Dragonkin: The Banished Ancestral Grid Guide — How to Build Your Character
If you’re jumping into Dragonkin: The Banished for the first time, the Ancestral Grid is going to be one of the most important systems you learn. It’s the heart of character building in the game, and it’s different enough from the traditional skill trees found in most action RPGs that it’s worth taking some time to understand how everything works before you start throwing fragments onto the board and hoping for the best.
Most ARPGs give you a skill tree where you spend points, unlock abilities, and gradually work your way toward more powerful options. Dragonkin takes a different approach. Your skills and their modifiers are represented by physical fragments that you arrange on a hexagonal grid, with the placement, compatibility, and rarity of those fragments determining how powerful your abilities become.
It’s part skill tree, part puzzle, and part equipment management system, and once you understand how the pieces fit together, you can start creating some genuinely interesting combinations.
The good news is that you don’t need to understand every advanced mechanic immediately. Start with the basics, learn how fragments connect, and gradually develop your grid around the skills you actually enjoy using.
Here’s how the Ancestral Grid works, how to increase your skills’ power, what your Wyrmling contributes, and which systems you’ll eventually unlock in Montescail to fine-tune your build.
What Is the Ancestral Grid?
The Ancestral Grid is Dragonkin’s primary skill customization system. Instead of unlocking every ability through a traditional skill tree, you collect skill fragments and modifier fragments, then arrange them on a grid to create and improve your character’s abilities.
Each character class has its own grid layout, and the available space gradually expands as you progress and develop the city of Montescail.
Fragments occupy hexagonal spaces, and some come attached to additional hexes, creating larger shapes that require more room. That means positioning matters because you need enough space to fit your important skills while leaving room for the modifiers that make those skills more powerful.
But there’s more to it than simply fitting everything onto the board.
Fragments must also be compatible with the skills they’re supporting. A modifier that doesn’t work with a particular ability won’t provide its intended benefit simply because you’ve placed it nearby.
That creates a puzzle where you’re constantly balancing available space, fragment compatibility, skill power, and the bonuses you want to activate.
Larger skill fragments can be particularly useful because their additional edges provide more opportunities to connect compatible modifiers.
As you progress, you’ll collect plenty of fragments, and the game provides several ways to manage them, including storage and the ability to keep unused fragments around the outside of your active grid.
Don’t feel obligated to keep every fragment you find, though. Once you understand which modifiers your build needs, you’ll become much better at recognizing what deserves a place in your collection.
Understanding Fragment Rarity
Fragments come in several rarity levels, and higher rarity modifiers generally contribute more power than their lower-rarity equivalents.
The standard progression is Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary, and Mythical.
Each rarity contributes a different amount of power:
| Fragment rarity | Base modifier power |
|---|---|
| Common | 1 |
| Uncommon | 2 |
| Rare | 3 |
| Legendary | 4 |
| Mythical | 5 |
There’s also a Divine enhancement, but it’s important to understand that Divine isn’t simply another ordinary rarity above Mythical.
Instead, Divine is an additional property that can improve a fragment’s power beyond what its normal rarity provides.
For example, a Divine modifier can contribute additional power compared with a normal modifier of the same rarity.
This distinction matters because the goal isn’t necessarily to collect fragments with the most impressive-sounding label. You want fragments that provide useful modifiers, contribute enough power to reach important thresholds, and fit into your grid efficiently.
A high-rarity fragment with a modifier that doesn’t support your build may be less useful than a lower-rarity fragment with exactly the effect you need.
And because space is limited, you should always consider how much benefit you’re receiving from each occupied hex.
Character Skills, Wyrmling Skills, and Modifiers
The Ancestral Grid uses three important categories of fragments: character skills, Wyrmling skills, and modifiers.
Understanding the difference between them is the foundation of building an effective character.
Character Skill Fragments
Character skill fragments represent the abilities your hero can actively use.
These include attacks, movement abilities, defensive skills, and other abilities associated with your chosen class.
You can equip up to five character skills on the grid.
These skills generally fall into three categories. Basic skills don’t consume energy, primary skills use energy, and utility skills typically operate around cooldowns rather than energy costs.
This gives you a natural starting point for building your character.
You’ll generally want a reliable way to generate or manage energy, a primary ability that deals meaningful damage, and additional skills that provide mobility, defense, or other useful effects.
The exact combination depends on your class and playstyle.
Modifier Fragments
Modifier fragments improve the abilities they’re connected to.
Depending on the modifier and the skill it supports, these bonuses can increase damage, reduce cooldowns, improve area of effect, alter energy costs, or change how an ability behaves.
Some modifiers are useful for almost any character, while others are particularly valuable when combined with specific skills.
