Dragonkin: The Banished Ancestral Grid Guide — How to Build Your Character

If you are jumping into Dragonkin: The Banished for the first time, the Ancestral Grid is going to be the system you spend the most time thinking about. It is the heart of character building in this game, and it is different enough from a traditional skill tree that it is worth taking the time to actually understand how it works before you start throwing fragments down and hoping for the best. This guide breaks it all down.

What Is the Ancestral Grid?

Forget linear skill trees. The Ancestral Grid works more like a puzzle. Instead of spending points to unlock skills in a predetermined path, you are collecting fragments that drop from enemies and physically placing them onto a grid. Fragments come in different shapes and sizes, which means placement actually matters  as you are working out how to fit pieces together efficiently, not just clicking through a menu. It also means you’re not able to just blindly follow someone else’s build guide.

Fragments come in six rarity tiers: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary, Mythic, and Divine. As you would expect, higher rarity fragments come with better modifiers and more powerful effects. You will be swimming in fragments before long, so the game helpfully provides personal chests, shared chests, and overflow storage around the edges of the grid itself to manage the volume.

Skill Fragments vs. Support Fragments

There are two types of fragments and understanding the difference between them is the foundation of the whole system.

Skill Fragments are the active abilities. When you place a skill fragment on the grid it unlocks that skill for use on your action bar. These are your damage dealers, your movement abilities, your core toolkit.

Support Fragments connect to skill fragments and provide passive buffs and modifiers to those skills. This is where the depth of the system lives. A skill on its own is just a skill. A skill with the right supports attached to it becomes something you can build an entire character around.

When you hover over a support fragment the grid will give you visual feedback on compatibility. Blue highlighting means the support is compatible with a nearby skill. Green highlighting means it is actively connected and providing its bonus. Pay attention to those colors — they are your best friend when you are trying to figure out whether a placement is actually doing what you think it is.

Total Effective Power and Skill Ranking

Every skill in the game has a stat called Total Effective Power, which determines the skill’s rank and overall strength. Each support fragment you connect to a skill adds a specific amount of Effective Power, typically around five points per support, and skills rank up at the following thresholds:

Rank 1: 0–5 Power
Rank 2: 6+ Power
Rank 3: 10+ Power
Rank 4: 15+ Power

This is the core loop of character building. You are always trying to push your most important skills up to higher rank thresholds by attaching more and better supports to them.

It goes deeper than that though. Individual modifiers within a skill, something like Greater Area of Effect for example, have their own tiers that increase as you stack more supports of the same type. Add enough AOE supports to a skill and you can push that modifier from 25% bonus area up to 40% or higher. This is where min-maxing comes in. Once you know what a skill needs to do, you can start stacking the specific supports that push its most important modifiers into higher percentage tiers.

Your Wyrmling

Every character has a Wyrmling, a small dragon companion that comes in one of four elemental types: Fire, Toxic, Electric, or Cold. Your Wyrmling has its own armor and skills, and it works with the grid in an interesting way.

Wyrmling abilities are slotted into the grid as supports rather than skills, but they function differently from standard supports. When you connect a Wyrmling fragment to an active skill, your pet will automatically trigger its ability whenever you use that skill. This means your Wyrmling becomes an extension of your build rather than a separate thing you manage independently. Choose your Wyrmling type based on what your build is trying to accomplish and then slot its fragments into your highest priority skills for maximum value.

Advanced Tools for Fine-Tuning Your Build

Once you have the basics down there are several NPCs and systems in the city of Montescail that let you push your build further.

The Enchanter works like rerolling in other ARPGs. Take a fragment to the Enchanter and you can swap out a single undesirable modifier for a better one. This is how you turn a good fragment into a great one without waiting for the perfect drop.

The Grand Benedictor is one of the most powerful tools available to you. This NPC lets you offer a skill and attach one free modifier to it that does not physically take up space on the grid. If you have a skill you are investing heavily in, getting a free modifier on top of everything else you have attached to it is a meaningful power boost that costs you nothing in terms of grid real estate.

The Memorialist lets you inscribe skill fragments directly onto your weapons and armor. Inscribed fragments add Effective Power to your skills through your equipment rather than through the grid, which means you can hit higher rank thresholds without needing to find the physical space on the grid to do it. If you are trying to push a skill to Rank 4 and running out of room, checking what you can inscribe onto your gear is worth doing.

The Master of Fragments is an NPC that lets you acquire specific skills for testing purposes. If you want to experiment with a build around a skill you have not found a fragment for yet, this is how you do it without waiting for the right drop.

Fragment Rotation is exactly what it sounds like: you can rotate fragments on the grid to better fit the available space. This sounds like a small thing but it is significant when you are trying to fit complex cluster arrangements together and when starting out it is easy to overlook that you can rotate them.

Build Philosophy: Spread or Focus?

The system supports two broad approaches and both are viable depending on what you want to do.

The first is spreading your Effective Power across five or more skills to build a well-rounded character with multiple tools at a reasonable rank. The second is dumping everything into one or two primary skills to push them to maximum rank with the highest tier modifiers possible, potentially hitting millions of damage on a single ability. The focused approach tends to work better in endgame content where raw damage matters most. The spread approach is more forgiving while you are learning the game and works well in co-op where you might want to cover different roles within a crew.

Start by identifying the one or two skills that feel the best for your class and your playstyle, invest your best supports into those, and build outward from there. The grid will start making sense quickly once you have a clear priority to build around.

Dragonkin: The Banished is available now on PC via Steam and launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on March 19, 2026.