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Skinning

Skinning harvests hides from the corpses of slain creatures. Hides come in six colored leather tiers and feed Tailoring for leather and studded armor. Because you skin what you kill, it slots naturally into any hunting character — and it's the fastest-gaining of all the gathering skills.

See the Gathering Overview for the town bonuses and luck mechanics shared with the other gathering skills.

Getting Started

  1. Get a skinning knife — tinkers, provisioners, butchers and blacksmiths sell them, or any tinker can craft one from iron ingots.
  2. Kill something with a hide.
  3. Double-click the knife and target the corpse.

Rules to know:

  • The knife must be in your backpack or hands.
  • Carving a corpse without a skinning knife destroys the leather — "Since you worked without a skin knife, all of the leather was lost."
  • Each corpse can only be skinned once.
  • Not everything has a hide: humans, skeletons, elementals, ghosts, fey and humanoid creatures give nothing.

The knife has 50 uses and every carve attempt costs one — success or fail — so carry a spare on long hunts.

A notable upgrade: the Royal Guard Survival Knife [Replica] (a champion artifact) skins like a normal knife but carries +140 Luck, dramatically improving your chance at better hide tiers.

Auto-targeting

Auto-targeting: click yourself

Target yourself with the knife and the nearest uncarved creature corpse within 2 tiles is skinned, as long as you can see it.

Player corpses are skipped on purpose — auto-carving one could turn you criminal.

See Gathering Overview.

Leather Tiers

Hides Skinning skill needed
Regular hides Regular 0
Shadow hides Shadow 60
Copper hides Copper 80
Bronze hides Bronze 100
Verite hides Verite 110
Valorite hides Valorite 120

The skill listed is the minimum to obtain that tier at all. If the corpse "rolls" a hide above your skill, it automatically drops down to the best tier you can attempt — you always get a shot at something.

Your success chance then depends on your skill, and on how good the hide is: the better the tier, the more often you ruin it. Around 90 skill the common tiers are reliable and the rarer ones are a coin-flip at best; at the full 120 everything up to Bronze succeeds every time and even Valorite rarely slips.

Hides into Leather

Skinning gives you hides, but Tailoring works with leather. Cut a pile of hides with scissors to convert it:

  • One hide becomes one leather — nothing is lost, and there is no skill check.
  • The hides must be in your backpack; you cannot cut a pile off the ground.
  • The tier carries across exactly: shadow hides give shadow leather, valorite gives valorite.
Hides Leather Tier
Regular hides Regular leather Regular
Shadow hides Shadow leather Shadow
Copper hides Copper leather Copper
Bronze hides Bronze leather Bronze
Verite hides Verite leather Verite
Valorite hides Valorite leather Valorite

Leather then feeds Tailoring — all leather and studded armor, footwear and quivers — and the tier sets the armor's protection magic level.

Where You Skin Matters

Which tier a corpse offers depends on where it died, not what it was:

Hides Overland In town Dungeon level 1 Dungeon level 2 Dungeon level 3
Regular 75% 100% 31.6% 13.2% 0%
Shadow 15% — 30% 33% 28.3%
Copper 9.3% — 21.6% 30.2% 38.7%
Bronze 0.4% — 8.4% 11.8% 16.6%
Verite 0.2% — 5.6% 7.8% 11%
Valorite 0.1% — 2.8% 4% 5.4%

Highlights:

  • Towns: regular leather only.
  • Dungeon level 3: never rolls regular hides — everything is colored, and the Bronze/Verite/Valorite odds here are double what miners and lumberjacks see at the same depth.
  • Strong monsters skin better: tougher creatures (measured by the quality of their loot) shift the roll further away from regular hides on top of the region table.

Luck Upgrades

Positive Luck can bump the rolled hide up one tier — "Out of sheer luck, you've just found some better hides than expected." The chance grows with your Luck and tapers at every step up the ladder — Regular→Shadow is the most common bump, Verite→Valorite the rarest, and that one needs 50+ Luck to fire at all. The upgrade only happens if your skill can actually use the better tier.

How Many Hides?

The amount scales with the strength of the creature:

  • Minimum 6 hides from anything skinnable.
  • Big game gives more, up to 39 hides from the very strongest monsters.

Town citizenship yield bonuses can add another +10–30% on top in the assigned region — see Citizenship. If you have an active gathering citizen quest for hides, toggle Quest Gathering on the knife's context menu to credit skins straight to the quest.

Training Skinning

Skinning is the fastest-gaining gathering skill — it gains about 50% faster than Mining or Lumberjacking below Grandmaster, and the boost grows even larger from 100 to 120. Two practical rules:

  • Skin above your comfort zone. Harder tiers give better gain chances — and once a tier becomes a guaranteed success for you, it stops giving gains entirely. Past 100 skill you must skin colored hides in dungeons to keep gaining.
  • Failing still teaches you, just at a reduced rate — don't be afraid to attempt Valorite corpses early.

Skinning also has its own Skill Mastery with perks for double yield, knife preservation, tier upgrades and the Flawless Harvest proc.

Town Quests for skinners

Your hides are worth citizen points

The town Cobbler posts gathering town quests for a quantity of one hide tier — regular hides up to verite hides, the rarer tiers on the longer quest periods. They pay citizen points, town score and reward currency, and count toward Town Exports.

Switch it on first. Left-click the skinning knife in your backpack and choose Turn on Quest Gathering. While it is on, hides of the requested tier go straight into quest progress instead of your pack; every other hide type is still cut normally.