It is known that many (upper) cluster algebras possess different kinds of good bases which contain the cluster monomials and are parametrized by the tropical points of cluster Poisson varieties. For a large class of upper cluster algebras (injective-reachable ones with full rank coefficients), we describe all of its bases with these properties. Moreover, we show the existence of the generic basis for them. In addition, we prove that Bridgeland's representation theoretic formula is effective for their theta functions (weak genteelness). Our results apply to (almost) all well-known cluster algebras arising from representation theory or higher Teichmüller theory, including quantum affine algebras, unipotent cells, double Bruhat cells, skein algebras over surfaces, where we change the coefficients if necessary so that the full rank assumption holds.

We study cluster categories arising from marked surfaces (with punctures and nonempty boundaries). By constructing skewed-gentle algebras, we show that there is a bijection between tagged curves and string objects. Applications include interpreting dimensions of Ext1 as intersection numbers of tagged curves and Auslander-Reiten translation as tagged rotation. An important consequence is that the cluster(-tilting) exchange graphs of such cluster categories are connected.

We study endomorphism algebras of 2-term silting complexes in derived categories of hereditary finite dimensional algebras, or more generally of Ext-finite hereditary abelian categories. Module categories of such endomorphism algebras are known to occur as hearts of certain bounded t-structures in such derived categories. We show that the algebras occurring are exactly the algebras of small homological dimension, which are algebras characterized by the property that each indecomposable module either has injective dimension at most one, or it has projective dimension at most one.