Could use help fixing data for skill recipe rewrite, no coding required

Game Talk The Lab
1

In the middle of tweaking the skill system. I’ve dropped secondary skills, and replaced them with “trained skills” and “required skills”. I’ve also added a new skill, “fabrication”, to handle tasks for working basic materials, which will cover everything from carving an arrow shaft to working a CNC mill.

I need someone to go through recipes.json and help fix the recipes (no compiling or coding required!)

Here’s the branch:
https://github.com/GlyphGryph/Cataclysm-DDA/tree/fabrication_skill

As of now, trained skills still count towards whether the difficulty level is met, and required skills are a list of skills in the format [“name”, lv#] or [[“name”, lv#],["name,lv#]]. Required skills represent a base of knowledge required to attempt the task, but assuming the player has that knowledge, it plays no other role, and you gain no experience for that skill. So crafting an advanced arrow (for example) would require a certain level of knowledge of archery, but no matter how many arrows you made you would not actually become a better archer.

If anyone wants to fork that branch, go through and fix up some skills, and then send me a PR, I would be much obliged. Meanwhile, I’ll be working on adding support for having multiple “trained” skills.

If you want to do a chunk of recipes but not the whole thing, post here saying what you’ll cover so we don’t duplicate effort.

Again, the format is:
“required_skills”: [“archery”, 1]
OR
"required_skills": [[“archery”, 1"], [“survival”, 3]]

2

Sign me up! always love to help you guys :P,
however can I get a quick example of how it should look using a recipe?

nevermind just found one :stuck_out_tongue:

3

Note that this isn’t a formatting change - technically, the recipes work (I did a find replace to handle that).

The problem is that currently the requirements make no sense.

Many recipes should require fabrication as the main skill and their current skill should be dropped or moved to a subskill. Many should require subskills of a higher level. Many should require multiple subskills. This all needs to be reworked, and that’s what the actual task is here. We should probably come up with some generalities here.

Remember that subskills represent the base of knowledge the character needs to attempt that task, but it’s a binary question - the task won’t teach them that knowledge, they either have it or they don’t.

Skills tasks should be governed by:
Fabrication - Any task that involves the basic working or reshaping of a piece of material. Woodcarving, making rope, making a crowbar, many of the “primitive” crafting skills, all of these would be fabrication.
Mechanics - Involving complicated interlocking or moving parts, tensions and basic physics, joints, hinges, locks, or anything that can be considered “machinery”. Some current mechanics tasks will become fabrication, and other tasks might require mechanics as a subskill.
Tailoring - Mostly, leave this be. Tailoring is about joining cloth together and shaping it. Probably all still correct.
Cooking - Like tailoring, you’ll probably mostly want to leave this one alone.
Electronics - Again, you’ll probably mostly want to leave this one alone, but there might be some instances where the task is primarily an exercise in fabrication rather than electronics, where it might make sense to move this to a subskill. We’ll probably revisit it again when we can have multiple “main” skills though.

Skills that should mostly be moved to subskills:
Survival - This will most likely be moved out to be subskills in most cases. Survival will be about knowing what you CAN build, instead of actually building it - it will be a limiter, but that’s about it for many skills it currently governs. A few might remain.
Archery/Melee (and all other combat skills) - Combat skills won’t be trained by crafting. Move them out to subskills. This was what initiated this rewrite, and is the primary purpose. Carving arrows will NOT make you a better shot.

Level subskills required?
1 - Familiarity. Many primitive items will have a basic survival requirement of 1. If you’ve heard of it, you can think of it, and probably figure out how to build it.
3 - Basic Understanding. You need more than familiarity, but you don’t need to be a master.
5 - Advanced understanding. You know quite well how this works. This should be enough to unlock most recipes for this skill.
7 - Basic mastery. You know the whole field to a good depth. Probably limited to mechanics, electronics, and cooking. And most of those will have those as primaries, so I don’t know if there are likely to be any of these as secondaries.
9 - Advanced mastery. You know pretty much all there is to know. It’s unlikely for there to be any recipe unlocks beyond this level. Maybe (maybe) for the advanced sci-fi stuff like teleporters and mutagens, but for those we probably won’t be using the relevant skill as a secondary skill so it still doesn’t apply.

