How to Respec in Salt and Sacrifice – Reset your Skill Tree Points / Nodes

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Covers all ways to respec in Salt and Sacrifice! How to reset or redo your skill points when you’ve made a mistake or changed your mind on a skill or build when using a Black Starstone on a level up skill node.

How to Reset / Respec in Salt and Sacrifice

Salt and Sacrifice, similar to Dark Souls and many action RPG games, gives you one skill point every time you level up.  In Salt and Sacrifice, you are also given one “undo” point as well every 5 levels. These are called Gray Starstones, while the regular Level-up items are called Black Starstones. You’ll receive a Gray Starstone in addition to the normal Black Starstone at Level 5, 10, 15, and so on.

You can use Gray Starstones on the same Skill Tree screen as you use Black Starstones. Just hover over the node you want to undo and press the button indicated at the bottom of the window.

Can You Respec in Salt & Sacrifice? (Full Reset?)

Unfortunately the limited number of Gray Starstones mentioned above are the extent of respecing in Salt and Sacrifice. There’s no method in the game to completely reset all skill points all at once.

How to Get Gray Starstones in Salt and Sacrifice? How Many Gray Starstones Do You Get?

You automatically receive a Gray Starstone every 5 levels when you level up. It’s safe to say you’ll have about 15 or 20 of these “undo items” total in a normal playthrough (many players are saying they finish the game around level 80-100 roughly.) There’s no way to farm more Gray Starstones as a random drop, find as a hidden treasure, in a chest, or anything along those lines.

How Best to Use Gray Starstones in Salt and Sacrifice

The ideal way to use Gray Starstones to reset a node on the skill tree would be to decide on a change fairly early on in your game, before you’ve used more than say 10 or 15 levels in nodes that you don’t want to keep. Say you started with Highblades, but decided you wanted to use Staves instead. Early on you’ll only have a couple points invested so you’ll be able to completely undo your “mistake” by about level 25.

If you don’t use your Gray Starstones during your game they will just be wasted, so keep this in mind before starting over completely. The game is designed for you to change your mind a little early on. At that point, you can just think of Gray Starstones as gaining a bonus level up every 5 levels.

The Workarounds for Respecing in Salt and Sacrifice – Other Options

  1. Test out weapons before spending Black Starstones: Salt and Sacrifice may not offer much of a respec option, however you can try out any weapons you find or craft against dummies, and see how you like their attack speed, range, moveset, appearance and so on. Weapons that you don’t have the skill node / point unlocked will have a red X on the icon however you can still equip these weapons and try them out against dummies in town, or weak enemies etc. They will do reduced damage however, so it may not be worth it to try using them in a real fight.
  2. Don’t worry too much about it! You should get enough skill points in a normal playthrough to test out several arms of the Skill Node Tree in Salt and Sacrifice. By mid-game you may want to make up your mind and focus on just one or two weapon types in order to be as powerful as possible, but play the game how you want.
  3. Another alternative: don’t go past Class 1 or 2 in a given weapon type, until you’re sure you want to stick with it for the whole game. You can delay unlocking Class 2, Class 3 and higher until you’re sure you like a weapon type. Instead you can invest in Armor, Endurance, or just hold the points in reserve for a while.
  4. Create a new character – If you’re only a couple of hours in, you could always make a new character. For example you could try a mage type instead of a fighter. This will start you out with different skill nodes and weapons so you can try out a different play style and starting weapon right away. If you decide to stick with the new character, you’ll be able to catch up pretty quickly since you already know the controls and don’t need to explore the first areas quite as much.

 

An Ideal Level Up / Respec System – Thoughts

Elden Ring, and to a limited extent other Dark Souls, Souls-like and similar games have been offering a great mechanic that allows a player to reset all their skill points. There are usually limitations imposed, such as needing to find a rare item that may be a very rare drop, or only appear a certain number of times in your game. In my opinion that is the perfect balance between giving the player a sense of building up a permanent character, with each level-up decision having a big impact, but at the same time allowing just a little bit of leniency for the player to change their mind or experiment with multiple playstyles.

Personally I do wish Salt and Sacrifice had implemented some sort of system like that to allow one or two full respecs in your playthrough, but I do respect the developer’s decision to forge their own path with their game. The game is not as long as something like Elden Ring, so a full second playthrough as a different build is also a much more realistic possibility here.

Full Respec Option Added in a Salt and Sacrifice Patch in the Future?

Unfortunately, don’t hold your breath on this. If Salt and Sacrifice is anything like Salt and Sanctuary, nothing major will be changed in future patches. It’s a small team of 1-2 developers, and the previous game did not have any major changes, updates, or even DLC after release. If anything is to be re-worked, most likely it would be in a sequel – for example multiplayer was added in Salt and Sacrifice which was not present in Salt and Sanctuary.

Thoughts?

I’ve been trying out a Dexterity / Highblade build and an Arcana / Channeling Rod & Staves build so far in my time with Salt and Sacrifice. I played through Salt and Sanctuary with a heavy weapon build so I wanted to try something different here.

Leave a comment below with your favorite Salt and Sacrifice build!

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