Decreasing tedious skill grind

Mechanical workaround skills

traps works.

the concept that because you can weld together a tank so you can also pick a doorjam is silly, unless you pick it witha tank shell.

but, both by gaming tradition and pseudosense, picking a lock and disarming a mine are both fine motor movements that use special skills and prvious knowledge of the schematic

After spending 1.5 years of game time unable to progress electronics from 3 before finding a helpful NPC, for some reason this topic sprang back to mind.

To step back to first principles for a moment, what, exactly, are the skills supposed to represent?

According to the wiki:

Cooking: Your skill in combining food ingredients to make other, tastier food items. It may also be used in certain chemical mixtures and other, more esoteric tasks.

Electronics: Your skill in dealing with electrical systems, used in the craft and repair of objects with electrical components. This skill is an important part of installing and managing bionic implants.

Fabrication: Your skill in working with raw materials and shaping them into useful objects. This skill plays an important role in the crafting of many objects.

Mechanics: Your skill in engineering, maintaining and repairing vehicles and other mechanical systems. This skill covers the craft of items with complex parts, and plays a role in the installation of bionic equipment.

Survival: Your skill in surviving the wilderness, and in crafting various basic survival items.

Tailoring: Your skill in the craft and repair of clothing, bags, blankets and other textiles.

Trapping: Your skill in setting and disarming traps safely and effectively.

Construction: Your general competence in building construction. This governs the complexity of structures that can be built, and the time required to build them.

Cooking is Chemistry.
Electronics is Circuitry.
Fabrication is Carpentry.
Mechanics is Metalworking
Tailoring is Knitting.

Trapping and Construction are some weird hodgepodge of the other crafting skills.
Survival is some weird hodgepodge of stonecraft and tanning.

Problems:

Massive overlap between the skills for no good reason. Trapping and construction especially.
Survival doesn’t actually improve your skill in “surviving in the wilderness” except through fiat, such as "Silly Cooking 10 guy, you don’t know how to cook Dandelions! You only have Survival 0!"
Trapping represents some weirdness about disarming traps that may otherwise be neglected if removed.

Proposal:

Construction needs to go, it’s utterly, irredeemably, redundant.

  • Cooking remains Cooking/Chemistry, and takes Survival’s ability to identify edible/toxic materials (since it’s also chemistry).
  • Fabrication remains DIY crafting, with recipes that revolve around wood, plastic, and plumbing. DIY handiman stuff.
  • Electronics expands to cover all Electricals, with any project involving wiring or the scavenging of said wiring using the skill - Headlights and wiring batteries into cars would use Electronics.
  • Mechanics moves towards exclusively dealing in metalworking and simple mechanisms - Making a wheel go round, making a steering axle work, attaching a metal pipe to something.
  • Tailoring remains exclusively working with fabrics and textiles - Nomex, Kevlar, Leather, Cotton, Wool, and subsidiaries thereof.
  • Survival moves into working stone, bone, chitin and fur and stops interfering quite so hard with cooking and fabrication.
  • Trapping handles complex, delicate mechanisms, like locks, explosive detonators, firing mechanisms for guns, and anything involving complex moving parts, like a motor or a rotor.

So to make a firearm would involve:

Trapping to make the firing and loading mechanism.
Mechanics to make the chassis and the bullets.
Fabrication to make the wooden grip.
Cooking to make the gunpowder.
Electronics to make the laser sight.
Tailoring to make the holster.
Survival to butcher whatever you shoot with it.

Making a car would involve:

Trapping to make the motor and alternator.
Mechanics to make the chassis, steering, replace the wheels, and weld everything together.
Fabrication and tailoring to make the seats.
Electronics to get the controls and headlights hooked up to the battery.
Cooking to make the diesel.
Fabrication to set up the fuel lines.
Survival to let it menace with spikes of bone.

Building a house would involve:

Trapping to make the door lock and the clock for the mantel.
Fabrication to fit the windows, make the door and craft the furniture and wooden floors.
Survival to build the stone walls, dig the well out back, provide the bearskin rug and set up the moose head over the fireplace.
Mechanics (with Survival) to make the porcelain throne and glass panes, and make the pipework for plumbing (with fabrication).
Cooking to provide the chemical treatments for your septic tank (forged with Mechanics),
Electronics to hook up the lights (bulbs made with Mechanics and Survival), space heater (plastic and metal frame made with fabrication and mechanics), and wifi (set up with Computers, obviously) together to the solar array (made from a mix of Survival, Fabrication, Mechanics and Electronics).

