Pet Experience & Leveling

Where XP comes from

• Expeditions. Every squad member earns 150 XP per hour of the expedition's duration, paid out when you collect. Grace, faction, and building speed bonuses can still return a squad faster, but the duration XP is paid on never drops below 75% of the fracture's base duration: building for speed shortens the trip without shrinking what it pays.
• Incursion floor clears. Clearing a floor's boss pays every squad member a flat base amount that grows a little with depth (Void Resonance). Some examples at today's settings:

  Floor	XP per pet
  1	115
  5	175
  10	250
  20	400

  Extracting instead of Descending stops this early; going deeper pays more per floor. See Tactical Incursions: How They Work.
• Hatching, breeding, and everything else pays no pet XP. A newly hatched companion always starts at level 1.

A companion with the Driven passive trait earns bonus XP on its own expedition collections and Incursion floor clears, on top of everything below. See the Passive Traits page.

Full-value XP and the Incursion budget

Pet XP is awarded at full value rather than through a hidden diminishing multiplier. Expeditions and other XP sources have no daily reduction. Incursion floor clears have one separate, visible per-pet budget: each companion can bank up to 2000 XP, refilling at 1000 XP per day.

• Incursion XP is paid in full until that companion's budget is empty.
• When it is empty, the companion can still descend for Glimmer, items and Captain XP; only its Incursion Pet XP pauses until the bank refills.
• The old diminishing daily credit has been removed. The budget is a clear Incursion activity boundary, not a hidden reduction and not a limit on XP from Expeditions.

Rested XP: catching up after time off

A companion that hasn't earned any XP in a while banks a separate bonus pool while it rests between jobs. After 12 hours of that, the pool starts filling at 50 XP per hour, up to a cap of 850 XP (17 hours' worth). The next XP that pet earns is worth 2× until the pool runs out, then it goes back to earning normally while the pool refills.

• The pool fills while a pet is not on an expedition or down an Incursion. Those are the two jobs that pause Rested XP. Listing, trading, breeding, and waiting in a stud request are not tiring jobs, so they do not pause it.
• Rested XP is a separate catch-up bonus, not a cap: it makes the next XP a rested pet earns worth more, and that bonus is credited in full like everything else.
• A pet's own page shows its current Rested XP and exactly what state it's in (filling, full, paused, or still warming up).

Experience required per level

Experience is cumulative and never resets or gets spent down: a companion's level is simply the highest tier its total experience has crossed. The table below shows the cumulative total needed to reach each level, and how much that particular level costs on top of the one before it. Leveling up also banks stat points to spend on a companion's own Progression panel.

The level cap is currently 25. Reaching it takes 34560 cumulative XP; experience keeps adding up underneath the cap, it just stops raising the level.

Echoing: prestige and personal power

Once a companion reaches level 15 you can Echo it from its own Progression panel. An Echo returns the companion to a fresh life: level back to 1, active XP, ordinary stat allocations and Rested XP all reset. In exchange it earns permanent, personal power that carries forward forever, and mints Legacy Echoes on the spot.

• Kept, always: identity and companion number, owner, lineage, generation, species, colours, markings, mutations, traits, born stats, inherited (bloodline) ceilings, personal Echo ceilings, purchased upgrades, every permanent anchored point, and the full Echo history.
• Permanent anchored points. An Echo grants automatic points by the level you reach: +1 at 15–19, +2 at 20–24, +3 at 25. The total survives every future Echo, up to a personal limit of 50 permanent points per companion, but each Echo also unspends every point already sitting in a stat: they're anchored in that they never disappear, not that they're locked to whichever stat you first put them in, so you can freely re-spend them into a different stat every time your squad's needs change.
• Legacy Echoes. Each Echo mints Legacy Echoes by the level reached (100 at 15, 200 at 20, 350 at 25, scaled between), with diminishing returns the more times a single companion has Echoed.
• A personal ceiling roll. Every Echo rolls one stat ceiling higher, more strongly the deeper you went. It raises only that stat's maximum, not its current value, and does not create a stat point to spend. It may be a different stat from the one you later choose for a permanent point. This is personal power only: it never enters breeding.
• Buying points. You can also buy permanent anchored points directly with Legacy Echoes (first 250, each later one costs more), toward the same 50-point limit.

Echoing is prestige, not genetics. None of an Echoed companion's personal power (anchored points, personal or purchased ceilings, Echo count) is ever passed to its offspring: breeding still reads only the bloodline.

Earning Legacy Echoes

Legacy Echoes come from two places, and both of them read a companion's level: Echoing it (above), which keeps the companion, and letting one depart your crew for good, which doesn't.

• Departure (release). Letting a companion leave your crew for good, from its own page, mints 10 base Legacy Echoes, plus 5 per generation and 2 per level: a deeper-bred, higher-level companion leaves more behind. The same departure also converts 50% of its lifetime experience (up to the level cap) into Captain XP. You can't release your only companion.
• Echoing. See the level-based payout table above. A companion that has already Echoed at least once leaves only 25% of the usual amount if it's later released, since it's already been paid for its Echoes.

Neither path is reversible: a departed companion is gone for good, and an Echo cannot be undone. Legacy Echoes themselves are spent on infusions and Captain unlock claims; see The Currencies of Starforge for the full spend list.