Minmax'd Wisdom Trees et al.

Well, mostly. Wisdom tree organization and other tips for getting the most out of a single playthrough.

Introduction & Acknowledgements

Very important: I strongly recommend not attempting to follow this guide strictly on a first playthrough. If you're on a first playthrough and kind of lost on what to do with your skills and wisdom trees skip to the "Tree of OCDs" section just below this introduction. Playing using one of the main trees in this guide will inevitably require that you work around using limited resources and dealing with some potentially harsh book RNG, which you may not be prepared to do on your first playthrough without accumulated knowledge on what to do and how to use the resources of Hush House.

This guide is very overwrought and mostly done just to prove you can; there's no actual reason to slot skills in level 9 nodes (you don't get anything for it except achievements) and there's definitely no need to do it all in one playthrough (except saving the time I guess). I'd say the most important bits are what skills go in what branches and maybe the order. For what it's worth even the most difficult version of these setups aren't all that difficult if you know your way around the game, and there is a certain amount of fun in the planning and execution.

This guide and my work here are in the footsteps of two inspirations that I want to acknowledge up front. The first is a guide to skill allocation from the Book of Hours wiki by a user named AllNamesTaken1 available at this page[book-of-hours.fandom.com] (looks like it's since been nuked, it's still in the wiki history and I'll instead just roll it into a section of this guide). The actual order of placement of skills in the tree was partly inspired by another Steam guide written by Asilak Ithaqua available here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3135866799

I used the former and jammed it together with the latter, moving things around to get everything to fit and came out with the tree as presented in this guide.

Lastly but not strictly relevant to this guide, there are many excellent public notes & spreadsheets available but the one I used most for my first playthrough and as inspiration for organizing my own spreadsheet was from wiki user Nimryel[book-of-hours.fandom.com] available here[docs.google.com].

I'll go into more depth in the Explanations section but the purpose of this tree is to enable you to hit the 9th node on every branch of the wisdom tree and to give you both an even spread of soul elements from the tree and at least 7 available evolutions for each element regardless of which librarian you start as. Additionally, the skill allocation choices are made to avoid spending resources leveling skills that are less useful for crafting.

There will be two versions of the "perfect" Wisdom Tree build, which I'll refer to as versions 2 and 3. Version 1 would have been the same as 2 but it had some critical errors that were patched up mid-test-run for what is now version 2. Having done a test playthrough using each version of the build (Archaeologist and Magnate starts for version 2 and 3 respectively) I can confirm that they basically work as intended. I'll cover some of the problems I ran into in the Caveats section. Version 3 had an extra pass for cleanup and optimizing and is probably an easier experience but has some minor drawbacks I'll cover in the Caveats section as well.

Again, if you don't want to have to think too much about how to progress your wisdom tree but don't want to commit to one of the builds here, I can suggest doing what I did for my first playthrough and following the AllNamesTaken1 "Tree of OCDs", recreated just below here, and allocate skills as they become available without worrying too much about the order. You'll probably make mistakes and, if you go the usual way of not leveling skills past when they're allocated, won't be conveniently optimized for crafting but you'll be able to make it through to an ending this way just fine, eventually, and come out the other side being able to make easier use of this guide.

AllNamesTaken1's "Tree of OCDs"

Again, everything in this section was the work of the Book of Hours Wiki user AllNamesTaken1 and was the scaffolding upon which most of my work here was done. To clarify, since it's sort of confusing if you've only gotten as far in the game as opening your Wisdom Tree, the skills in the right column are slotted in the wisdom tree branch (I'll underline them here for even further clarification) in the left column and will give you the corresponding soul element upon slotting. Lastly, some pairs of skills can be swapped as noted (eg Glassblowing & Vesselcrafting or Inks of Revelation) while still preserving the intended outcomes.

Element and Wisdom	Assigned Skills
Wist Hushery	Sights & Sensations, Sharps, Snow Stories, Glassblowing & Vesselcrafting (or Inks of Revelation)
Wist Ithastry	Stitching & Binding, Kernewek Henavek, Spices & Savours, Fu cine
Phost Ithastry	Transformations & Liberations, Anbary & Lapidary, Deep Mandaic, Inks of Revelation (or Glassblowing & Vesselcrafting)
Phost Illumination	Preliminal Meter, Auroral Contemplations, Meniscate Reflections, Disciplines of the Scar
Mettle Illumination	Pyroglyphics, Disciplines of the Hammer, Glaziery & Lightsmithing, Purifications & Exaltations
Mettle Horomachistry	Inks of Containment, Edicts Martial, Sacra Limiae, Bells & Brazieries
Fet Horomachistry	Sabazine, Sacra Solis Invicti, Ouranoscopy, The Great Signs And The Great Scars
Fet Nyctodromy	Path & Pilgrim, Vak, Watchmans Paradoxes, Furs & Feathers (or Pearl & Tide)
Shapt Nyctodromy	Door & Wall, Sickle & Eclipse, Coil & Chasm, Hyksos
Shapt Skolekosophy	Solutions & Separations, Horns & Ivories, Ragged Crossroads, Lockworks & Clockworks
Ereb Skolekosophy	Edicts Liminal, Killasimi, Putrefactions & Calcinations, Wolf Stories (or Rhyme & Remembrance)
Ereb Bosk	Applebright Euphonies, Desires & Dissolutions, Orchids & Narcotics, Insects & Nectars
Health Bosk	Drums & Dances, Weaving & Knotworking, Resurgences & Emergences, Pearl & Tide (or Furs & Feathers)
Health Preservation	Rites of the Roots, Hill & Hollow (a dud), Herbs & Infusions, Tridesma Hiera, Maggephene Mysteries (or Quenchings & Quellings)
Chor Preservation	Surgeries & Exsanguinations, Edicts Inviolable, Stone Stories, Cracktrack
Chor Birdsong	Leaves & Thorns, Pentiments & Precursors, Sea Stories, Strings & Songs
Trist Birdsong	Sand Stories, Ramsund, Sky Stories, Rhyme & Remembrance (or Wolf Stories)
Trist Hushery	Inks of Power, Serpents & Venoms, Ericapaean, Quenchings & Quellings (or Maggephene Mysteries)