The skills may merit some refluffing as a result (and some tweaks to books to account for the new emphasis for each skill), but this would provide a system with sensible, logical, relationships between the various skills, and should be attainable without anything more code intensive than dummying out Construction and changing the skills involved with each craft.

Which page? I got a feeling that one is years out of date.

Which page? I got a feeling that one is years out of date.[/quote]

http://www.wiki.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?title=Skills

The wiki isn’t particularly up to date, granted, but for core concepts like this it remains at least passably accurate, and is backed up by the recipes currently in place in the game as checked in the experimental item/recipe browser.

If you’ve a preferred interpretation of what each skill currently means or what it could mean in a revised system, however, I’d be interested in your perspective.

Which page? I got a feeling that one is years out of date.[/quote]

http://www.wiki.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?title=Skills

The wiki isn’t particularly up to date, granted, but for core concepts like this it remains at least passably accurate, and is backed up by the recipes currently in place in the game as checked in the experimental item/recipe browser.

If you’ve a preferred interpretation of what each skill currently means or what it could mean in a revised system, however, I’d be interested in your perspective.[/quote]

Ow no, I just meant, please reference the page(s) you used. Esp as some of the pages are not that well traveled, and can contain a lot of old stuff.

I might eventually get to fixing the skill pages, I have some ideas. But not really relevant here. (See some of the talk page changes I did on the recent changes list today/yesterday).

You have a pointless overlap between Mechanics and Trapping there. Why would you need two different skills depending on the complexity of the mechanism? Also, splitting metalworking from Fabrication makes no sense, quite frankly.

I’m an advocate of merging Trapping into Mechanics, personally. Trapping is incredibly pointless at the moment.

Am i the only one who thinks the skills that have to much overlap should be split up?

to get rid of that whole “butchering corpses makes me better at finding loot in bushs” -thingy…

(though even i think Construction is useless. and you have to go out of your way to make that one useful…)

As for skills that a pain to train by actions, couldn’t you just bump up the exp gain,…

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:1, topic:12277”]No skill gain for practice. This would be more like a challenge mode than main game. Skill gain would come only from books and NPCs. This would fix tedium of grinding skills by making skills very “fixed”, instead making it all about hunting books and NPCs.[/quote]I like this idea for skills in general, not just as a challenge mode. For me, requiring explorations fits into a main hook that the game operates on.

From a logic perspective you’re getting the ideas for these crafts from a source. I would have never thought to turn my jeans into a backpack until I saw it as a default recipe.

We’d need to put in more books, and likely make their window of usefulness smaller.

Reading a book and grinding are more or less the same thing however. I like that recipes are learned from books first and foremost.

Personally my issue is with grinding skills when they are already high. I have 10 mechanics. I need 15 mechanics to install more engines… in a vehicle that started off with more engines…

That is silly. And I don’t know how to level it up reasonably fast because a lot of tasks are too low level to train it further and the high level items, there’s no reason to be crafting tonnes of.

So other than stripping thousands of vehicles…

I think streamlining this thing is unneccesary. We got kind of simulator here, so how about keeping it relevant to simulate stuff. Getting skills in real life IS grinding.

Finding the resources for your sock-knitting-efforts is a mission, a task you must approach. Finding food and water to keep skilling up creates the need to establish some sort of base where you can train your skills. Its really driving force for the game in my opinion. I quess on 50th playtrough you get bored, but for new players it actually is interesting - or atleast challenging and creates problems that should be solved and thus motivates the player to … well. Prepare.

Im thinking about game called Unreal Worlds, another survival-roguelike - where you spend your whole gamelife collecting rocks and twigs - i mean literally yoru whole game career (well, later you get nice things to aid you, but you still collect a lot of twigs and rocks!) - to survive. It is even more deep in the simulator-survival genre and its damn nice doing it.

I think the whole appeal of CDDA is NOT in the casual approach (it certainly isn’t one) - but on the mindset of mastering the game on the game’s terms. If game says you have to sew 500 socks then you frigging sew those socks to level up.