For example, an area-of-effect modifier might be extremely useful for a skill designed to damage large groups of enemies, while a cooldown reduction modifier could make a frequently used utility ability more reliable.
The important thing is that modifiers must be compatible with the skill they’re supporting.
You can’t simply surround every ability with the highest-rarity fragments you own and expect everything to work.
Wyrmling Skill Fragments
Wyrmling skills represent abilities used by your dragon companion.
You can equip up to five Wyrmling skills alongside your five character skills, giving you ten skill slots in total across the two categories.
Unlike your character’s active abilities, Wyrmling skills are triggered through their connection to your character’s actions.
When you use a character skill connected to a compatible Wyrmling ability, your companion can automatically activate its associated effect.
This makes your Wyrmling an important part of your overall build rather than simply a decorative pet following you around.
Wyrmling skills can also contribute power to connected character skills, although their contribution works differently from ordinary modifier fragments.
How Fragment Connections Work
One of the most confusing things for new players is understanding why a fragment sometimes provides a bonus and sometimes doesn’t.
The answer comes down to compatibility and connections.
When you select or hover over a skill, the grid provides visual feedback showing which modifiers can work with it.
Compatible fragments can be highlighted in blue, while active connections are indicated in green.
If a modifier is incompatible, the interface can display red markings to indicate that the fragment isn’t providing its intended effect.
Pay attention to these indicators because they tell you whether your arrangement is actually working.
Fragments also contain compatibility keywords, and those keywords determine which skills they can support.
A modifier that requires a particular type of skill won’t suddenly become compatible because you place it next to an unrelated ability.
The grid also allows connections through attached hexes, meaning that the arrangement of larger fragments can create opportunities to activate additional modifiers.
This is why the shape of a fragment can be nearly as important as its rarity.
A larger skill fragment may occupy more room, but its additional edges can allow more modifiers to connect, potentially increasing the skill’s overall power.
The trick is finding a layout that makes efficient use of the available space without sacrificing important connections.
Total Effective Power and Skill Ranks
Every character skill has a Total Effective Power value that helps determine its rank.
As you connect compatible modifier fragments, their power contributes toward the skill’s progression.
Higher-rarity modifiers generally provide more power, making them valuable when you’re trying to reach the next rank without using too much grid space.
The important thresholds are:
| Skill rank | Required effective power |
|---|---|
| Rank I | 0 |
| Rank II | 6 |
| Rank III | 10 |
| Rank IV | 15 |
Reaching these thresholds increases the rank of the associated skill, improving its effectiveness and unlocking additional possibilities.
Rank IV is particularly important because it allows the skill to benefit from Symbiosis, a mechanic connected to your Wyrmling’s development.
You can check the Total Effective Power value by examining the skill on your grid.
It’s important to look at that actual value rather than simply counting how many fragments are attached.
A single Mythical modifier can contribute considerably more power than a Common modifier, so two skills with the same number of connected fragments may have very different effective power totals.
And remember that only compatible, active contributions count toward the skill’s progression.
A fragment that isn’t properly connected won’t help you reach the next threshold.
Modifier Tiers and Affinity
Skill ranks aren’t the only reason to pay attention to power.
Individual modifiers also have their own progression thresholds, sometimes referred to as affinity tiers.
As you connect additional compatible modifiers of the same type, their combined contribution can unlock stronger versions of the associated effect.
For example, a duration modifier might provide a relatively small benefit at its first threshold, then become substantially stronger as you accumulate more affinity.
That means stacking the same useful modifier can be more effective than spreading your available space across several unrelated bonuses.
However, it also means you need to think carefully about what your build actually needs.
If your primary attack already deals enough damage to defeat ordinary enemies, improving its area of effect or reducing its energy cost might provide more practical value than simply increasing its damage further.
This is where the Ancestral Grid becomes much more interesting than a conventional skill tree.
You’re not just deciding which abilities to unlock. You’re deciding how those abilities should behave.
Your Wyrmling: More Than Just a Companion
Every character travels with a Wyrmling, a small dragon companion that contributes its own abilities and bonuses to your build.
Wyrmlings come in four elemental varieties: Fire, Ice, Electric, and Poison.
Each type has access to its own abilities, giving you different ways to complement your character’s skills.
Your Wyrmling’s abilities can be equipped on the Ancestral Grid and connected to compatible character skills.
When the associated character skill is activated, your Wyrmling can automatically trigger its connected ability.
That creates opportunities to combine your attacks with additional effects from your companion.
For example, you might prefer a Wyrmling that supports your offensive abilities, or one whose skills provide additional utility during difficult encounters.
