The Modular Action System, a Starter Guide

As a general rule, an action has a basic nature (crafting, fighting, spellcasting) and modifiers that make it more complex (hit strongly, hit accurately, aim for a quadruped's legs, etc.). Every action has a cost, which you have to pay for with physiological counterparts (e.g. health, stamina, parry, dodge).

When setting up an action, its cost needs to be covered in full by counterparts, otherwise it cannot be saved.

Default actions, as given out by a trainer, are generally useless, since they merely give you access to one specific stanza and just enough counterpart; they therefore lack the efficiency one can expect from a proper action. For example, the trainer might give you a fight stanza like Hard Hit 6, which might look like the following:

Default stanza for hard hit 6

As you can see, the general stanza type is fight, and the modifier is Hard Hit 6. So you'll be hitting pretty hard, right? If you try this action on a critter, you'll be doing significant damage... but only once in a while. So you'll be expending a lot of stamina to hit randomly, and will soon find yourself unable to continue hitting for lack of it. What would be the point of trying to hit so hard if one isn't even landing one's throws? You'd need to add an accuracy stanza for this action to be truly effective.

Let's walk through the creation of a properly set-up fight action.

Action setup	Explanation
	To create a new action, right-click on an empty slot in your hands bar, and select New Action.
	This is the new action dialog. Type in a name that defines it. In our case, "Hit hardest".
	To define a root action type, click on the empty square. A list of root actions appears. which you'll have learned at the trainer as you gain experience. We'll be selecting a fight stanza, first in the list.
	This is the barest of skills on Atys. No option, no cost. We need to add an option to it to make it a hard hit. Clicking on the Add Option button will show us what's available.
	Options at our disposal vary depending on what we trained. Melee fighters will want to deal damage, and we're after our hardest possible hitting stanza. We'll select Increase Damage Option.
	We now have a fight action that includes a little extra damage, defaulting to level 1 when added. You'll notice that his action is no longer free, and costs 5 points. We'll therefore need to add a counterpart (credit) at least equivalent to the option cost to validate our action. Note that some of the icons were greyed out as a result of choosing Increased Damage. Specifically, range weapons are disabled. The action will therefore be disabled whenever you wield a range weapon. For now, we'll click on the square at the right to see what our maximum hard hit level is.
	6 it is. Let's select it. The cost for that will be 75 points. Much counterpart needed!
	As it turns out, we have a Stamina counterpart worth 80 credits. Sounds good, that will pay for our option and validate the action.
	And we're done! We have a valid option, paid by the counterpart, we're ready to go hunt! Well, not quite. This is probably the dumbest action we can make. We'll be hitting hard all right, but how often? We don't have any accuracy option, and will definitely not land our swings very often... We really need to rework that, and add an accuracy option. We have another issue: we're using Stamina exclusively, so if we go about to hunt solo, there's a very good chance we'll be running out of Stamina rather quickly. We'll split the credits into both HP and Stamina counterparts. You may want to find a balance that lets both your Stamina and HP bars go down more or less at the same rate, or that leaves a significant amount of HP to stay on the safe side. As before, we click on Add Credit to add HP counterpart, then click on the existing Stamina counterpart to lower it a little.
	Ok, so we have split the credits now, to use both HP and Stamina. Let's add some accuracy to our action, by clicking on Add Option again. Accurate Attack Option is what we're after.
	As with the Increase Damage Option, Accurate Attack has a cost, which we'll have to add credit for, again. We'll select the highest accuracy possible, to make sure we land as often as possible.
	Here is a very decent action now, which should allow us to deal damage effectively. A note about the success rate and how to increase it: depending on the weapon you're wielding and your level of expertise with that weapon, the success rate will differ. adding more counterpart does increase the success rate! If you're in a team with good healers, you can increase the counterparts; when going solo, you may want to be more conservative with your HP and Stamina. if you wish to lower options, it's preferable to hit consistently than hit hard; lowering Increased Damage is therefore preferable to lowering Accuracy. We have a little extra credit in that action, and could even add a little Bleeding option. At this stage, we're ready to validate and save our action, and create a new one that takes advantage of parrying abilities.
	Those familiar with fencing will know that dodge and parry are counters, which let the fighter take advantage of an opponent's attack to land an easy hit. A dodge is an evasive move to avoid an opponent's attack. A parry is a deflection of the attack. Successful dodging and parrying lead to an opening. Therefore, dodging and parrying are credits. As such, they let us land a significantly stronger hit, but only when an opponent has missed us, or when we've deflected an attack; this is why we need to create a separate action on our bar. The same holds true when an opponent rushes into you for a hard hit and ends up exposed to an easy attack. Let's now create another action, similar to the previous one, and click on Add Credit again to take advantage of our ability to parry.
	35 extra credits, nice. We can either lower the HP and Stamina costs and retain the options as they are, or make the strongest action possible, adding Bleeding or specific aims to deal as much damage as possible when in parrying situations. We'll opt to balance out the action, lowering the Stamina cost and increasing Damage.
	We now have a decent all-purpose action, and a parry action to take the openings. In general, you'll want to be in Parry mode when wearing a heavy armor, and in Dodge mode when in Light armor. You cannot do both at the same time, and may therefore need to have several fighting actions to account for all situations. To toggle between Parry and Dodge modes, use Shift-D.
Other action types
	This is a typical prospecting action used when looking for materials at random. Its options are: 20m range 90-degree angle prospect for up to 5 nodes at a time 1.4s prospection speed Lakeland specialization only Choice mats will be searched for. Here, there is no advantage in success rate when credit exceeds option cost. The only counterpart available is Focus.
	Another prospecting action, with options as follows: up to Choice grade 10m range 90-degree angle up to 5 prospected nodes Seed specialization Lakeland specialization knowledge. Since material specialization is very costly (100 points), it pushes the Focus counterpart to 400 points. This left room for the knowledge stanza, thrown in but useles since we already know we're only going to be finding Seeds. Over time and as skills develop, this action will evolve to have a higher Multiple Nodes stanza and Prospecting Speed.
	A typical Lakes extraction action: gentle speed harmful rate gentle extraction Lakeland specialization.
	Jewel crafting action. Here it's the characteristic bonus (HP, Sap, Stamina or Focus) that acts somewhat as counterpart, which will incur a Focus cost when you craft; a grinding craft action without any boost has no cost, regardless of the quality crafted. Characteristic counterparts can be mixed.
	Low-level healing action, with mixed HP/Sap counterparts.
	Another healing action, with a bomb to heal up to two homins at the same time. The smallest range counterpart was added to match option costs exactly. Very high range penalty can be used when all mages in a team stand in close proximity (a.k.a. mage huddle).. Over time, a healing specialist might well end up having a full bar for healing actions, some with single heals, some with bomb heals, some with double spells combining HP and Stamina healing, for example. Healers often have to adjust to the team they're in, for example to heal both tanks with one action and all four mages with another action for routine hunting, and revert to an immutable full, double-HP spell cast on a single homin when trouble occurs.
	A low-level Cold spellcasting action, with simple counterparts.

Many actions will be at your disposal as you train up your abilities. To know when a stanza will become available to you, press B to open the Action Progression window, expand the trees on the left hand side and select your current active tree branch, or the one immediately upcoming. In the screenshot below, we see that the Attack After Parry 6 counterpart will become available at level 100:

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