We have spent time over the summer creating Cultural skills for those Cultures who don’t have them. (If your Culture already has skills, this post is partially or wholly inaccurate for your culture). Finding out exactly what belongs to your culture is part of the game, but some general rules for Cultural skills we want to make clear:
Cultures normally have four basic and four True skills, like a rulebook header. You can learn the basic skills of your primary Culture with three lessons, as with most skills. However, it requires a plot step in addition to the standard six lessons to gain access to its True skills. In effect, you have to show that you are fully embedded in the Culture. Depending on the Culture, this might involve reaching a certain rank, or performing a particular sort of task, or various other activities.
Gaining access to any skills of another culture is also more difficult than just studying them - it requires both a plot event that establishes you are truly regarded as a member of that culture, and twice as many (six) lessons to learn your first basic skill of that culture.
Two notes of caution:
First, if as a result of plot events you no longer meet the requirements for being True in a culture, or in the extreme have been thrown out of it completely, you lose access to True/basic Cultural skills until you can fix that.
Second, while some of the Cultural skills are already available in the standard headers, some of them are unique to your Culture. Generating 40-50 unique skills has almost certainly introduced a few that are OP or useless or otherwise not right for game. We will be looking at these again over the winter, and look forward to your feedback.