Wisdom Tree Skill Allocation (Version 2)

Illumination

1. Purifications & Exaltations
   
2. Meniscate Reflections
   
3. Glaziery & Lightsmithing
   
4. Pyroglyphics
   
5. Disciplines of the Hammer
   
6. -
   
7. Preliminal Meter
   
8. Disciplines of the Scar
   
9. Auroral Contemplations

Hushery

1. Ericapaean
   
2. Sharps
   
3. -
   
4. Inks of Power
   
5. Maggephene Mysteries
   
6. Snow Stories
   
7. Serpents & Venoms
   
8. Inks of Revelation
   
9. Sights & Sensations

Nyctodromy

1. Vak
   
2. Hyksos
   
3. Watchman's Paradoxes
   
4. Door & Wall
   
5. Path & Pilgrim
   
6. -
   
7. Pearl & Tide
   
8. Sickle & Eclipse
   
9. Coil & Chasm

Skolekosophy

1. -
   
2. Killasimi
   
3. Lockworks & Clockworks
   
4. Ragged Crossroads
   
5. Rhyme & Remembrance
   
6. Solutions & Separations
   
7. Putrefactions & Calcinations
   
8. Horns & Ivories
   
9. Edicts Liminal

The Bosk

1. Furs & Feathers
   
2. Orchids & Narcotics
   
3. -
   
4. Desires & Dissolutions
   
5. Applebright Euphonies
   
6. Weaving & Knotworking
   
7. Drums & Dances
   
8. Insects & Nectars
   
9. Resurgences & Emergences

Preservation

1. Cracktrack
   
2. Stone Stories
   
3. Herbs & Infusions
   
4. Hill & Hollow
   
5. Surgeries & Exsanguinations
   
6. Quenchings & Quellings
   
7. Edicts Inviolable
   
8. Rites of the Roots
   
9. Tridesma Hiera

Birdsong

1. Ramsund
   
2. Sky Stories
   
3. Wolf Stories
   
4. -
   
5. Leaves & Thorns
   
6. Sea Stories
   
7. Sand Stories
   
8. Pentiments & Precursors
   
9. Strings & Songs

Horomachistry

1. -
   
2. Sabazine
   
3. Sacra Solis Invicti
   
4. Ouranoscopy
   
5. Bells & Brazieries
   
6. The Great Signs and the Great Scars
   
7. Inks of Containment
   
8. Sacra Limiae
   
9. Edicts Martial

Ithastry

1. Deep Mandaic
   
2. Fucine
   
3. Kernewek Henavek
   
4. -
   
5. Glassblowing & Vesselcrafting
   
6. Spices & Savours
   
7. Stitching & Binding
   
8. Transformations & Liberations
   
9. Anbary & Lapidary

Explanations part 1

As alluded to in the intro, this setup is designed to achieve several goals:

• Evenly distributing skills to obtain 4 of each of the elements of the soul available from each branch
  
• Enable reaching the level 9 node in each branch by (in all but one case) using the branch links to skip one slot in each branch
  
• Enable up to a minimum of 7 evolutions for each element of the soul (but see "Strategies for using this Wisdom Tree" for why you may not want to use most of them)
  
• Favor higher placement for skills that are more useful for crafting
  
• All of the above should be universalize-able for all librarian starts

There are 73 skills for 81 slots, distributing everything evenly means each branch will have 8 skills with the exception of one (in this case Preservation) which will be able to fill all 9 slots. As such, in order to hit the level 9 node each branch must be able to use one of the branch links to skip a skill level. You can see most of our examples of this here:

Normally, branch nodes are opened by placing a skill in one to open the next highest. However you can see that the level 1 Bosk node has a connection to the level 2 Skolekosophy node, which means allocating a skill to the level 1 Bosk node also opens the level 2 Skolekosophy node, which allows us to access it while leaving the level 1 node blank. This works regardless of relative levels, for instance we can see that allocating the level 5 Preservation node allows us to skip level 3 Bosk by opening up its level 4.

After reviewing the skip options, I'm sticking with the skips I used in the version 2 tree for version 3, here are the important considerations:

• The starting goal was to minimize the use of downward or same-level links, but this only ended up setting a couple small decisions.
  