What could be given is some kind of additional incentive for crafting. Hand-nimbleness? You get stuff done quicker because you got well-adjusted fingers. You load bullets 10% faster and you switch stuff faster. This perk would be trained by tinkering. Incentive to tinker. Also how about rewarding by self-esteem? You done the socks that you are using to wade trough the piles of enemy bodyparts! Be proud of it! Little bit of morale boost out of self-made items would also give incentive to craft (and use) them.

All I’m saying… maybe its not the grindiness that needs to change or go away, but maybe make the grinding more interesting/rewarding somehow? Lots of games where grinding is essential grinding is ok because they made it interesting/fun to do in the first place. So maybe solution would actually to ramp up the requirements (as far as materials go) so people see ability to craft stuff kind of REWARD for playing smart? When you are always pulling those curtains for rags and thread it gets old soon.

[quote=“Sharklaser, post:32, topic:12277”]I think streamlining this thing is unneccesary. We got kind of simulator here, so how about keeping it relevant to simulate stuff. Getting skills in real life IS grinding.

If game says you have to sew 500 socks then you frigging sew those socks to level up.[/quote]

We don’t simulate a lot of realistic things simply because they would be detrimental to the gameplay. And often would end up less realistic than not simulating them.

IRL if you wanted to sew a hoodie, you wouldn’t sew 10 pairs of socks, 20 scarves and 30 pieces of underwear, but rather would try sewing a hoodie over and over until you succeeded.

Oddly selective realism is worse than lack of realism. It breaks immersion more effectively and is bad for gameplay.

For a good example of bad realism: earlier in the development, arrows were crafted in steps. Crafting unfletched arrows, fletching, then combining them into arrows.
This sucked. It was “more realistic” because IRL you’d do that too, but if we wanted that kind of realism, we should make it so that you have to manually put an arrowhead on arrow shaft, manually chew food, press “breathe” and “blink” keybinds once in a while etc.
Nowadays there is a single recipe that does those 3 steps in just one.

All arguments for realism also have to deal with a giant obstacle: for the realism to actually be there, the player character must be rewarded for acting realistically. That is, what makes sense IRL has to make sense in the game.
For example, if morale didn’t have the focus and stat boosts (neither of which is realistic), it would result in survivors not going for morale. Everyone would be eating bland oatmeal gruel and drinking water. Or going for some sort of rational diet that is impossible to stick to for sane humans due to its extreme blandness.

So no, having to craft 500 socks doesn’t make it more realistic, because IRL you wouldn’t craft 500 socks to “level up tailoring” so that you can craft Kevlar socks.

You have a pointless overlap between Mechanics and Trapping there. Why would you need two different skills depending on the complexity of the mechanism? Also, splitting metalworking from Fabrication makes no sense, quite frankly.

I’m an advocate of merging Trapping into Mechanics, personally. Trapping is incredibly pointless at the moment.[/quote]

Sorry for not getting back to this previously, I’ve been away on a training course.

“Why would you need two different skills depending on the complexity of the mechanism”?

Do you think a clockmaker makes their own cogs?

“Mechanics/Metalworking” would be “use of tools for the shaping of metal into appropriate shapes”.
“Trapping/Tinkering” would be “using those appropriate shapes together to make intricate mechanisms work”.

It is possible to have an individual who is skilled in field servicing firearms who could not create the components those firearms are made out of.
It is possible to be perfectly capable of precision machining cogs without having the ability to make a working clock.

It is possible to be able to create explosive materials without having the ability to create reliable detonators.
It is possible to be able to create reliable detonators without having the ability to make C4 from chemicals you’d find in your kitchen.

That’s why a separate skill should continue to exist, because it is a different skillset.

Would you consider this to be a bad thing? I’d love to be able to keep trying over and over to make a hoodie, and the option already exists for repairing one - keep trying until you succeed, fail, or level up. Recipes artificially capping the player like they do now are unfun and unrealistic.

Regarding recipes being locked to books and skill gains the same:

Where’s the realism? It might not be obvious to someone with 0 Tailoring skill that they could easily turn a pair of jeans into a knapsack, for example, but to someone with advanced training in fashion and design, why wouldn’t they? If skills represent the player’s understanding of underlying principles of the skill, and recipes specific applications thereof, they would be able to arrive at the location they needed by simply asking “What do I need?”, and then applying their understanding of basic tailoring until: “Ah, I could easily turn a pair of trousers into some storage if I sewed up the legs”. People improve without teaching by self-study and experimentation, the idea that you can only learn by following others begs the question of how anyone learned anything in the first place.

