Uma Musume Skills Explained - Unique, Upgrades, Passives, and Types
How does the Uma Musume Skills system work? It can seem complex at first, but once you’ve played through the Career mode, you start to get familiar with the best way of building your characters.
Another important factor in strengthening characters in Uma Musume Pretty Derby is by collecting, upgrading, and equipping them with Support Cards. We have a Support Card Tier List to help you!
Uma Musume Skills
There are three different types of skills for your characters during their Career. These are:
- Unique skills
- Passive skills
- Debuff skills (can debuff you or your opponents)
Unique Skills
Unique skills are the bread and butter of building your characters, as they are created solely for them. For example, Special Week’s Unique skills are not the same as Gold Ship’s. There are tons of Unique Skills, as this number will only increase as more characters are added to Uma Musume Pretty Derby.
The best thing to remember when it comes to this type of skill is that you need to read their descriptions carefully to figure out whether that ability is useful for your current build and race. It depends on the length of the race, the track condition, and your character’s stats.
Passive Skills
The passive skills increase your character’s base stats. As each one levels up, they become stronger! Passive skills are always available for your characters, and must be upgraded as you progress through the Career mode. You need to think carefully about which base stats work with specific characters, though trying to increase the grade of all stats is useful overall!
- All-Rounder
- Increases more than one base stat
- Stamina
- Speed
- Wit
- Power
- Guts
Normal Skills
All characters utilise these skills, and Unique Skills fall under this category, too. However, there are different types of Normal Skills apart from the Unique ones. They are:
- Acceleration
- The speed at which a character accelerates
- Lane Change
- Increases the character’s speed when they change lanes
- Recovery
- Boosts the replenishment of the character’s Stamina
- Speed
- The overall speed of the character
- Observation
- The better the Field of View of the character, the easier it is to find a strong position and apply debuffs to opponents
- Starting Gate
- Decreases the chances of a slow start
Debuffs
Keep note of which Debuff Skills apply to you and which you can use to weaken your opponents.
Applicable to Opponents
These Debuff Skills can be applied to opponents to weaken them during a race. By using these skills, you can:
- Decrease your opponent’s Acceleration
- Decrease your opponent’s Stamina
- Decrease your opponent’s Speed
- Increases the duration of the Panic debuff
- Decreases the Field of View of your opponent
Applicable to Your Character
If your character has any debuffs, you must spend Skill Points to remove them.
- Power
- Decreases your base Power
- Speed
- Decreases your base Speed
- Wit
- Decreases your base Wit
- Stamina
- Decreases your base Stamina
- Starting Gate
- Guarantees a bad start when you begin every race
- Guts
- Decreases your base Guts
Upgrading Skills
As you progress through the Career, you slowly earn Skill Points. You can then use these points to upgrade your current skills or unlock new ones. The more powerful skills cost a lot more Skill Points, and these are usually the Unique Skills for that particular character.
Some skills affect their performance on certain tracks, so double-check the weather and location of the next race before you purchase any of these! You also need to collect Skill Hints as you play Career mode to unlock access to specific skills. Discounts often appear, which reduces the cost of a skill upgrade/unlock.
I recommend prioritising the Unique skills first, and then whatever SKill Points you have left can be spent on the skills you haven’t acquired yet. This is where checking the conditions and location of the next race comes in, as you can spend the remainder of your points on skills to improve your character’s performance for that specific race.
Adele Wilson
Editor