• Illumination, Hushery, and Preservation are the most free for decision making. Preservation will get 9 skills, so doesn't have to worry about skips.
  
• Illumination has skip options in slots 1, 2, and 6. 1 inconveniently requires 2 languages in Ithastry and 2 requires both a downward link and awkward pathing through Hushery and cuts off synergy using the link to Ithastry at 2. The 6 skip is more convenient in just about every way.
  
• Hushery has skip options in slots 1, 3, 4, and 5. The best options to preserve link synergy is 1 or 3, and 3 is my preferred option here since 1 hard requires a language in Nyctodromy and 3 allows us to preserve the option to skip Nyctodromy 1 which you might choose to because...
  
• The choices for Nyctodromy, Skolekosophy, and Bosk are interlinked; the options are either skips at Nyctodromy 6, Skolekosophy 1, and Bosk 3 or Nyctodromy 1, Skolekosophy 4, and Bosk 1. No matter which you choose we will have to give up one 1=2 link and take at least one downward skip to make either work. What decides this for me is that the Nycto 6 option forces a 5=4 downward link (at Preservation & Bosk) versus the Nycto 1 option forcing a 7=5 downward link (at Nyctodromy & Skolekosophy).
  
• Actually, either choice for Nyctodromy could be swapped for the skip at slot 3 but requires an additional downward link through Hushery.
  
• Skip choices for Birdsong, Horomachistry, and Ithastry are also interlinked like this and this one's especially ugly with lots of languages, rarer skills, and forced awkward pathing involved no matter what you do. Choice between skips at Birdsong 4, Horomachistry 1, and Ithastry 4 or skips at Birdsong 2, Horomachistry 4, and Ithastry 1. The former requires a mandatory path along Birdsong 1-3 to Horomachistry 2-5 before completely opening up and can get bottlenecked at several skills (Birdsong is especially bad for how many of the rarer skills it's stuck with), but this sequesters the languages required for Ithastry and preserves some link synergy. The latter version also requires putting more lessons into the Ithastry languages and requires less goofy bouncing around and no downward links. This is a really tough choice and I think ultimately I'm leaning towards the former because there's fewer dependencies on languages but it's also a complete dice roll if you get enough of the regular skills to make it work. If you choose you could change nothing about the tree except swap these groups of skips around and be fine.

Another detail that's useful for this kind of playthrough that you might miss normally: allocating skills opens nodes on both sides of it. You might normally think of allocating a skill as opening the node above it, but they do also open nodes below where they are allocated. For instance you can see here that level 4 Nyctodromy is connected to level 5 Hushery; in my test playthrough I was able to allocate Maggephene Mysteries before even getting Sharps, and this opened the way to allocating Inks of Power in the level 4 slot early, before getting the skip from level 3 Illumination.

I realized partway into testing version 3 that you could maybe be somewhat more flexible with where the skips are by using higher links to fill in branches downward from a higher point as described in the previous paragraph. Eyeballing it kind of quickly, I don't think you'd be able to come up with a strictly easier tree like this but someone else is welcome to take a look; I'm kind of happy with how things are at as designed now.

Wisdom Tree Skill Allocation (Version 3)

Illumination

1. Purifications & Exaltations
   
2. Pyroglyphics
   
3. Disciplines of the Scar
   
4. Glaziery & Lightsmithing
   
5. Meniscate Reflections
   
6. -
   
7. Disciplines of the Hammer
   
8. Preliminal Meter
   
9. Auroral Contemplations

Hushery

1. Ericapaean
   
2. Snow Stories
   
3. -
   
4. Maggephene Mysteries
   
5. Sharps
   
6. Glassblowing & Vesselcrafting
   
7. Serpents & Venoms
   
8. Sights & Sensations
   
9. Inks of Power

Nyctodromy

1. Vak
   
2. Hyksos
   
3. Door & Wall
   
4. Sickle & Eclipse
   
5. Pearl & Tide
   
6. -
   
7. Watchman's Paradoxes
   
8. Path & Pilgrim
   
9. Coil & Chasm

Skolekosophy

1. -
   
2. Killasimi
   
3. Rhyme & Remembrance
   
4. Horns & Ivories
   
5. Edicts Liminal
   
6. Putrefactions & Calcinations
   
7. Lockworks & Clockworks
   
8. Solutions & Separations
   
9. Ragged Crossroads

The Bosk

1. Weaving & Knotworking
   
2. Furs & Feathers
   
3. -
   
4. Desires & Dissolutions
   
5. Applebright Euphonies
   
6. Resurgences & Emergences
   
7. Orchids & Narcotics
   
8. Drums & Dances
   
9. Insects & Nectars

Preservation

1. Cracktrack
   
2. Hill & Hollow
   
3. Surgeries & Exsanguinations
   
4. Quenchings & Quellings
   
5. Tridesma Hiera
   
6. Herbs & Infusions
   
7. Edicts Inviolable
   
8. Stone Stories
   
9. Rites of the Roots

Birdsong

1. Ramsund
   
2. Sea Stories
   
3. Pentiments & Precursors
   
4. -
   
5. Wolf Stories
   
6. Sand Stories
   
7. Strings & Songs
   
8. Sky Stories
   
9. Leaves & Thorns

Horomachistry

1. -
   
2. Sabazine
   
3. Bells & Brazieries
   
4. Sacra Limiae
   
5. The Great Signs and the Great Scars
   
6. Sacra Solis Invicti
   
7. Ouranoscopy
   
8. Inks of Containment
   
9. Edicts Martial

Ithastry

1. Deep Mandaic
   
2. Fucine
   
3. Kernewek Henavek
   
4. -
   
5. Spices & Savours
   
6. Stitching & Binding
   
7. Inks of Revelation
   
8. Anbary & Lapidary
   
9. Transformations & Liberations

Explanations part 2

Here's the draft for the version 3 the tree with all my organizing notation intact:


