes to dig, steeper rock to mine, tougher ground to forage and botanize. Crafting works differently: each piece of work is a skill check against how hard the item is, with a chance of success shown before you start, and work with a chance of 5% or less is refused. And if you die, the skill you lost comes back three times as fast until you are back where you were — death costs you, but the game helps you earn it back.

The practical lesson is the one every WoW player already knows from professions: train the skill by doing the work you actually need done. Digging levels fastest when you are digging a real foundation, not a hole in nowhere. Woodcutting levels when you need boards. Smithing levels when you need tools. The grind that pays is the grind with a product at the end of it.

The 42 Skills, in Plain Groups

The official wiki publishes the full skill list — 42 skills, each with what it does and what trains it. No per-skill gain-rate table is published beyond the digging example above, so do not expect a rate for every skill; the list below is what is verified. Read it as a map of the game: every system in Loamward is a skill, and every skill is a job you can build a life around.

A few skills carry numbers worth knowing by heart. Digging: more skill lets you work steeper slopes — three times your skill plus one, in 10 cm steps, never under 30 — and read border slopes further off. Mining: surface mining is limited to rock no steeper than three times your skill. Foraging: more skill gives more searches (one at first, two from 26, three from 53, four from 80) and better finds, and opens up wet mud at 43. Botanizing: more searches, and wet mud at 27, moss at 35, peat at 42. Milking: 1 kg at first, 2 kg from 26, 3 kg from 53, 4 kg from 80. Cooking: your skill caps how good a dish can be — four times your skill for plain fare down to once for feasts. Swords: 1% quicker swings for every 10 points. Animal husbandry: from 10 you can see an animal’s traits, from 50 when a mother is due. Carpentry also caps how big a building can be.

Which skills to train first depends on what you want to be, but the starter order is nearly universal: Digging and Woodcutting first, because every foundation and every board starts there; then Carpentry and Blacksmithing, because tools and buildings are the two things every other skill needs; then Farming and Cooking, because food is stamina and stamina is learning speed. Fighting skills can wait — wolves and bears roam the wild, but settlement guards keep the peace at home, and a player with a house and a full belly can learn to swing a sword later.

The Characteristics Behind the Skills

Behind the skills are five characteristics, in two groups: Frame (Deftness, Endurance, Brawn) and Wits (Reason, Quickness). They start at 20 and grow slowly on their own as you work the skills that use them; you can’t train them directly. They are the quiet stats — you never grind them, but they decide what you can carry, how long you can work, and what you can ride.

The carry math is the one to internalise: 7 kg per point of Brawn, starting from 20 — so a new character carries about 140 kg, and every point of Brawn earned is another 7 kg of timber, stone or harvest you can haul in one trip. It is the closest thing Loamward has to a strength stat, and it grows by working, not by choosing. The riding thresholds matter too: a horse needs Deftness 21, and Deftness grows slowly, so riding is a mid-game goal, not a day-one one. And Reason’s queued actions are the quality-of-life stat — one waiting action per 10 points, never fewer than two — which is the difference between working smoothly and stopping to queue every action by hand.

Quality Is the Level Bar

If Loamward has a level bar, it is quality. Quality (QL) runs from 1 to 100, and it is the number that decides whether your work is good. A tool’s effective quality is its QL reduced by its damage: a QL 40 spade at 50 damage works like a QL 20 one. Where a result’s quality comes from depends on the work: digging gives loam at your Digging skill, never better than the spade’s effective quality; mining rolls each piece of rubble or ore against the rock’s or vein’s difficulty, with your skill helped or held back by the pick’s quality, and never better than your Mining skill or what the rock holds; crafting rolls your skill, helped or held back by the tool’s quality, against how hard the item is to make.

New tools, heads, blades, anvils and lights come out no better than a fifth of your skill — you raise them afterwards by improving. Improving is a step at a time, in the crafting window’s Improving tab or from the item’s menu: each step needs its own thing in hand, such as a hammer, a hone, water, a hide or a lump of the same metal for metalwork, and a carving knife, mallet or rasp for wood. Metal must be glowing hot. A success raises the quality; a failure adds damage. A step takes 15 seconds at first, less as your skill and the tool you use get better, more when you are tired. The tools you work with wear a little, and material is used only when a step succeeds.

Wear is the tax on everything. Tools take a little damage each time you use them, less the better they are; some metals wear more slowly than others — star iron and steel best, lead worst. At 100 damage a tool breaks and is gone, so keep an eye on it: a damaged item’s QL shows in yellow on its slot, and its tooltip gives the damage. Repair by right-clicking and choosing Repair: it takes all the damage off, and costs some quality — a tenth of a QL per point of damage, falling to a quarter of that as your Repairing skill nears the item’s quality. Repair often and you lose little. A damaged item must be repaired before it can be improved.

