Everwind Combat Guide: Max Level, Runes, and Weapon Tiers
If you treat combat here like a mindless clicker, a basic skeleton is going to fold you in half before you even realize your stamina bar is empty.
The game does not hold your hand when it comes to fighting. The tutorial teaches you how to swing a stick and immediately unleashes you into a world filled with enemies that hit incredibly hard. Your health melts, your stamina vanishes, and your weapons will shatter in your hands if you are not prepared. I spent my first few hours getting absolutely wrecked by everything that moved because I treated the combat like a casual block builder.
It is not. You have to block, you have to manage your endurance, and you have to actually plan your character build. Thankfully, the developers have confirmed a few key details on the forums that make the grind a lot less stressful.
The Level 40 Cap And Respec Potions
Let us get the most important piece of information out of the way immediately. The current maximum level in Everwind Early Access is 40.
You earn experience by exploring and fighting, and every level grants you one skill point to spend. Knowing there is a hard cap means you cannot unlock every single node across all three trees in a single playthrough. You have to make choices. However, you do not need to panic if you accidentally put a point into something useless. You can purchase a respec potion in the game to completely reset your character.
This takes an enormous amount of pressure off the early game. You can dump points into basic physical damage to survive your first few islands and then chug a potion later to transition into a pure magic build. If you are playing with friends, you can constantly shift your builds to figure out what works best for the group. I highly recommend reading my multiplayer co-op guide for advice on dividing these roles so your crew is not fighting over the same crafting materials.
Navigating The Skill Trees
There are three distinct skill paths in the game. The Warrior, the Arcanist, and the Engineer. The combat trees have six tiers, and you must spend five points in your current tier before the game lets you unlock the next one. They do not share progress. If you want tier two magic, you have to spend five points in tier one magic.
The Warrior Path
This is your bread and butter for physical damage and surviving heavy hits. You will get passive buffs to your health pool and unlock the ability to parry. The upper tiers are where things get wild. You can unlock a stealth mechanic that makes you completely silent while crouching, and eventually, you gain access to the Throatslice ability. This gives you a chance to instantly kill an enemy based on the damage dealt. Just keep in mind that Throatslice does not work on bosses or elite enemies. You will also need to invest points here to legally equip Advanced and Master tier armor.
The Arcanist Path
If you prefer shooting fireballs from a floating deck, the Arcanist tree is incredibly deep. It scales through elemental masteries sequentially. You start with Fire, move to Ice, unlock Lightning, and finally gain access to Poison. The fourth tier has a hilarious node called Wild Magic. Every time you cast a spell, it has a chance to either deal 50 percent more damage or 25 percent less. It is a massive gamble that can either save your life or get you killed. Magic weapons like staffs have a strict durability limit of 50 uses, so treat them like heavy artillery rather than a primary weapon.
The Engineer Path
This is the utility tree. It will not inherently make you hit harder, but it makes navigating the world significantly easier. You can unlock a compass scan that highlights living creatures through walls up to 650 meters away. You also get passive reductions to sprint stamina, which is a lifesaver when you need to run away from a bad fight. I covered the importance of running away in my early game survival guide, especially when it comes to the wildlife.
Upgrading Your Forge
You cannot craft any of the good weapons listed above without proper infrastructure. The moment you start finding raw copper ore on the islands, you need to build a Furnace and a Smithing Station on your ship.
Raw ore is dead weight in your inventory. You have to smelt it into ingots before the smithing table will even recognize it. Upgrading your gear from stone to metal is the single biggest advantage you can give yourself. It increases your raw damage and massively boosts your weapon endurance, meaning you spend less time frantically trying to craft a replacement stick mid fight. Make sure your ship actually has the power grid to support these stations by brushing up on my airship engineering guide.
The Math Behind Runes
Everwind has an enchanting system that uses runes to apply permanent buffs to your weapons and chest plates.
You find Rune Fragments by killing low level enemies. You can also pull them out of special chests scattered across the map. The system relies on a brutal combining mechanic. You need five fragments to craft one Small Rune. You need five Small Runes to craft one Medium Rune. This scales all the way up through Big, Huge, and finally Perfect Runes. The grind to get a Perfect Rune is intense, but even the smaller tiers provide noticeable benefits in combat.
If you find a sword with an enchantment you do not want, do not throw it away. Build a Processing Station on your ship. You can throw enchanted gear into the processor to recycle it and extract the rune fragments to use later.
Runes You Need To Find
When you are ready to enchant, you literally hold the rune in your hand, press the use key, and select your target weapon. It consumes the rune and a specific crafting component permanently.
Life Steal: This heals you for two percent of the damage you deal. It is mandatory for long dungeon runs so you do not burn through your entire food supply.
Battle Feast: This gives you five stamina back every time you secure a kill. It allows you to keep swinging your sword through large crowds without stopping to catch your breath.
Acceleration: This boosts your attack speed by five percent for five seconds after hitting a target. If you slap this on a fast weapon like a copper dagger, you turn into a blender.
Doom: This is the most broken rune currently in the game. It instantly kills any standard enemy that drops below 20 health. It ignores elite enemies and bosses, but it absolutely trivializes clearing out weaker bandit camps.
Get your shield up, stop ignoring the stamina bar, and start saving those rune fragments. The sky might be pretty, but everything living on those floating islands wants you dead.