This version has also now been put through a full playthrough, some issues are covered in Caveats part 2. I think this is the superior version of the tree. Here are some of the important differences:

• Completed a review of crafting usefulness for all skills; on the draft image, the numbers before each skill indicate my subjective, eyeballed 1-5 "craft rating" (yes, Edicts Martial is a 6). Leading symbols for some pairs of skills are tracking pairs that can be swapped between their branches and still preserve soul element allocation. Percents are tracking which skills are less common (my arbitrary cutoff was for anything below 96%).
  
• Of these swap-able pairs, only Glassblowing & Vesselcrafting and Inks of Revelations switched branches from version 2 to 3.
  
• I spent a lot of time pondering over skips but ultimately ended up keeping things the same from the previous version.
  
• Additional goals for this tree include ensuring there's a diversity of principles at the high levels, mitigating skill rarity, and trying to design for more explicit flexibility.
  
• To that end, many skills with the same craft rating can be swapped if desired, but a lot did end up getting placed somewhat deliberately within the same number rating. I maybe should have made it a 10 point scale.
  
• By sheer coincidence I ended up getting languages in the same order for each branch.
  
• Meniscate Reflections, Maggephene Mysteries, Pearl & Tide, and Furs & Feathers were placed in "dump slots" that are less critical and can be bypassed if they're not showing up. These can be swapped (usually downwards) if you get them early enough. Else, low chance skills were placed later in the tree among their craft rating with the assumption this will give you more time to acquire them and can be swapped as desired if you get them early.
  
• There were a few big changes within-branch. Disciplines of the Scar and Hammer swapped positions, as did Sea and Sky Stories, and Sacra Solis Invicti and Limiae did as well. Lockworks & Clockworks and Ouranoscopy clearly needed to be much higher. Watchman's Paradoxes, Ragged Crossroads, Orchids & Narcotics, Leaves & Thorns, and Pentiments & Precursors et al. all got big bumps up; likewise Sickle & Eclipse, Edicts Liminal, Horns & Ivories, and Weaving & Knotworking all got big downgrades.

Caveats part 1

The biggest problem in playing with a strictly set wisdom tree is book RNG with regards to finding every unique skill in the first place. Languages are a luck problem too, though there it's more of a direct problem in terms of landing the right visitors (and having the available spintriae) compared to hoping enough of the right books spawn in your library in the first place. Lessons seem to be flexible enough (especially if you abuse one or two Numas) that once you have the skills, teasing out their levels is pretty smooth. Deciding what to use lessons on can get to be complicated but I'll give a few pointers in the next section.

Despite all the below discussion on uncatalogued books and skills, regardless of how it shakes out you are very unlikely to finish slotting everything in the tree without having to spend a decent amount of time in the Oriflamme's "post game"--there simply aren't enough lessons in the house to get there.

There are 281 books, of those you are guaranteed to find 16 in every playthrough (Travelling at Night volumes 1 & 2, the Journal of Sir David Greene 1903, and all the Numens) and 6 cannot be obtained until you've exhausted their source period completely including from Oriflamme's (1 for every period plus an Oriflamme's one). You will eventually find 161 uncatalogued books, or 156 effectively, if you're hanging on to 1 uncatalogued book of each period (see the first point in "Other general tips" for why you'd do this, in a nutshell you can't obtain every book without doing this) and the ratio for each period looks like this (excluding static sources):

Period	Uncatalogued total	Period total	% of period recovered per playthrough	# that must be bought via Oriflamme's
Dawn	28	51	55%	23
Solar	29	47	62%	18
Baronial	32	57	56%	25
Curia	40	68	59%	28
Nocturnal	32	36	89%	4

Which means if you wish to acquire all of the books in a single playthrough you will need to purchase 98 books from Oriflamme's to complete the collection (or 104 books if we include en route to one of each of the Multitudinous books). Fun fact: I purchased 6 before I ran out of uncatalogued books in my version 2 playthrough, which means at 6 minutes per season at 6x speed I'll have spent a minimum of 9 additional hours just passing time to finish the collection, not accounting for having an appropriate spintria income and not including seasons when the Oriflamme's deck gets refreshed which causes it to skip a sale.

Since book RNG doesn't have no bearing on playing things out, version 3 of my wisdom tree will have tried to take into account how difficult it is to get certain skills (I've done the math since the earliest drafts of this, see next paragraph). For instance the last two normal skills I got in my version 2 test playthrough were Surgeries & Exsanguinations and Putrefactions & Calcinations, which respectively are only found in 4 and 3 specific books. I never even found the latter until a little ways into hitting the waiting-for-Oriflamme's post-game. (Putrefactions & Calcinations was one of the first skills I received on my first playthrough, and one of the last skills I got on that playthrough, Wolf Stories, came with my journal this time!)