4

The way I see it, it’s a knowledge of creating stuff from scratch, am I right? So, “manufacturing” by its meaning?
Let’s just imagine you want to make a standard casing for a CD/DVD optical storage.
This is way beyond, say, cut gloves -> saw leather onto jacket, or dig hole -> stick double 2x4 and one vertical -> fill the space -> use the nails to finish the job until 6 feet high wall.
It also ain’t fixing a CD box with duct tape or superglue, or cutting a CD sleeve from a magazine cover. This is the knowledge of the material’s properties as well as of rules and procedures in a specific line of work.
Therefore I’d like to propose that character’s experience can be viewed production-par; if you’ve manufactured enough items to be sure you can work in a factory (in that line of work), you could get one, valuable point in that column. Not saying that a lab technician’s work is the same as working in a sawmill, only implying that a person that has enough routine can be guided into a different line of work quickly enough. If you have cutting, bashing and piercing for melee, SMG, pistols, rifles and what not for firearms, you can have this for… well you know what my drill is. :slight_smile:

5

Rather than saying “overhauling skill system”, you might want to say “overhauling skill use when crafting”, I was a bit worried by the thread title :wink:

Also, “trained skill” is misleading, because “trained” gives the impression that that’s all that happens with the skill, rather than it being used for success calculation etc. I think leaving it “primary skill”, or even just “skill used” would be better.

6

Thanks for the guidelines. I’ve got a copy of the branch set up in github, and can start working on this.

7

I’m working on the block of recipes from the beginning of the file, down to about line 3300 (I stopped at the recipe for clean water). If someone else is working on the file too, please let me know where you are stopping, otherwise I will pick up where I left off tomorrow.

8

Almost done. Done.

I tried not to alter the apparent intention of any of the recipes when adjusting the skill requirements. My thought process for the skills is listed below.

Notes on skill adjustments:
In General –
When replacing a combat skill with Fabrication, I usually kept the combat skill as a required skill, and tried to keep the level of combat skill required consistent with the original difficulty of the recipe.

Some skill requirements were lowered slightly to fit in with the 1-3-5-7-9 skill proficiency breaks, bearing in mind that those recipes also now required the new skill of Fabrication in addition to their original skill requirements.

Bows, Crossbows, Archery Ammunition & Components –
Fabrication became the main skill to produce archery items almost all the way across the board, except for crossbows which use Mechanics. Archery is the main required skill, I kept Survival as a required skill when it was appropriate and apparent that the original recipe intended it to have a survivalist component (i,e. low level basic bows from scavenged materials, fletching, etc), but I removed the Survival requirement from high-end bow recipes where it no longer seemed appropriate. Some mechanically-complex recipes now have Mechanics as a required skill as well.

Guns & Ammo –
Again, ammunition and explosives across the board use Fabrication as their skill now, with increasing levels of Gun as the required skill. High-end ammunition requires higher Gun skill, but in general the Fabrication skill tops out around 5 for most ammunition. Basically, if it involved putting a charge or load into a casing, it uses Fabrication and that process is only so complex. Simple recipes such as sawn-off shotguns only require Fabrication. Most basic pipegun recipes had the Gun skill added as a requirement.

General skills that formerly used Mechanics –
If a recipe called for Mechanics, but should actually use Fabrication, the skill was replaced. Rarely, a very basic skill that called for mechanics had the skill requirement removed entirely (i.e., the recipe for tying a stack of plastic bags into a bundle),

Traps –
Trap recipes now all train the Traps skill. Mechanically-complex recipes require Mechanics, and some survivalist recipes require Survival.

Bionics –
All bionic recipes now have First Aid as a requirement. It seemed odd that no medical expertise was required to create bionics.

9

I’d like to help out!

What remains to be done?

10

I think DarthServo got the whole thing - so nothing until I finish the multiple primary skills bit.

11

Alright I’ll keep an eye out for future projects.

Right now I have a contribution that I’m just about ready to put through the GIT system: some more near-future weapons for the players to find and survivor guns to create!