Love and Deepspace may be a dating simulator, but it also has RPGs in its DNA. This is apparent not only in how you have to balance your in-game love life with the need to frequently engage in action-packed battles against interdimensional invaders, but also in the way you level up as you play through the game.
Levelling in Love and Deepspace is serious business, since unlocking new story chapters requires you to meet level requirements first. However, the game gives you very little indication of what your goal is in this regard, which can make it difficult to assess the significance of each level you gain. That’s why we’ve put together this explainer on Love and Deepspace’s levelling system, including how to gain Hunter EXP and what happens when you reach the level cap.
Love and Deepspace level cap
Love and Deepspace players will hit the level cap when they collect enough experience points (EXP) that their Hunter profile reaches Level 80.
Unlike in many games, EXP in Love and Deepspace can only be gained from performing Daily Tasks – activities which don’t inherently grant EXP upon completion, but which advance the tracker in your daily task journal (accessed from the Agenda icon at the top of list on the right-hand side of the screen).
You get an EXP boost for every 20% of the daily task tracker you fill in, worth 7,000 EXP a go – meaning you can collect up to 35,000 EXP every day. The EXP requirements for gaining new levels increase exponentially; so if you always complete your daily tasks, you’ll be levelling up very rapidly until you hit Level 30 or so, and can expect to gain an average of a couple of levels every day until you’re well past the halfway point. Needless to say though, it takes a bit more time to see that final level cap.
This is part of how LaDS tries to encourage you to play every day, but even by live service standards it’s a bit unusual. It means that there’s effectively a limit on how much you can level up in a day – which in turn means that new players can’t speed-run the existing story to catch up with fans who’ve been there since launch, since story chapters often have a levelling requirement you need to hit before they’ll unlock.
However, if you’re absolutely desperate to meet Sylus or Caleb and don’t like them being locked behind a level requirement, you can actually skip ahead to unlock their chapters early – although it does ruin the pace of the story a bit!
There’s a single exception to the daily task rule, which is that you get a small EXP boost every time you complete a main story battle for the first time. However, this won’t get you very far unless you’re also completing daily tasks, which are by a large margin the most important requirement for levelling.
Note that Hunter EXP gains are separate from Affinity gains, which track your individual relationships with each of the game’s five love interests. Activities that increase Affinity don’t tend to increase Hunter EXP or vice versa, and a big part of LaDS’ gameplay loop is ensuring that you’re balancing both.
What happens after you hit the level cap in Love and Deepspace?
Once you hit Level 80, you no longer gain EXP from either of the normal sources. Your Hunter profile will no longer tally your current EXP progress towards the next level underneath your profile picture, and will instead read “Lv.80: 0/0”.
In fairness, there’s not much point in gaining EXP any more at this stage – at least until such a time as LaDS’ developers choose to raise the cap, which does sometimes happen in long-running live service titles, but is far from guaranteed. (For what it’s worth, Level 80 has been the cap since launch, even though we’re now well into Version 3.)
So what’s the incentive to carry on completing your daily tasks? Well, you of course still get to collect other assorted and useful rewards for doing them, which don’t change except for the fact that EXP gains are no longer listed among them. That means there’s still 50 Diamonds up for grabs on a daily basis, plus assorted other levelling materials and consumables. You can also rest easy at this point knowing that your protagonist is enjoying her maximum possible health and stamina, both of which increase with every level gained.