Attributes

Physical Attributes

(Determines max hit points, average of the eight)

Constitution: Overall fitness. Determines how much your health regenerates.
Strength: Physical brute strength. Determines how much weight you can carry, and melee damage.
Dexterity: Hand eye coordination and flexibility. Reduces the amount of stamina used by skills.
Intellegence: IQ, memory, and knowledge
Willpower: Overall self discipline
Perception: How much you notice and comprehend
Endurance: Your body's ability to keep going and not get tired. Determines your maximum stamina.
Resilance: Your body's tenacity against disease and sickness. This is put into your resistance categories.

Psionic Attributes

(Determines max psi points, average of the five)

Mind: This determines the effectiveness of mind powers.
Body: This determines the effectiveness of body powers.
Force: This determines the effectiveness of force powers.
Heat: This determines the effectiveness of heat powers.
Electricity: This determines the effectiveness of electrical powers.

Resistance Attributes

Physical: This reduces damage from physical damage.
Heat: This reduces damage from heat damage.
Cold: This reduces damage from cold damage.
Electrical: This reduces damage from electrical damage.
Poison: This reduces damage from poison damage.
Psionics: This reduces damage from psionic damage.
Projectiles: This reduces damage from projectiles.

Skills

Weapon Skills

Barehands: Increases damage dealt, chance to inflict critical hit and stunning.
Handgun: Aim is better, increased chance to do critical hit.
Rifle: Aim is better, increased chance to do critical hit.
Cannon: Aim is better, increased chance to do critical hit.
Crossbow: Aim is better, increased chance to do critical hit.
Knife: Increases chance to inflict critical hit and stunning.
Sword: Increases chance to inflict critical hit and stunning.
Crushing: Increases chance to inflict critical hit and stunning.
Throwing: Increases range and accuracy of throwing objects.
Exotic: Increases bonuses on certain weapons.

Physical Skills

Sprinting: Maximum running speed & also takes less stamina.
Swimming: Maximum swimming speed, & drowning damage.
Climbing: Chance of successful climbing, & increases climb speed.
Acrobatics: Lowers falling damage, & lowers chance of critical fall.
Dodge: This increases the chance of an attack missing you.
Blocking: This decreases the chance of a critical attack on you.
Stealth: In stealth mode this makes it harder for you to be detected.
Longjumping: This increases the distance you can jump while running.
Encumburence: This allows you to carry more for your strength without enalties.
Forcing: How well you can break doors/chests.

Mental Skills

Learning: Skills take less experience to increase with this greater.
First Aid: This increases the effectiveness of first aid items.
Idenification: Determines how well you can tell what something is.
Hotwiring: This increases the chance of hotwiring doors, disarming traps, etc.
Repair: This increases the chance of a successful repair.
Searching: This increases the chance of finding objects and secret doors/traps.
Willpower: The higher this is, the less effect the negative effects have.
Meditation: This determines how fast your psi regenerates.
Transmission: Ability to cast psi spells on an ally instead.
Communication: Increases options to conversations.

Skills can get better several ways. The first and most common way is to have skills increase slowly with the equivalent cost from the experience when you practice the skill. If you use rifles a lot, that weapon skill will go up by itself and will probably be higher than the other weapon skills. The other method is to find a trainer in the selected area who is willing to teach you. This method is faster. Most of the time you need to be friends, be willing to pay money, or both.You could also find a book that trains you when you read it or you could find a holographic training room.

All of these methods though require experence points in the first place to relocate into the skills. You get experience points from doing certain quests, slaying hostile enemies, getting around a problem creatively, and sometimes it is awarded for getting to certain points in the games storyline.

Skills require more experience points and more time to increase a percentage the greater it is. The equation to determine the experience points required is:

ExpNeeded = Skill% + NewSkill%.

So to go from 1% to 2% requires 3 exp while going from 40% to 41% requires 81 exp.

Negative values for the skills do not give you experience when increased. They behave like their positive counterparts. Going from -15% to -14% requires 29 points. So getting out of low levels is difficult.

If you get the points from training it would take the same amount of exp points as if you went through every percentage normally. So going from 13% to 18% takes (13+14)+(14+15)+(15+16)+(16+17)+(17+18), or 155 exp points required.