There are two ladders in Aurbis and they do not touch. Skills are what your hands know, and they rise by doing the thing. Your character level is something else. It comes from time actually lived in the world, which means a tailor and a soldier level at the same rate, and neither of them can grind their way past the other.
How it works
Skills rise through use, one skill at a time. /skill reads them all back and /skill <name> gives you one in detail: the trained level, the experience toward the next one, and the next rank. The public jobs sit on the same readout (see Public Jobs: Fishing, Felling, and the Bards).
Your character level comes from active minutes. A minute counts as active when you are doing two different kinds of thing in the same stretch: moving and talking, working and trading, fighting and opening doors. One-dimensional play accrues nothing, and neither does a client you have alt-tabbed away from.
Twenty active minutes in an hour earns a paycheck at one minute past that hour. The offer arrives in chat carrying a six-digit code, and you have five minutes to type it before it lapses. Collecting hour after hour raises what the next one pays, and a missed hour puts it back where it started. There is nothing to bank, and offline hours earn nothing at all.
Every level gives you exactly one thing, so no level is a dead level. Even levels give a perk point. Odd levels give an attribute pick you spend on health, magicka or stamina. Picks do not expire, so you can sit on several and spend them when you know what you want.
Smaller amounts land on skill level-ups, finished job runs, places found for the first time, and quests completed. Levels keep counting past forty as a standing rather than as a reward.
Commands (/help skill)
/skill lists your effective Aurbis skills and public jobs. /skills is an alias./skill jobs lists your public-job levels and ranks./skill <skill or job> shows one in detail./skillbar <skill|job> pins a progress bar to the bottom of the screen. /skillbar level pins your character level and /skillbar off clears it.
Level and pay (/help level)
/level shows your level, your progress toward the next one, and where this hour stands./level health, /level magicka and /level stamina spend one banked attribute pick on that pool./paycheck <code> claims the hourly paycheck with the six-digit code the offer carried.