Having done the probability shenanigans, it turns out the worst skills only have ~10% chance of not being discovered before you run out of uncatalogued books. I calculated the odds assuming you're withholding one of each uncatalogued (so if you're not the odds are marginally better), the worst offender is Furs & Feathers with a ~9.5% of not being discovered, with an odd 3-way tie for second place at ~9.15% for Serpents & Venoms, Sky Stories, and Wolf Stories. Spread across 73 skills it sort of makes sense that you might average 1-2 missing by the end.

Quite a few have very high odds of being found, especially Nocturnal books (1 source is already an 86% chance of finding it, 2 brings it up to 98%). Of the skills without a guaranteed source (14 skills, by the way), 34 have >95% chance, 23 have >98%. The highest-chance-to-find non-guaranteed skill is Preliminal Meter which has a ~0.0006% chance of being missed (has 9 sources, 4 of which are Nocturnal period meaning all of the Nocturnal books you don't get have to be Preliminal Meter sources for this to even be a remote possibility).

Keep in mind none of this is a guarantee when you'll find any given skill, just the likelihood of finding it before examining your last uncatalogued book.

Chances are you'll end up bottlenecked at several points in the tree, but I'm mostly confident you'll never be so severely blocked off that you won't be able to work through it. The flip side of this is that once the missing pieces fall into place you'll often get windfalls of 3-4 new soul elements all at once.

My (first) test playthrough had trouble getting Horomachistry and Birdsong going, similarly Bosk had trouble getting off the ground since my Preservation was slow to develop. Hushery, Nyctodromy, and Ithastry were all fine; the latter popping off by virtue of connections enabling me to work downward from higher in the tree despite being blocked off by 3 languages. Illumination was stuck at Glaziery & Lightsmithing for a time but that eventually resolved itself. You may or may not have similar issues by virtue of the connections being static. After reviewing the skips and links it seems like Birdsong, Horomachistry, and Ithastry are always going to have a tough time for reasons outlined in the Explanations section. Again, later versions of the tree will have tried to account for this.

The last thing I'll note here is that if you don't mind adjusting how things are placed on the fly you can easily swap specific placements around within a branch without losing much. Since they can't be used for crafting, languages were placed in a purely arbitrary order where there's more than one of them per branch--you can and should plug them in interchangeably as soon as possible once you get them. Most skills in the 4-5 or lower range are there because they're not useful for crafting and can probably be safely swapped (for example, the entire 3-5 order of skills for Preservation was arbitrary when designing this tree). I'd gauge this is also probably true for skills in the 6-7+ ranges as well since by the time you're comfortably doing Scholar/Keeper recipes you'll have options for covering many shortfalls.

The second major problem is that the early game is a little bit slower than it might be otherwise if you were to be more liberal with lower level allocations. For the most part this is fine since you'll be waiting on languages a lot early on anyways. Expect to spend lots of time with fewer elements of the soul and to take longer to have a healthy amount of each one. You can mitigate this some by using the Sweet Bones to cycle soul elements. Unlocking rooms will also be a little tight but press on because having more books will be what alleviates everything.

Caveats part 2

I wrote all of the above but my version 3 playthrough ran into an awkward early game problem where I was progressing the mansion too quickly for how many soul elements I had, and was getting a big backlog of uncatalogued books in the early/mid game. (Though disclaimer: by this point I'm extremely familiar with the game's mechanics and the house's resources.) I've had to stop a few times just to catch up on all the accumulated books, caches, and spare drink packets I'd been amassing. It's been a good problem to have though, and it's worth reiterating what speeds the game up generally is simply having access to more books. Chief problem has still been finding the right skills as I need them.

The "problem" of unlocking rooms too fast followed through past the mid game, though there's a lower density of uncatalogued books past the middle section of the mansion. Getting early-ish access to the Sun Disfigured along with Mrs Kille enables some easy 2-rooms-per-day shenanigans that would otherwise be kind of tricky. Needing to slow down at any point here was more a matter of juggling memories to level skills into the upper levels versus getting books completed. This playthrough finished the mansion and ran out of uncatalogued books before I hit my second Numa, whereas both my previous playthroughs would've hit "endgame" around or after the third.

My version 3 test playthrough also got really badly stuck at Horomachistry but this was mostly bad luck versus poor planning. By the time I finished unlocking the house I was missing two skills: Bells & Brazeries and Serpents & Venoms (plus one language: Hyksos). Not having Bells & Brazeries locked down my Horomachistry and post-skip-Birdsong-and-Ithastry branches for basically the entire run. Ironically, it's a "guaranteed" skill but it's guaranteed by one of the Numens in literally the last room I unlocked (not including the guaranteed lessons from the Numen it's a 91.1% chance of finding from uncatalogued sources, so maybe this is a little bit of poor planning). By the time I got it and had it leveled to slot, I had another 7 (!) skills behind it ready to go for Horomachistry, Birdsong, and Ithastry.

