I have been playing with a fun build lately.
20 Intelligence, 5 for strength (chain smoker +1) 4 other stats
Gourmand, Fast Reader, Stylish, allow the character to enjoy food, reading, and nice clothing, with optimist amplifying these effects. Then I add addiction resistant to enjoy worry free chain smoking and meth gobbling. Plus Robust genetics for long term fun that could potentially augment these good things.
On the negatives I have Fast Met, High Thirst, and Sleepy, which basically make the character into a ravenous blob. Sleeping for nine hours satiated and quenched and you wake up very hungry and thirsty. Given the expanded food options this is actually pretty fun, you wake up, devour pop tarts, chain smoke, drink malt liquor, snort coke and read tolstoy and you have +500 morale. Youre very weak combat stats are augmented by insanely high berserker morale boosts. Zombies are smited.
I also add forgetful, which with Intelligence linked skill rust is basically free points because your skills hardly rust at all. I also add slow learner, which I haven’t even noticed, easily getting to +12 melee and haven’t even cleared the first town. The neat thing about this build is that all its disadvantages can be eliminated with proper base building and stockpiling.
The early game is pretty hard though. I give myself chainsmoker start for +1 stats, which goes into strength to make my carry weight less terrible. I tried to do tweaker but it is impossible to survive with this build as tweaker (try it). The fact that you get flu from tweaker withdrawal means your already augmented thirst becomes a vortex that dehydrates you to death in about 36 hours, or leaves you with 25 movement to defend yourself. Defending yourself with 0-1 strength and 25 movement, while naked, doesn’t end too well. I played about 20 games before switching down to chain smoker. The best runs I had were breaking into a gas station and eating everything, but that only gave me 35 versus 25 speed (killed by coyotes) and crawling towards a river and guzzling unfiltered river water, sleeping naked in the rain while Amigara hallucinations yelled at me (killed by moose). Try to survive as a tweaker with this build (randomly finding meth on dead junkies is cheating!)
Anyway it’s a fun build, I haven’t gotten to late game yet but this character should be able to trick himself out with CBM’s and good mutations without issue, which should offset terrible stats. Thanks devs for fun game.