The leveling advice here is simple and it is the same advice as the skill section: improve the tools you actually use, repair them before they break, and remember that a QL 30 tool from the trader — improvable, unlike your starter kit — is the first real upgrade in the game. Better tools also work faster, up to a fifth quicker at QL 100, and wear more slowly. Quality is not a vanity stat. It is speed, durability and the cap on everything you make.

Hearthrest, Titles and the Hall of Masters

Hearthrest is the closest thing Loamward has to a rested-XP bonus, and it is worth understanding properly because it doubles your learning. Hearthrest is rest banked for later: while you have some, every skill you train gains twice as much, and your stamina comes back three times as fast. The gold bar under your food and water shows how much is banked — hover over it for the hours left — and you can bank up to 20 hours.

You bank Hearthrest three ways. Sleep in a bed: right-click a bed under a roof and choose Sleep here. You are asked first, since sleeping logs you out. For every hour you are away you bank a quarter of an hour of Hearthrest, and you must be away at least an hour. You wake in the same bed, well rested, and nobody else can sleep in a bed while you do. Drink acorn brew: each cup banks up to 30 minutes. Or bring Old Tamsin’s daily bounty: 30 minutes as well as coins. Hearthrest is spent as you work — each action that trains a skill uses up as many seconds as the action took — and to save it for later, pause it: right-click the gold bar, or click Hearthrest: on in the Skills window (K). While paused the bar is grey and nothing is spent.

The practical rule: bank Hearthrest overnight by sleeping in a bed, pause it during easy work, and unpause it for the hard work — the long dig, the difficult craft, the skill you are pushing toward its next title. Titles are the visible milestones: skills and characteristics earn titles at 30, 50, 70, 90 and 100, each in its own words — Digging starts with “Sod Turner”, Carpentry with “Plank Sawyer”, Swords with “Blade Bearer”, Brawn with “Sturdy”. When you earn one it shines across your screen, and reaching 100 is announced to everyone. Wear one of the titles you have earned under your name, where everyone near you can see it: open Skills (K) and click Title.

The Hall of Masters is the endgame board for makers: it lists the finest of every kind of item ever made in the world, by quality, with the name of whoever made it. Everything you make carries your mark, and if you make one finer — or improve an item past the record — your name takes its place, the improver named beside the maker, and great records are announced to everyone. Collections fill as you play — every kind of gem you find while mining, every kind of animal you win over as a companion, every kind of fish you land — and completing one earns a title: Keeper of Gems for every gem, Wildheart for every animal, Master Angler for every fish. Open them from Skills (K) → Collections.

Settling Down: Houses, Settlements and Seasons

Plan a house wall by wall, in timber, log or stone, with stairs, roofs and doors that swing, per the Steam page. Walls are built by hand: rough-sawn board-and-batten timber, hand-hewn log walls chinked with clay, and stone walls laid stone by stone, in every shape — windows, doors, gables, half, diagonal and round walls. Roofs of hand-split shingles or thatch, a hewn log palisade, railings, wide and double windows, double doors and a wooden mine door. Wooden buildings, furniture and carts take the colour of the wood they are made from, including the new European larch.

Found a settlement, invite your neighbours, set who may build or dig, keep its coffer full, and hire guards and a trader — settlement guards keep the peace at home while wolves and bears roam the wild. Founding takes work, not money: a settlement pillar costs nothing but work, made with a mason’s chisel on 5 kg of rubble (Stone cutting). Stand on dry ground, right-click, choose Found a settlement here, give it a name (3–20 letters), and set how far it reaches from the pillar to the north, south, west and east — each between 5 and 200 tiles, up to 40,000 tiles in all. The full founding costs, upkeep and guard rules are in our Loamward Farming Guide, because a settlement is also a business — but the leveling point is simpler: found or join a settlement before you build anything you care about, because building on unclaimed ground is building on borrowed time.

Live off the land around it: forage berries and herbs, fish rivers and ponds, grow crops through the seasons, win an animal’s trust, breed your herd and ride out on horseback, per the same page. Hunger, thirst and the weather all count, and seasons turn by the real calendar — snow lies in winter. Day turns to night, trees seed and grow, and the island goes on whether you are logged in or not: a windmill grinds grain and halite, saws timber or pumps water by itself whenever the wind blows, even while you are offline, and bees work by the real clock while you are away. Loamward is a slow game, and the slow systems are the ones that reward you for coming back.

Your First Week on the Mainland

Here is a first week that uses every system above, in the order the game teaches them.