For what it's worth, up to that point I was still very healthy in elements of the soul both in terms of quantity and evolutions (and again I was full speed through the entire mansion and most of my books the whole time). Just after opening the last room my elements looked like this:

Not perfect but "healthy". Missing two skills (and Serpents & Venoms was another of the high-risk "rare" skills at 90.8% per run) and one language by this point seems to be on par--was the same 2 skills (Surgeries & Exsanguinations received very late and Putrefactions & Calcinations in the "post-game") and 1 language (Kernewek Henavek--both again as expected by rarity; Hyksos, Kernewek Henavek, and Ericapaean are all only available from 1 Numa and 1 non-Numa visitor) by around this point for my version 2 playthrough. At least in this case, the version 3 tree did well enough at mitigating the problems this can cause.

Another problem I noticed testing the v3 tree that might beg some future problem solving is that organizing the upper branches around the most useful crafting skills means they come online kind of late, more or less past the earlier points where they'd be most useful. I don't know if this calls for yet another revision but it's not out of the realm of possibility. Most of the most useful early game crafts have viable alternatives available, subject to the same book RNG everything else is.

Strategies for using this Wisdom Tree

-You can get a head start on collecting languages if you can make it to the Grand Ascent - Ground Floor before the first season change; the Delightful Repose couch there has a Bronze Spintria hidden within.

-Keep notes on which Wisdom Tree nodes are open and which skills are queued to be leveled to fit the lowest nodes that are still closed (ie also be working towards skills for slots that are not yet open), but also be trying to level a couple skills for high level slots because in the early game you'll also want to have some high principle skills available to keep the books rolling. Balancing this with leveling skills to fit in all the low level slots is another tricky part of the early game.

-When it comes to evolutions, my basic recommendation is to raise one element of each type up to the highest level you can and keep everything else at the base level. This ensures you have as many available actions as possible while still having juiced up principles available. Before evolving I like to make sure I'll have at least 1 base level element left, and when evolving to ++ or higher that I have access to enough evolutions to get there without having an intermediate level left over. Here are some examples of what I mean:

• Depending on circumstances, either evolve the first + as soon as you have an evolution available or at 3 base elements.
  
• Evolve ++ when you have a + and 3 base elements, and two evolutions available
  
• You can pretty comfortably stop at ++ (this wisdom tree setup can let you get one of each +++ in a single game but obviously this leaves you with very few total elements of the soul) but the pattern would continue with evolving +++ at 5 base elements and 3 evolutions available

-Cycling elements of the soul through the Sweet Bones (the bar) can be very useful and profitable, especially early game. Each minute of manual labor gives sixpence but recovering fatigued soul elements only costs tuppence (plus 1 minute each as well).

-There's a handful of things you can savescum and while I don't have a full grasp of how you can manipulate everything cleanly, I do recommend saving before cataloging batches of uncatalogued books if dealing with contaminations would be inconvenient. Also, for ensuring Contraband Jetsam gives Box of Rarities if you're trying to find a Yellowing Newspaper.

-Early access to the Sun Disfigured and Mrs Kille (especially if you can get her for free, still probably worth it with the extra shilling but you'll have to watch your funds) can turbocharge room progress in the mid game since there's a bunch of Grail rooms in the 8-12 range that makes it viable to use her instead of/in addition to the hired assistants.

Other general tips

-Very important: If you're trying to collect all books in one playthrough, the bug/design oversight preventing the period-specific Multitudinous (ie "infinites") books from (presumably being intended to be) spawning (and respawning endlessly) from Oriflamme's still exists (as of 3/10/24). The workaround for this is to hang on to an uncatalogued book for each period until you've exhausted that period from Oriflamme's. I'll have to start a fresh playthrough to test this myself but from what I understand the individual Uncatalogued Books decks all contain each Multitudinous book as a default draw if there's no other options to draw, but the Oriflamme's draw pool does not contain those books, and so you'll get one copy of the Multitudinous book by cataloging that one final uncatalogued book once you've used Oriflamme's to exhaust the period's deck.

-Keep notes on everything and consider starting your own spreadsheets; the game very much wants you to do this and I believe doing so really adds to the experience.

-I like to use the Reading Room as my memory generation catalogue. Bookshelf labels help tremendously. I try to avoid books that need a language card for convenience and only keep one or two books for each memory, plus or minus phonograph records for some since there's a phonograph nearby. I like to set it up like this:

1. Contradiction: Edge 2, Moon 1
   Foresight: Forge 2, Lantern 1
   
2. Satisfaction: Grail 2, Heart 1
   Beguiling Melody: Grail 2, Sky 2
   
3. Storm: Heart 2, Sky 2
   Solace: Heart 2, Sky 1
   
4. Cheerful Ditty: Heart 2, Sky 1
   
5. Pattern: Knock 2, Forge 1
   Secret Threshold: Knock 2, Rose 1
   
6. Salt: Knock 1, Moon 1, Winter 1
   A Stolen Secret: Moon 2, Knock 1
   
7. Intuition: Moon 2, Rose 2
   Confounding Parable: Moon 2, Rose 2, Sky 2
   
8. Gossip: Rose 2, Grail 1
   
9. Impulse: Moth 2, Nectar 1
   
10. Fear: Scale 2, Edge 1
    
11. Savage Hymn: Scale 2, Sky 2
    Earth-Sign: Nectar 2, Scale 2
    (Both of these only have two possible books, one for Savage Hymn needs a language so I prefer the other one if available)
    
12. Hindsight: Winter 2, Scale 1
    Regret: Winter 2, Forge 1
    
13. Bittersweet Certainty: Winter 2, Lantern 1
    Revelation: Lantern 2
    
14. Basket of Towels -- Use with Swimming at Crosscrow Sands or Boathouse (must use Health) to generate Salt and Solace for 1 minute, plus a Basket of Damp Towels which automatically reverts back to Basket of Towels every morning. The mansion comes with two of these, one in Infirmary and one in Stores, once the Boathouse is available I usually put the second in the Hermit Cell directly adjacent for convenience.
    