[quote=“Pantalion, post:23, topic:12277”]“Mechanics/Metalworking” would be “use of tools for the shaping of metal into appropriate shapes”.
“Trapping/Tinkering” would be “using those appropriate shapes together to make intricate mechanisms work”.[/quote]

But the first one sounds like fabrication and the second one sounds like mechanics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fabrication#Processes

I’d remove trapping and roll it into survival with some of the traps requiring some mechanical skill. And maybe add some traps that attract ‘game’ which is what trapping is for.

If you look at the book descriptions in the game and the skills they train, trapping sounds like it belongs with survival and all of the metalworking books train fabrication.

[quote=“Pantalion, post:34, topic:12277”]Would you consider this to be a bad thing? I’d love to be able to keep trying over and over to make a hoodie, and the option already exists for repairing one - keep trying until you succeed, fail, or level up. Recipes artificially capping the player like they do now are unfun and unrealistic.

Regarding recipes being locked to books and skill gains the same:[/quote]

For tailoring, it would be OK to unlock recipes from the start. It makes sense that someone would come up with a way of sewing up pants from leather without having much tailoring knowledge. The sewing projects of this kind would most likely fail, but the worst side effect here would be a pin prick.
Cooking is worse. Here “critical failure” could result in damaged tools, poisonous food, cut fingers and housefires. Simulating those (instead of keeping recipes skill-locked) would lead to this kind of anti-realism I described above - for example, collecting a lot of disposable tools and “volatile” food, cooking until you get cut badly, sleeping off the damage and leveling up cooking that way. Only specific cooking recipes could be autolearned before their difficulty.

As for book locking:
You won’t figure out how to make software to hack robots by yourself. You’d need in-depth documentation of their AI at the very least.
Similar for katanas, plate armor, reflex-recurve bows, lemon batteries, atomic lamps, zombie pheromones, biodiesel, meth, heroin, oxidizer powder, ammonia, RDX etc.
Even something as simple as brewing alcohol (even prison pruno variety) requires some knowledge that you aren’t born with. If you don’t know yeast makes alcohol from sugar, you don’t know it until you read about it or at least taste it when preparing some soon-to-be-baked food. And a typical American hamburger eater who has a high chance of is now knowing how to cook anything more complex than a frozen pizza (especially if young) would most likely have a hard time figuring out all the low level cooking processes more complex than heating things up. A lot of common knowledge isn’t as common as it seems to be.

Some recipes are a bit out of line, but that doesn’t mean book locking should be out. For example, cooked acorns could be book locked since it requires understanding soaking to leach tannins.

That’s for realism.
As for gameplay:

[ul][li]Early cooking progression is a pretty good incentive to go out and get varied food as opposed to trying to cook acorns over and over to level the skill. And as food tends to be limited early on, it isn’t a very good idea to grind cooking at that point. This results in learning by using (rather than by explicit grinding), which is good.[/li]
[li]Tailoring is already way too “book-unlocked” compared to most skills. It also has no tool locks. Those aspects make it very strong early on, resulting in obviously optimal but tedious idea of grinding it. Unlocking hoodies from the start wouldn’t make it much worse, but unlocking some book-locked recipes could.[/li]
[li]Fabrication tools could be un-book-locked, since forge lock is a horrible failure at design, but that still wouldn’t fix it since it would still be a huge time investment. Unlocking skill level requirements would just lead to crafting a lot of pilot lights or small plastic bottles or whatever. Un-book-locking medieval weapons (even just the simpler ones) could lead to forging actually being really good.[/li][/ul]

tl;dr No single general change like “remove all book locking” or “unlock all recipes” from the start looks viable. It has to be addressed by changing specific recipes.

Sure, extensive simplification was already on the table. Logically you could remove all other skills, and Fabrication covers all creation, carpentry, carving, and all metalworking, Mechanics covers all complex machinery, from firearms to clockmaking to engines to pumps. Forget survival, working with stone is fabrication too.

The same issue still applies - working in wood is a different skillset to working in metal is a different skillset to working in stone. Knowing how to fabricate up an IKEA cabinet and knowing how to fire up an arc welder is not a natural progression from one to the next.

