The Maximum Level in Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord

TLDR: It is level 30-31 depending on smithing perks, although you’re very unlikely to max out every skill to get there.

The Learning Limit

When you add an Attribute or Focus point to one of your skills, the game increases not just the rate at which you gain experience but also how far you can learn that skill. Every Attribute beyond 1 increases your learning limits by 10 levels and every Focus beyond 0 increases it by another 30.

The pace at which you approach your learning limit does not affect the rate at which you earn experience, so it’s always a good idea to invest your points as soon as you get them. When your skill level exceeds your learning limit, you begin taking a “Learning Limit Exceeded” penalty to your exp rates.

That’s why the Learning Limit of 240 with the maximum of 10 Attributes and 5 Focus points reaches below the 275 skill levels needed to reach the final perks, you can’t get to the final perks without exceeding you learning limit.

The Max Skill Level Formula

That said, the max skill level formula is a bit more complicated.

The first attribute point only increases the skill maximum by 4 levels. The rest of the Attribute points increases the maximum by 14 levels each, and every Focus point increases it by 40.

Since Attributes increase 3 skills at once, that means every Attribute increases your max skills levels by a combined total of 42, making them slightly more efficient than Focus points for increasing your max skill limits (and therefore your max level).

Here’s a couple handy tables showing the learning limits and max skill levels to summarize.

Of special note are a few nodes in the table that stop just 2 or 3 skills from acquiring a perk (the reason I made this guide). Most skills are not likely to be maxed out in a regular playthrough (by the time you get close to the max skill you’ll have a learning rate close to 0.11 or 0.09, making it very slow to learn) but you should keep them in mind for easy skills to level like smithing (especially its level 150 and 225 perks).

Now for the Max Level

When you start the game, your character has a total of 18 Attribute points and 12 Focus points already allocated from your answers during character creation, and your skills all begin at 0 except for the skills that got buffed from your answers. You also begin with 1 unallocated Focus point to place wherever you want.

The way your character levels up and acquires Attributes and Focus points is by increasing their skill levels, this works by taking your current level, multiplying by 5 and then adding 5 points on top.

Table for demonstration:

If you open the character screen at the beginning and check your level, it says you have 0 / 10 skills needed to reach level 2. What you must know is that you don’t truly begin with 0 skill points learned, since the number of acquired skills in the beginning is 120. The way the game makes sense of this is that it ignores the first 120 skill points and uses the rest to calculate your progress towards character levels.

If we take into account the max level of all the combined skills that we start with and calculate how far that’d take us we get:

6 Attributes and 12 Focus from creation answers: 252 + 480 = 732
+ 324 from the base 12 Attributes that our answers don’t change = 1056
– 120 from the skills that the game ignores at the start = 936

That’s enough to place us at level 18 with 86 / 95 progress to next level without spending a single Attribute or Focus point.

We also need to account for the smithing perks at levels 150 and 225 that combined can give either 2 Attributes or 1 Attribute and 2 Focus points.

Now we have everything needed to calculate the game’s max level.

Without both smithing perks, the max skill levels we can obtain is:

13 Attributes and 42 Focus Points from creation answers and leveling: 546 + 1680 = 2226
+ 324 from the base 12 Attributes that our answers don’t change = 2550
– 120 from the skills that the game ignores at the start = 2430

That places us at level 30 with 110 / 155 progress to next level. The first Attribute from the level 150 smithing perk takes us 42 points further but it’s not enough to take us to level 31.

The story changes if we get the level 225 perk however, and combined with the extra focus point acquired from level 31, the max level then becomes 31, with either 79 / 160 or 117 / 160 progress to next level depending on whether you chose the extra Attribute or the 2 extra Focus points.

Keep in mind that this assumes that you’ll take every single skill to its absolute limit and as mentioned before, the experience rate falls to abysmal levels by the end so you shouldn’t count on maxing out every skill, but at least now you know what the max level of the skills and the player character in Bannerlord can be. And I hope that improves your game.

Credit to Joule Zeath