15. Hush House Key -- You'll recover this randomly from gathering after using it; place here, consider for a non-consumable source of Sound
    
16. Swaddled Thunder -- Craft one of these, place it here, consider for a non-consumable source of Storm weather
    
17. Yellowing Newspaper -- Consider for Occult Scrap
    
18. Imposing Reading Armchair or Ambrose's Favourite Chair -- Consider either chair here for a non-consumable source of Touch
    
19. 'Dr Serena Blackwood' -- Consider for a non-consumable source of Sight
    
20. Paradise Palm -- Consider for a non-consumable source of Scent

-I use a similar setup for Numens with the Vestibulum Transitus:

1. Merciless Alteration
   Edge 5, Forge 5, Grail 5
   
2. The Bells of Ys
   Edge 5, Forge 5, Rose 5
   
3. Weaving the World
   Heart 5, Moon 5, Nectar 5
   
4. Loopholes
   Knock 5, Moon 5, Moth 5
   
5. The Great Counterfeit
   Lantern 5, Moon 5, Nectar 5
   
6. Back Into Balance
   Heart 5, Sky 5, Winter 5
   
7. The Sun's Weakness
   Grail 5, Lantern 5, Moth 5
   
8. The Paths of the Sun
   Forge 5, Knock 5, Lantern 5
   
9. Three Rules
   Heart 5, Moth 5, Scale 5
   
10. That Old Lost Music
    Rose 5, Scale 5, Sky 5
    
11. An Irresistible Feast
    Edge 5, Grail 5, Nectar 5
    
12. Inescapable Confinement: Knock 5, Scale 5, Winter 5
    A Final Understanding: Rose 5, Sky 5, Winter 5

-When looking at what to use Lessons on I tend to look at which among the candidates is of the principle with fewer skills and prefer those, occasionally using Lessons with common principles like Sky or Moon for when I need something raised up more urgently. For reference:

Principle	w/ languages	w/o languages
Edge	9	8
Moth	10	8
Heart	10	9
Grail	10	9
Winter	9	7
Knock	11	9
Lantern	11	8
Rose	7	6
Sky	17	16
Moon	20	19
Forge	10	8
Nectar	10	9
Scale	12	10

-Days are 6 minutes.
-Seasons are 6 days.
-Visitors show up on the first day of a season.
-Oriflamme's offers books on the third day of a season.

-Here are some of the most useful Prentice recipes, all of which require no intermediate components, just a relevant skill and enough principle to hit 5:
Consider stockpiling some of these if you have spare soul elements near the end of a day.

-I don't want to insert a comprehensive guide for dealing with Numa (see here[book-of-hours.fandom.com]), though I will recommend aiming to break level 4 skills to have a little breathing room instead of minmaxing the 5s--not strictly necessary. Also, try to track potential Numa from the start of your game since it gets trickier to figure out where in the deck you are mid-run. The game is cycling a 9-card deck with 1 Numa and 8 Not-Numa every season. Be wary about hanging on to lessons across season changes if there's an upcoming potential Numa. {Speculative: I think the first season or the season directly after a Numa doesn't draw a card. One or both of these aren't true since my efforts to track Numa in my third playthrough were slightly off.}

Originally posted by ForestMagi:

Contaminations DO spread, but only via infected Soul cards, so you can safely leave contaminated books wherever you like; I've tested this pretty extensively, by leaving contaminated books next to uncontaminated books and objects for multiple years, through Numa, and so on. The contamination never spread by mere contact.

If a book has a contamination that says it will spread, trying to read that book with one of the Soul cards it can infect will Malady that Soul card and tag it with that contamination; if you then use that Maladied Soul card to read another book, it will pass the contamination to that new book.

My Public Notes/Spreadsheet

[public] Book of Hours notes[docs.google.com]

Snapshot copy of my notes as of 3/29/24, just past the finished phase of my third playthrough. If you'd like to use the checklists or alter for your own use, go to File -> Make a copy

Some features:

• Both Wisdom Tree versions, as presented in this guide
  
• Complete book listing (including a recently discovered secret book, pending others I guess), with everything you'd want to know about them
  
• Extensive Room and Item notes
  
• Crafting lists by result and by skill
  
• Scattered collections of descriptions for skills, rooms, items, memories, et al. in various states of completion; the Rooms tab is basically done, Items is mostly complete except for consumables, Incidents are still being worked on, everything else are missing random bits of things I haven't gone out of my way to encounter
  
• My skill analysis including descriptions (the wisdom allocation fluff is still incomplete), notes, and calculations
  
