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I once saw someone in an Arena stream chat say something about a jump in level numbers, and I think someone also mentioned it in an UESP forum post, but I forget the details and can't find that post, so I decided to make a thread.

In my current playthrough, I'm going through all 32 cities of each province in order and exploring a 6x6 square around each city, which means I've been acquiring a lot of experience. At the moment I'm in Summurset Isle and have been at Level 27 for a very long time. Yesterday I leveled up while exploring a wilderness dungeon. and instead of increasing to Level 28 my character jumped to Level 31. Also, instead of being given the usual half-dozen or less points to allocate, my character got a whopping 21 points!

I created this thread so Arena players can document their experiences with this "glitch," in order to get a clearer idea of what players can expect.

Is it always a jump from Level 27 to Level 31, or can the level numbers vary?

And what about the increased number of points for allocation? It looks like the usual level-up numbers may have been multiplied by 4, either by a routine that was executed 4 times or by values that were bit-shifted by 2 places, but those are only guesses:

Level 31 - 27 = 4, and 4 / 4 = 1 (the usual number)
Allocation points = 21 (in my case), and 21 / 4 = 5.25 (close to the usual number)

And finally, does this glitch recur during any subsequent level-ups, or is it a one-time thing?

I may eventually gain enough experience to level up my character again, and if I do, I'll add to this thread.

I just leveled up again, much much much sooner than I would have expected, jumping from Level 31 to Level 41. (!!!) I was given 44 bonus points to distribute.

Edit: Everything seems to hit much much harder than expected. My Force Wall spell gets taken out quickly, and each hit that damages me takes out a goodly chunk of my health, especially considering that I now have (IIRC) 424 maximum Hit Points. I haven't checked after each hit to see how many Hit Points I'm losing, but with a maximum of 424 anything that causes my health bar to drop by several pixels must correspond to a sizeable number of Hit Points. As expected with such a large number of maximum Hit Points, it is now taking more potions of Heal True to recover my Hit Points.

I just leveled up again, this time from Level 41 to Level 67. I received 125 Bonus Points to distribute and gained a lot of hit points.

To summarize what I've seen so far, the level-ups beyond Level 27 appear to be as follows:

Level 27 --> Level 31 (+4 levels)
Bonus Points*: 21 (or 5.25 * 4)

Level 31 --> Level 41 (+10 levels)
Bonus Points*: 44 (or 4.4 * 10)

Level 41 --> Level 67 (+26 levels)
Bonus Points*: 126 (or 4.8 * 26)

* I realize that the number of Bonus Points received is random, so the numbers shown are just to illustrate that the number of Bonus Points appears to be multiplied by the number of levels gained-- or x4, x10, and x26, versus the usual x1 increase.

My Health is now 692 maximum hit points, whereas my Health at Level 41 was 424 maximum hit points, so I gained 268 hit points. I didn't keep track of my Health at previous levels, and my Health is undoubtedly a lot higher than most player characters would be due to the fact that Endurance is always the first stat I max out.

The bad news for me-- besides the fact that everything hits like a ton of bricks-- is that I can't afford to level up any more, because all but two of my stats are maxed out at 100, and the remaining two are now at 66 each, so I can distribute only 68 more Bonus Points, which is surely a lot less than I'll be given at my next level-up, and from what I've read you cannot exit out of the level-up screen until you've distributed all of your Bonus Points.

I don't believe it, but I just leveled up AGAIN, less than 24 hours after the last time. o_O

Level 67 --> Level 163 (+96 levels)
Bonus Points: 54
Health: 692 --> 4390 (+3698 hit points)

If I'd received more than 68 Bonus Points, I wouldn't have been able to distribute all of them and exit out of the level-up screen, so I'm very grateful that I received only a "paltry" 54 Bonus Points. It looks like maybe I "should" have received as many as 576 Bonus Points (or 6 * 96) but the data field doesn't use enough bits for that. Assuming that "rollover" occurs at 512 Bonus Points, it looks like maybe I would have received 566 Bonus Points (or 5.8958 * 96), which would definitely have locked up my game.

My Health is now so high that it takes well over a dozen Heal True potions to heal up.

I leveled up again, but I got lucky. I don't know if the game will give you no more Bonus Points than you can distribute, but I got 14, which was exactly enough to increase my two remaining stats to 100. That means if I level up again, I'll be in trouble if my Bonus Points aren't 0.

Level 163 --> Level 209 (+46 levels)
Bonus Points: 14
Health: 4390 --> 23818 (+19428 hit points)

What I said before about everything hitting like a ton of bricks was misleading, because even though each hit takes a lot of hit points, I've got so many hit points that my Health bar goes down only a tiny bit. In the Vaults of Gemin I was able to deal with all of the hellhounds, homunculi, wraiths, and stone golems without having to constantly worry about healing up or casting force wall. I sold my beloved Ring of Force Wall because it's worthless to me now, since everything just rips through the force wall and takes it out in one hit. My Potions of Heal True (2000 of them) are also worthless for the most part, since it would probably take hundreds of them to recover my Health. Fortunately, resting restores my Health pretty quickly; I haven't tested it to see how many hit points a single hour of resting restores, but it must be a lot, since half a dozen or so hours of rest were enough to restore my Health when I had 4390 maximum hit points.

I've been skipping all of the things I would normally be doing, such as exploring the wilderness, doing quests for the city rulers, and clearing out the entire map of each main quest dungeon from top to bottom. Even so, I leveled up again so soon after having hit Level 163 that I'm expecting to do it again a few more times before I can finish the game. The game was starting to act buggy in Vaults of Gemin-- locking up when I tried to rest and it triggered a dream-sending from Jagar Than-- so I'm having to save more frequently now.

Hey I saw this and I wanted to test it by myself, i edited the amount of experience each enemy grant to speed up the process
I can confirm when your character goes over level 27 next time it level ups it "jumps" several levels
I tested it with a mage that jumped to level 41 and a sorcceror that jumped to level 38 and a couple of other times I wasn't fully taking notes
What was curious is what happened after, sometimes I got random jumps of levels but what was common is that in one of those jumps I would get the "exact amount of points necessary to get all my stats at 100" It happened at least 3 times
But not only that, in one test I got exactly 256 points to distribute, just one point short to get all my stats at max , and then immediately I level up once again and the game give me exactly 1 point to distribute, kinda crazy
Also this happened to me twice after getting all my stats at 100 I did get to level up again but it didn't crashed the game, it just showed me the message with the fanfarree and the game resumed as normally, it didn't take me to the character menu.