The important thing is to choose based on how the Wyrmling’s abilities complement your build rather than assuming you must always match your character’s primary damage element.
Understanding Symbiosis
Symbiosis is one of the more important advanced mechanics associated with character skills and your Wyrmling.
When a character skill reaches Rank IV, it becomes eligible for its Symbiosis bonus.
This provides an additional way to strengthen the skill and makes reaching the highest rank particularly valuable for abilities you use frequently.
One important detail is that a Wyrmling skill doesn’t necessarily have to be placed directly beside a character skill for that character skill to reach Rank IV and activate its Symbiosis progression.
The rank requirement is based on the character skill’s effective power, so focus on reaching the necessary threshold rather than assuming a particular Wyrmling fragment must always occupy an adjacent hex.
As you develop your character, pay attention to how your chosen Wyrmling abilities interact with your most frequently used skills.
A well-planned combination can provide substantially more value than simply equipping whichever Wyrmling fragments happen to have the highest rarity.
Expanding and Organizing Your Grid
Your available grid space is limited, particularly during the earlier stages of the game.
As you progress and improve Montescail, additional grid spaces become available, allowing you to build more complicated arrangements.
That makes city development an important part of character progression.
You can also rotate fragments to fit them into different positions, which is particularly useful when working with larger shapes.
Don’t overlook this feature.
Sometimes the difference between fitting another useful modifier onto your grid and running out of room is simply rotating a fragment into a different orientation.
The grid also includes filtering tools that help identify compatible fragments and organize your collection.
I’d recommend using these features regularly rather than trying to remember every modifier and compatibility keyword.
And if you find yourself constantly rearranging your grid, don’t worry. That’s part of the system.
A layout that works perfectly at Level 20 may need significant changes once you’ve collected better fragments and unlocked additional space.
Montescail: The NPCs That Improve Your Build
The city of Montescail isn’t simply a place to sell equipment and accept quests.
As you develop the city, you’ll unlock services that allow you to customize fragments, improve equipment, and expand your character’s capabilities.
Several of these NPCs become particularly important once you’ve moved beyond the basics of the Ancestral Grid.
The Enchanter
The Enchanter allows you to modify certain attributes on equipment and fragments.
For weapons and armor, this means changing an eligible equipment affix.
For hex fragments, the Enchanter can change a modifier, allowing you to improve a fragment that has a useful shape or combination of effects but contains one modifier that doesn’t suit your build.
However, the Enchanter doesn’t simply let you replace any character skill or Wyrmling skill with whatever you want.
The system is primarily concerned with modifying eligible affixes and modifiers, and its available options and limitations depend on the item you’re working with.
Additional city upgrades expand what you can do with enchanting.
For players who enjoy optimizing equipment, the Enchanter eventually becomes one of the most useful services in Montescail.
The Grand Benedictor
The Grand Benedictor is another important source of character progression.
This NPC allows you to sacrifice eligible fragments and equipment to unlock additional benefits, including skill modifiers and talent-related improvements.
Rather than simply granting an unlimited free modifier to any skill, the system uses offerings and progression to unlock specific bonuses.
As you develop the Grand Benedictor’s systems, you can gain additional modifier power and other improvements that help strengthen your character beyond what the Ancestral Grid provides on its own.
The Grand Benedictor becomes particularly valuable when you’re trying to optimize a favorite skill and need additional power without rearranging your entire grid.
It’s also worth remembering that the system depends on what you’ve unlocked and contributed, so don’t expect every option to be available immediately.
The Memorialist
The Memorialist allows you to inscribe additional skill-related bonuses onto equipment.
This is a particularly interesting system because it provides another way to strengthen abilities without relying entirely on the limited space of your Ancestral Grid.
However, the process is more specific than simply selecting a skill and attaching it to a weapon.
You need an appropriate skill fragment with an attached modifier, and the inscription process uses that combination to determine the bonus applied to your equipment.
The system also requires materials and currency, so it’s worth being selective about which equipment you improve.
For players trying to maximize the power of a particular skill, the Memorialist can provide valuable additional bonuses.
Just make sure you understand which modifier you’re attempting to inscribe before committing your resources.
The Master of Fragments
The Master of Fragments is especially useful for experimenting with new builds.
This NPC provides access to character skill fragments, allowing you to obtain abilities without depending entirely on random drops.
Additional city development expands the selection, including access to Wyrmling skill fragments.
That makes the Master of Fragments an excellent place to visit when you want to try a different ability or experiment with a new combination.
Instead of waiting for a particular skill to appear as loot, you can investigate whether it’s available through the vendor.
It’s a valuable quality-of-life feature for anyone who enjoys testing different builds.