To remove the attachments you’re giving to the existing names for skills, the skills we’re talking about are:
Cooking, Metalworking, Carpentry, Sculpting, Mechanics, Electronics, Textiles.
(Cooking, Mechanics, Fabrication, Survival, Trapping, Electronics, Tailoring)

For a simplified system, that would be:

Cooking, Fabrication(Metalworking, Carpentry, Sculpting, Trapping [simple]), Mechanics (Also Trapping [complex]), Electronics, Tailoring.

So to make a car requires Fabrication for putting together the frame and anything that involves “working with basic materials”, Mechanics for the engine, possibly steering, and possibly doors, Electronics for the headlights, Tailoring for the seat padding (the frame of the seat is fabrication again).

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:36, topic:12277”]For tailoring, it would be OK to unlock recipes from the start. It makes sense that someone would come up with a way of sewing up pants from leather without having much tailoring knowledge. The sewing projects of this kind would most likely fail, but the worst side effect here would be a pin prick.
Cooking is worse. Here “critical failure” could result in damaged tools, poisonous food, cut fingers and housefires. Simulating those (instead of keeping recipes skill-locked) would lead to this kind of anti-realism I described above - for example, collecting a lot of disposable tools and “volatile” food, cooking until you get cut badly, sleeping off the damage and leveling up cooking that way. Only specific cooking recipes could be autolearned before their difficulty.

As for book locking:
You won’t figure out how to make software to hack robots by yourself. You’d need in-depth documentation of their AI at the very least.
Similar for katanas, plate armor, reflex-recurve bows, lemon batteries, atomic lamps, zombie pheromones, biodiesel, meth, heroin, oxidizer powder, ammonia, RDX etc.[/quote]

You do not need to be “able to do something flawlessly” to be able to visualise it, and for things that seem complex to a layman, an expert could easily conceptualise them.

Skill failure for things like cooking already exists, and should arguably carry serious consequences already (you’re mixing bleach and ammonia with poison for twenty hours a day while Dead Tired and fighting off zombears with your bare hands), but as already suggested earlier, this could easily be abstracted to be the same for all skills:
1: Your attempt fails without further incident.
2: You waste some materials (burnt/poisonous food, lose some raw materials as you do while repairing or modifying clothing).
3: You damage your tool (I assure you, you can most assuredly break your needles while sewing, it’s much harder to damage a pot but still doable, especially working with chemicals).
4: You hurt yourself (cut finger, breathed in poison gas, tried poisonous food, electrocuted yourself).
5: Your attempt succeeds without further incident.

Thinking up a super basic system:
1+SkillD100 divided by Difficulty Level +1. (Skill 10 = 11-1100 result, difficulty level 10 = /11 so 1-100 result, heavily skewed towards middle results because of the law of averages). Roll 1DX, stop further rolls on 1 or 5.
Result table with 0-10 “Roll 1D4 x 4 for results.”, 11-25 “Roll 1D4 x 3 for results” 26-50 “Roll 1D6-1 x 2 for results, autofail if you don’t roll a 5”, 51-75 “Roll 1D5 x 2 for results, autosuccess if you don’t roll a 1”, 76-90 “Roll 1D4+1, autosuccess”, 91+ “Autosuccess”.

This obviously is very crude and may overrepresent problems occurring at equal skill/difficulty, but if you had, say, 5 skill and tried a DC10 recipe, you would have a small, but tangible, chance of success “with problems”, with a highest possible result of 54 giving a better than 40% chance of success, and a ~15% chance of success on a 26-50 roll.

Yes, you theoretically could keep trying a complex dish and keep failing and sleeping until you succeeded - it would be realistic, it would be tedious, and it would be inefficient. It would be more efficient to just take those same materials and “experiment” for the same skill gain. In the ideal system you craft because you want something, not because you want skills.

