In WorldShift, you are not stuck with the same three races throughout your gaming career. The Ability Grid lets you customize your factions by equipping items and choosing specializations. Here is how it looks and works:

		The tabs are used to select the faction to modify.
These are Humans’ item slots with some items equipped. Every item fits one particular slot. This player has collected some items both for the Humans and the Cult.				This is the Humans’ specialization tree. Some specializations are still locked, and some of the unlocked ones have stars allocated to them. The player has 6 xenoshards and one unallocated star.

• The items represent things like technologies, policies, or special training. They are equipped for the faction as a whole, not for an individual ‘hero’. For example, if an item gives an armor bonus to the Trooper unit type, equipping it will affect all Troopers that you use in subsequent missions.
• You can extract items from artifacts, receive them as awards for completing a mission, or buy them with the battle points you have earned in deathmatches. Artifacts can be found just lying around the map in most game modes but the ones yielding the best items are dropped by the bosses in cooperative games.
• You keep the unequipped items in a common inventory area for all factions.
  
• The specializations are arranged in specialization trees similar to the skill trees in role-playing games. Every faction has is own skill tree.
• To be used, specializations must first be unlocked and then have special points, or stars, allocated to them. The number of stars available for a faction depends on the number of unlocked specializations in the faction’s specialization tree.
• To unlock a specialization or reset your specialization tree for a certain faction, you need xenoshards, a special resource gained when collecting or recycling artifacts.