• Day 1 — Finish the island. Walk all fifteen stations with Old Harl, earn the Islander title, the coin and the Hearthrest at the beacon. Do not skip it: the reward is the cheapest Hearthrest in the game.
• Day 2 — Alderbrook and the trader. Meet Old Tamsin, learn the Buy and Sell pages, and buy an ordinary QL 30 tool you can improve — your first real upgrade over the starter kit. Put your most-used tools in the satchel’s three pockets.
• Day 3 — Dig and cut. Work Digging and Woodcutting on real jobs: level a plot for a house, fell trees and saw boards. Watch the skill tracker and feel the curve — fast to 20, slower after.
• Day 4 — Make your first tool. Smith a head or blade at the anvil, put it together, and improve it a step. Repair it before the damage builds up. Learn the Improving tab now, not later.
• Day 5 — Food and rest. Forage, cook a dish, sleep in a bed and bank Hearthrest. Bring Old Tamsin’s daily bounty for the coins and the 30 minutes. Eat well — nutrition adds up to about 5% to your gains.
• Day 6 — Found or join. Found a settlement with a pillar you cut yourself, or join a neighbour’s. Set your home bank at its pillar so your coin cannot be lost or dropped.
• Day 7 — Spend the Hearthrest. Unpause it and push your main skill toward its next title. A title at 30 — “Sod Turner”, “Plank Sawyer”, whatever your work is — is the first real milestone in a game with no levels.

After week one, the loop is the same at every scale: work the land, make the tool, improve the tool, bank the rest, spend it on the hard work. The island does not care how fast you go. It cares that you come back.

Fighting and Staying Alive

Loamward is not a combat game first, but the wild is not safe either: wolves and bears roam the wild, and settlement guards keep the peace at home. Fighting has its own skills — Fighting itself, which adds to your chance to hit in every fight and grows each time you kill something, more for a long fight; Brawling, which trains with every swing of your fists when you hold no weapon; Swords, Axes, Mauls and Polearms, each tied to its weapon and each training with every swing; and Shields, which trains with every blow your shield meets. Swords make your swings a little quicker as you improve — 1% quicker for every 10 points — and axes and mauls do the same.

The weapons come from the same crafting chain as the tools: axes, mauls, a spear and staves, each with its own skill, plus shields and plate armor you can see on your body, all added in alpha 0.1.20. Two tough new animals arrived in the same update — the moose and the wild boar — so the wild has more in it than wolves and bears now. Refining applies to weapons, shields and armor too: each level from +1 to +9 makes a weapon hit 2% harder or armor protect 2% better, and the full refining table is in our Loamward Farming Guide, because a refined weapon is also a product worth selling.

The leveling advice for fighting is the same as for every other skill: train it by doing the work you need done, not by grinding it in isolation. Clear the wolves near your settlement because they threaten your animals, not because you want Fighting 30. Carry a weapon when you go into the wild, and a shield when you expect trouble. And remember the death rule: skill lost when you die comes back three times as fast until you are back where you were, so a death in the wild is a setback, not a disaster. The players who fight well in Loamward are the players who built a house first, ate well, banked their Hearthrest, and then went looking for trouble with a good tool in their hand — not the players who ran into the woods on day one with a starter axe.

Staying alive is also a survival skill in the literal sense: hunger, thirst and the weather all count. Forage berries and herbs, fish rivers and ponds, cook what you catch and grow, and sleep in a bed under a roof. A fed character works faster, learns faster — good nutrition adds up to about 5% to your gains — and recovers stamina faster when well fed. The survival loop is the leveling loop: eat, rest, work, and let the skills follow.

Common Mistakes

• Waiting for a quest, a class choice or a level-up screen — Loamward has none of those by design.
• Skipping the Firstfurrow Isle guided course and crossing to the mainland without the basics — or skipping it and losing the Islander title, the coin and the Hearthrest.
• Working with worn starter tools when the trader sells QL 30 tools that can actually be improved.
• Letting a tool hit 100 damage: it breaks and is gone. Repair often — a tenth of a QL per point of damage, less as your Repairing rises.
• Working below a fifth of your stamina, where gains shrink sharply — rest, eat, and come back.
• Burning Hearthrest on easy work instead of pausing it and spending it on the hard work.
• Building on unclaimed ground without founding or joining a settlement to protect it.
• Forgetting the alpha can wipe: the official site warns to expect the odd world wipe, so do not treat any build as permanent yet.
• Paying a third party for Loamward Gold or items: no listing was verified, and player prices are player-set — any offer is unverified by MMODude.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

Checked November 12, 2026. Game systems change with patches, so confirm numbers in game. Where a number is not published, this guide says so instead of inventing one.

• MMODude: Loamward (launched Nov 11, 2026, five days early, free to play, no verified listing)
• Steam: Loamward (no classes or levels, Firstfurrow Isle, crafting, settlements, seasons)
• Bramblewright Games: Loamward (Alderbrook start, 16 km island, world wipes, veteran-owned studio)
• Official Loamward Wiki (game-data reference: 42 skills, skill-gain example, Hearthrest, quality, Firstfurrow Isle stations, starting kit)
• itch.io: Loamward (alpha contents, skills grow with use, trade and coin, up to 5 characters)
• Loamward devlog: Alpha 0.1.20 (Nov 1, 2026 — hand-built homes, carts, tailoring, new Firstfurrow Isle, 68 achievements)