For booklocking:

Hacking - You’d need to know their OS, perhaps. but how many types of code does someone know at Computers 1? Computers 3? Computers 10? It might not be feasible to straight up start coding in subroutines into their code, but with any remote access laptop you could try putting in a bunch of extra data into the code at random and see if something unusual happens (It’s much easier to crash code than it is to make it work, after all).
Katanas - Knowledge needed - “Those are the swords where they folded the metal a bunch of times, right?” More in depth would be the knowledge that this was done to remove impurities from the metal, even more in-depth was that the end result wasn’t actually much different to what Westerners forging with superior steel were producing as standard and sticking to making broadswords. You really want to forge a katana, start folding steel and see what works. It might not be the next Masamune brand sword, but from that extremely basic “let’s try folding steel to make a sword” and a solid foundation in metallurgy that a high skill level represents you could come out with something that performed pretty katana-ley. Even if you only knew the most basic “long, curved sword”, you could emulate the shape alone and still produce something that did the job.
Plate Armour - This is extremely easy to conceptualise, and is a well recognised “trope”, but does not involve any particular secret, so much as a solid understanding of the fundamentals: You need to know how to make plates move together seamlessly, how to keep those plates in place, how to shape them so as to distribute force, and how to fit them together so you can move easily, with the correct underlying materials to permit maximum protection and mobility. A level 6 Tailor is a “fashion designer”, who understands the properties of textiles and how to work them, as well as how to correctly fit fabric together and size garments. A level 6 Metallurgist is capable of advanced shaping of metal, is familiar with the properties of metal and how to make armour out of that metal. If they want to combine their skillsets then there’s nothing stopping them from sitting down and designing full plate on paper, then putting that into practise/refining their method until it’s perfect.
Reflex-recurve bows - I’m not actually sure how a bow can be reflex without also being recurve, but I assume a more experienced archer might know. Regardless, as an archer with deep knowledge into the properties of materials and how they work (high fabrication, high archery), I know what I need from a bow, and can conceptualise stronger draw bows by changing the material, length (screw recurve, I’m going straight limb English longbow) changing the shape, and changing the shape of the bow and which way the bow flexes when unstrung - or in other words, whether the bow is reflex, recurve, or both.
Lemon batteries - Seriously? It’s two different types of metal in a fruit. The underlying physics are pretty basic. If my electronics skill is sufficient to craft a flying robot, I should hope I understand electricity well enough to understand how basic electrical cells work.
Biodiesel - To a non-chemist, this may be inconceivable, but what are you doing to bring your skill up to level 7? Do you understand catalysed reactions? Combining Hydrogen Peroxide and Methanol to reduce oils to a mixture of glycerine and thin usable fuel?
Atomic X - There’s several ways this might be achieved, honestly. Using the radioactives as either a light source in themselves or to produce a constant amount of power to a light. Honestly the biggest strangeness is that an atomic power converter doesn’t achieve the same “perpetual power” already. Now, you might say that any “nuclear energy” source is a specialist skillset, which I’d be willing to accept, but then you’d have the other possible that knowing one recipe then unlocks others through familiarity - if you know how to make an atomic lamp, why wouldn’t you know how to make an atomic nightlight?

Specific chemicals are the most compelling case, since you do not necessarily know what you’re attempting to achieve, and different compounds can have different gross physical properties. We can assume that mutagens are complex chemical treatments using catalysts and difficult processes to produce with trial and error being time and resource prohibitive. The player might feasibly try breaking down some zombie meat to reproduce their smell and achieve “zombie pheromone”, or know that chlorine + X reacts together to produce another basic chemical when treated - from basic chemical knowledge that they have accumulated while working with chemicals sufficient to bring their skill level up in the first place.

While I concede the necessity and importance of books to a layman, and the majority of chemistry recipes can be difficult to reliably replicate without some fundamental understanding of what you’re trying to achieve, it is not unreasonable that high skill levels include more than raw procedural knowledge. This includes the knowledge that you are not born with. Your average American hamburger eater has a cooking skill of 0-1 for preparing frozen food. Getting to higher cooking levels precisely involves “figuring out low level cooking processes”, and this includes “Ew, these were horrible and crunchy. Maybe I’ll try soaking them like they were beans” for something like cooked acorns.

So to tl;dr that, and clarify my position:

If you have the recipe in a book: Should be able to attempt it, regardless of skill level. Potentially huge failure chance, but even laymen can follow clear instructions for some hope of success. I cannot make pudding, but I can google up a recipe and have a good chance of pudding success.
Unlock certain “obvious” recipes and should be able to attempt them before skill level reaches the difficulty level (leather pants), or for specific “complex” recipes (secret blend of herbs and spices), once their skill level far exceeds their difficulty level. They might be difficult to achieve but obvious to conceptualise (fireproof armour that doesn’t weigh you down), or be simple to achieve, but require a deep understanding to come to that realisation on your own (acorns are edible, but require soaking and draining).
Very rare, and very specific recipes could be booklocked, but these would be the exception, not the rule, and would likely be mainly restricted to chemical processes or highly technical specialised fields of study.
Traits or professions may grant familiarity in those booklocked fields to allow them to be unlocked by increase in skill, or be available from the start, depending.

