Every PMC has a number of skills, each providing a number of benefits to their abilities such as increasing carry weight, reducing stamina usage, and reducing weapon recoil. As you level up these skills, the benefits increase until you level the skill to elite level, capping out the benefits and giving you a more powerful bonus.
Metabolism Skill Effects
- Increasing the effect of food and drink
- Decreasing the speed at which you lose energy and hydration
- Reducing the speed at which you forget physical skills
Once you manage to get your Metabolism to Elite Level, or level 51, you gain two Elite bonuses.
- Zero chance of dehydration and exhaustion effects
- Physical Skills are no longer forgettable
Note that even though it indicates that the skill reduces the speed or completely prevents Physical Skills from being forgotten, skill level decay was removed in Patch 0.8.0.1208, but may be added again in a later patch with changes.
While it may not be the most beneficial of skills in combat or the grand scheme of the game, in extended raids in which you run down your energy and hydration by running around or using medical supplies, you may feel the benefit of having a greater Metabolism level.
Leveling Metabolism
If you’re simply playing along with the game and upgrading your hideout, you may notice that in order to upgrade your Nutrition Unit to level 3 you’ll need to have your Metabolism skill at level 3. If you’re looking to upgrade your Intelligence Station and then get a Scav Case, you’ll need to upgrade your Nutrition Unit, and thus you’ll need to level your Metabolism.
To actually level your Metabolism, you’ll have to consume food and drink while in raid. Don’t go trying to just bring a backpack of food and water into a raid, as you’ll need to at least restore some points of Energy or Hydration in order to actually gain any experience for the skill.
The best way to level the skill is to just eat and drink any food or liquids that you can when you pick it up in raid. This might take a while, but if you aren’t looking to just grind your skill to Elite level, you’ll at least gain some of the benefits for leveling the Metabolism skill if you do this consistently.
If you really want to grind out the skill levels though, it is possible to do so, though it may cut into your cash reserves.
Food items and certain medical supplies such as painkillers or morphine may reduce your energy and hydration by a fixed amount, or give you a debuff that drains your energy and hydration.
One such example is the Combat Stimulant Injector SJ1 TGLabs, which grants you a buff for 100 seconds, then applies a debuff for 200 seconds that drains your energy and hydration by a small amount per second.
If you want to grind out your skills, then you can drop into raid with a few of these items that decrease your hydration or energy, and consume them to reduce those numbers before consuming something else to bring them back up.
This may also take a long time and a lot of roubles, but you’ll be getting skill points much faster than if you just ate food whenever you found it in raid.
Good luck leveling your skills, and good luck in the city of Tarkov.
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