• The previously posted spoiler-light room unlocking map
  
• Some random notes
  
• A primary set of checklists and a clean backup copy

Changelog

-3/6/24: Published the first draft.
-3/10/24: Added in a first copy of my public notes, in the early planning stages for a theoretical third playthrough; completed a review of the Wisdom Tree slot skips and added my findings; did my best to wrap my head around the probability problems with regards to discovery odds for every skill and added those findings as well
-3/11/24: Completed an analysis of the Skills for crafting usefulness and put everything together for my planned version 3 Wisdom Tree, now pending another playthrough for testing; included a draft copy in the guide
-3/15/24: Ran out of space and had to spin off the two subsections of Important Notes into their own proper chapters
-3/19/24: Had to split the Caveats section into two parts as well, starting to drip in notes on my playthrough using the version 3 tree.
-3/26/24: Am mostly wrapped on the test run of the version 3 tree and incorporated it properly into the guide; might continue on with the goal now to collect Incident lore. The last thing to do now is to clean up my notes and create a quasi-final public copy. Overall I'm pretty happy with where things are at.
-3/29/24: Made an updated public copy of my spreadsheet
-6/26/24: Made some small tweaks but also noticed the Tree of OCDs got removed from the main wiki page so I did a little digging to just flat insert it into it's own section of this guide.

[JDCollie]

Just a note, if you are stuck trying to get a language, you can accelerate the chances of getting a new visitor by manually inviting guests you know that have aspects relevant to the current event, rather than waiting for them to visit you naturally.

Obviously it can get a bit ink-expensive prior to getting one of the typewriters, but it really helps both with finding languages and buffing your visitor pool for setting up salons.

[Moggstor]

Hello SCPantera,

Thank you so much for this work. I tried following your assignment, but there were things about it that was bugging me, so I decided to start with your assignments as a baseline, then switch skills around. My pain points were:

I don't like skips on the lower rings of the tree. This is where skills go in the early game, and early game is where it is most critical to assign skills to get more elements of the soul (because you have so few of them). Furthermore, it also leads to more level ups overall.

I also have my own preferences for which skills are high tier and which are low tier, and of course I want to reserve the highest spots in the tree for the skills I was going to level to 9 regardless.

I ended up with the assignment here https://imgur.com/a/RtXSyEF

It is only because of your assignment as the foundation that I could make my own that suited my preferences better, so thank you so much for your work.

[sooshee]

This was great, thank you! Used this guide and your spreadsheet to max my wisdom trees on my second playthrough

Oddly enough, I still haven't managed to learn kernewek henavek haha but I sidestepped that nicely using the skips

(my first one was a mess because i'd gone in blind, obviously)

[Frostygale]

Wish i found this guide sooner; I've been going for the "slot a max level skill into the max level slot" achievements, and I'm aiming to get them all in one run, but I've totally slotted in some easy-to-level skills too soon, and I'm left with a bunch of hard-to-level stuff i need to get up high in the tree. On the bright side, I've skipped like...9 slots I think? So hopefully I can still achieve my goal with some intense Numa skill shenanigans.

[SCPantera]

Nah, no need to wait, languages are interchangeable within the same branch.

[Ithos]

Lucked out and got Hyksos early-ish. Is there any reason to wait for Vak, or are those two interchangable? don't recall any terribly hard late-game books needing a small lvl2 aspect boost

[Teagana]

Omg Hyksos was so hard to get. Held me back from the victory I wanted for quite a while because I couldn't read the Child's Treasury of Golden Afternoons. I'm excited to try the guide and be more methodical in the next playthrough, as well as more judicious with my spintria budget.

[SCPantera]

I'm also still of the opinion that you don't really need to put that much effort into minmaxing Numa; it's only essential if you've totally boned things up, and if you're savvy enough to figure out how to squeeze that much out of it you're probably not getting things boned up bad enough to need it. I still think you should try to pop and use a level 4 skill as much as you can but I don't necessarily think it's worth stressing over which.

(Quenchings & Quelling's most useful aspect is for purging Chionic Theoplasma but that doesn't require it to be committed either.)

[SCPantera]

The worst languages IMO are Ericapaean and Kernewek Henavek; not only are both available from only a single Numa and non-Numa visitor, that one non-Numa visitor is Yvette Southey who teaches both (which means of the incidents she shows up for you only get a choice of one of those--and you don't even get to pick!). Hyksos is technically the worst by number-of-possible-incidents metrics at only 6 of the 22 normal incidents (Ericapaean and Henavek are tied for second worst here with 8).

I didn't care enough to get granular wrt incidents where multiple tutors for the same language can appear but inasmuch as we're using chance-per-incident that's where things stack up. Ramsund is statistically one of the easier languages to get.

[SCPantera]

I was so sure your assertion wrt Ramsund was intuitively incorrect that I went and ran the numbers on everything. Ramsund is (by my count) available in 14 incidents which is tied with two others (Fucine & Killasimi) for the language(s) most available by percentage of all normal incidents--everything else is available in fewer normal incidents. Those three I named here are also tied for the highest number of normal visitors that can teach the language (plus also Deep Mandaic, which also wins overall since there's 1 Numa tutor).