Death happens when the HP of a character or a monster reaches 0. For a character it is a setback rather than an ending: a tombstone appears where they fell, with their head hovering above it, and they choose whether to return to the nearest town or stay where they are and wait for a revive.
The cost is experience. A character who dies loses up to 10% of the experience bar towards their next level.
Character death
Most deaths happen while training or fighting a boss, and there are only a few things in the game that can actually kill you.
- Monster attacks. Physical and magic damage from monsters, including contact damage from simply touching one. See Damage for how the numbers are worked out.
- Damage over time. Poison and similar effects continue to tick after the attack that applied them has finished.
- The cold. 21 maps in the El Nath mountains drain 10 HP from anyone standing on them, over and over, whether or not anything is attacking. A character who walks into them without potions can die to the map itself. See Environmental hazards.
- Falling. Fall damage scales with the distance fallen. The damage cap and distance thresholds have not been confirmed.
The experience penalty
Dying costs up to 10% of the experience bar towards the next level.
The penalty cannot cost a level. If a character has less than 10% of the bar filled when they die, the bar is emptied to 0 rather than dropping them back to the previous level. That makes the moments just after a level-up the cheapest time to die, and the moments just before the next one the most expensive.
Monster death
Monsters die the same way, when their HP reaches 0, and it is the core loop of the game. A dying monster can award experience, drop a random amount of mesos, and drop items from its drop table.
How much experience a monster is worth is set entirely by its level, and bosses award exactly four times the standard figure for theirs. The Training guide works through what that means for choosing where to train, since two monsters of the same level are always worth the same and differ only in how much HP you have to remove.
Not every monster dies to damage alone. A monster's knockback threshold decides whether your hits interrupt it on the way down, and its elemental resistances decide how much of your damage lands in the first place. A monster immune to your element cannot be killed by it at all.