How to Build Your First Ancestral Grid
When you’re first learning the system, I’d recommend keeping things relatively simple.
Start by choosing one primary damage skill that you enjoy using.
This should be an ability that feels comfortable, deals reliable damage, and fits the way you want to play your character.
Place that skill somewhere on your grid where you’ll have enough room to attach several compatible modifiers.
Next, look for modifiers that directly improve its effectiveness.
Damage is an obvious starting point, but don’t ignore energy management, cooldown reduction, or area of effect if those are important to the skill.
Once you’ve established your primary attack, add a basic skill that helps manage your energy and a utility ability that provides mobility or defense.
From there, begin incorporating your Wyrmling skills and any additional abilities you want available during combat.
As you collect more fragments, gradually replace weaker modifiers with better versions and experiment with different arrangements.
The goal during your first several hours shouldn’t be creating the mathematically perfect grid.
It should be understanding why your abilities work and how different modifiers affect them.
Once you’ve learned that, optimizing the layout becomes considerably easier.
Build Philosophy: Spread Your Power or Focus on One Skill?
One of the biggest decisions you’ll eventually face is whether to distribute your resources across several abilities or concentrate most of your available power into one or two primary skills.
Both approaches have advantages.
The Balanced Approach
A balanced build uses several abilities to handle different situations.
You might have a primary damage skill, a basic attack for energy management, a defensive ability, a movement skill, and another attack that performs well against groups of enemies.
This approach gives you flexibility and can be particularly useful while you’re learning the game.
If one skill isn’t effective against a particular enemy, you have alternatives available.
It also gives you more opportunities to experiment with different fragments and Wyrmling combinations.
The disadvantage is that spreading your best modifiers across several skills can make it harder to push your primary damage abilities toward their highest ranks.
The Focused Approach
A focused build concentrates more resources into one or two abilities.
Instead of trying to make every skill equally powerful, you prioritize the attacks that deal most of your damage and use your remaining abilities for support, mobility, or defense.
This approach can be extremely effective once you’ve collected enough high-quality fragments and understand how to stack compatible modifiers.
Reaching Rank IV on your primary skill and activating its Symbiosis bonus can provide a substantial improvement.
However, focusing too heavily on damage without considering energy costs, survivability, or mobility can create problems during difficult encounters.
Even a powerful attack isn’t much use if you can’t sustain it or survive long enough to activate it.
Which Approach Is Better?
For beginners, I’d recommend starting with a balanced setup and gradually shifting toward a more focused build as you discover which abilities you enjoy most.
You don’t need five equally powerful attacks, but you also shouldn’t feel obligated to sacrifice every utility skill just to increase the damage of one ability.
A reliable primary attack supported by energy management, mobility, and defensive options is a sensible foundation for most characters.
Once you’ve reached the endgame and collected stronger fragments, you can begin experimenting with more specialized arrangements.
Common Ancestral Grid Mistakes to Avoid
One of the easiest mistakes is assuming that a fragment is providing a bonus simply because it’s physically touching a skill. Always check compatibility and confirm that the connection is active.
Another common mistake is focusing entirely on rarity. A Mythical modifier that doesn’t support your build may be less useful than a Rare modifier that provides exactly the bonus your primary skill needs.
Don’t ignore fragment shapes, either. Larger skill fragments can provide more connection opportunities, and rotating pieces can make the difference between an efficient layout and a grid filled with wasted space.
It’s also worth checking your Total Effective Power rather than counting the number of modifiers you’ve attached. Different rarities contribute different amounts, and reaching the next rank depends on the actual power total.
Finally, don’t forget about Montescail.
The Enchanter, Grand Benedictor, Memorialist, and Master of Fragments provide additional ways to develop your character, and ignoring those services means missing out on some of the game’s most useful customization options.
The Takeaway
The Ancestral Grid is one of the systems that makes Dragonkin: The Banished stand apart from other action RPGs.
Instead of simply investing points in a predetermined skill tree, you’re physically building your abilities through fragment placement, compatibility, and modifier combinations.
That gives you a great deal of control over how your character develops, but it also means you need to pay attention to more than just damage numbers.
Fragment rarity matters, but compatibility matters just as much. Skill rank is important, but so are the modifiers you’re using to reach it. And your Wyrmling isn’t simply another companion following you around; its abilities and Symbiosis bonuses are part of your overall build.
My recommendation is to begin with one primary damage skill, support it with compatible modifiers, and gradually expand your grid as you learn what works.
Don’t worry about creating the perfect endgame arrangement during your first few hours.
Experiment, rearrange your fragments, try different abilities, and make use of Montescail’s services as they become available.
