Literacy

Literacy is a learning based skill that increases your chance of successfully reading a spellbook or ancient book, as well as decreasing the time required.

You may attempt to read any spellbook regardless of your skill level, but failure may result in you being confused, losing all your MP, being randomly teleported, or spawning strong monsters around you. For this reason, it is advised that you attempt to read spellbooks in a wilderness area or portable shelter rather than in your home or a town. Reading while confused may cause you to fail, regardless of your skill.

Literacy can be temporarily increased by casting divine wisdom or by reading a scroll of knowledge. Some equipment will have the attribute of increasing the Literacy skill, so you should keep those for when reading a difficult spellbook.

Reading scrolls will increase your literacy skill; however, scrolls have a set casting level that is unaffected by your literacy skill.

Having Literacy as a starting skill prevents the character from starting with 3 potions of cure minor wound. It could be argued that the ability to learn spells is rather useful compared to a few potions.

For reasons not fully understood, as your literacy skill increase to higher levels a "floor" value emerges on the literacy potential. Below the floor value, literacy growth slows to a crawl. It is critical to keep one's literacy potential above this floor value as the floor value seems to increase with level. The floor in the 80s were measured at about 85% potential, about 95% in the 90s, and at least 103% potential at 102 literacy skill. This is probably related to some sort of rounding effect applied to the skill gain.

Elona+ changes

As of Elona+ version 1.22, monsters summoned in permanent locations will disappear after a few days if it's a location where dropped items eventually disappear (like towns).

E+ also introduces the Reading party, Wide special action learned on next level up after getting 40 Learning. It allows you to read a spellbook/ancient book from PC inventory (you cannot use Reading party on books that are on the ground) using both your Literacy and part of Literacy of pets currently accompanying you while also preventing all negative effects from failed reads. But it costs around 30-40 stamina to use.

Later versions of Elona+ allow you to use your Literacy skills to create sellable books. To do so, you need to use(t) a placed Table furniture and create manuscripts, which will convert all your ideas into manuscripts. (You can hold up to 100 ideas, and they will recharge by traveling the world map at the rate of 1 idea per mile.) The quality of manuscripts generated is based on your Literacy skill and Perception and Learning attributes. From lowest to highest, the possible qualities are: "paper scraps", "noob", "commonplace", "good sense", "cool", "satisfied", and "masterpiece".

The second option will allow you to turn a stack of at least 10 manuscripts into books, paying an upfront fee of 30000 gold. This will produce a stack of 100 books which you will be prompted to name. The value of the books depends on both the quality of the manuscripts and the size of the stack used. (The entire stack will always be used, but the effect on the price is capped at 1000 manuscripts.)

Trained skill

You may learn Literacy from the trainers in Palmia, Noyel and Lumiest.

Races

• Yerles
• Eulderna
• Mandrake
• Wyvern
• Cupid removed in Elona+
• Piece
• Roran

Classes

• Wizard
• Warmage
• Pianist
• Priest
• Claymore

Wishing

• #literac will increase Literacy by 1 level and train its potential.

Elona Mobile

In mobile, Literacy is a Magic stat based skill.