[quote=“Pantalion, post:37, topic:12277”]Skill failure for things like cooking already exists, and should arguably carry serious consequences already (you’re mixing bleach and ammonia with poison for twenty hours a day while Dead Tired and fighting off zombears with your bare hands), but as already suggested earlier, this could easily be abstracted to be the same for all skills:
1: Your attempt fails without further incident.
2: You waste some materials (burnt/poisonous food, lose some raw materials as you do while repairing or modifying clothing).
3: You damage your tool (I assure you, you can most assuredly break your needles while sewing, it’s much harder to damage a pot but still doable, especially working with chemicals).
4: You hurt yourself (cut finger, breathed in poison gas, tried poisonous food, electrocuted yourself).
5: Your attempt succeeds without further incident.[/quote]

Damaging tools is bullshit because for grinders it would be inconsequential (just grab more pots/hammers and grind using recipes with cheaper tools), while for everyone else it would mean wrecking pots while cooking food and somehow managing to burn through hammers and knives like they’re made of plastic whenever attempting any serious construction project. There is no way to balance that against both of those extremes - you can either make tools essentially just components to make grinding unrewarding or make the tools resistant enough that it doesn’t matter. So it solves nothing.
Damaging self is bullshit because for grinders it would be inconsequential (just sleep it off), while for everyone else it would mean having to deal with playing a mong who manages to burn/cut/poison/spray with lemon juice/zap self over and over. And manages that through thick gloves/gas mask/isolating rubber gloves/hazmat. Unless the wounds were so severe that you had to stop crafting right there, it would solve nothing.

So the end result would be annoying, unrealistic and either inconsequential balancewise or way more annoying and unrealistic than expected. No good sides here.

Hacking - You'd need to know their OS, perhaps. but how many types of code does someone know at Computers 1? Computers 3? Computers 10? It might not be feasible to straight up start coding in subroutines into their code, but with any remote access laptop you could try putting in a bunch of extra data into the code at random and see if something unusual happens (It's much easier to crash code than it is to make it work, after all).

It would be like trying to devise a cure for cancer without any cancer cells to test it on and without good knowledge of human biology.
While all the hacking concepts share similarities, at the very least you need to know how to communicate with the software in question. Trying to hack something that only “talks” on an encrypted channel (ie. any military soft), without having any method of knowing the encryption keys would mean having to bruteforce military grade encryption key just to start attempting to hack. And that (bruteforcing the key) alone would be infeasible within a single human lifetime.

Unless we go full hollywood hacking, then it’s fine to hack military equipment by chirping into a walkie-talkie or by commanding the tank drone to solve a trivial paradox.

You really want to forge a katana, start folding steel and see what works.

Katana design took multiple lifetimes of small improvements by experienced smiths. It’s not something you could come up with just from knowing how to fold steel.

screw recurve, I'm going straight limb English longbow

Longbows are actually feasible. As far as I recall, current longbows are autolearn. Though they also are sporting/hunting bows, not the long-ranged warbows.
Still, straight limb bows are probably much easier than the composite ones that would require trial and error to come up with without good knowledge of how they are made.

It's two different types of metal in a fruit. The underlying physics are pretty basic. If my electronics skill is sufficient to craft a flying robot, I should hope I understand electricity well enough to understand how basic electrical cells work.

But you don’t understand how to make a robot yet, just how to assemble a flashlight. Taking apart flashlights and then putting them back together doesn’t require much understanding of chemistry.

To a non-chemist, this may be inconceivable, but what are you doing to bring your skill up to level 7

Vodka and pickles.

Using the radioactives as either a light source in themselves or to produce a constant amount of power to a light.

Making radioactive stuff glow would be unfeasible, except for some specific elements. Making it produce power requires knowing how to. Currently Geiger counters require more skill than atomic lights.

one recipe then unlocks others through familiarity - if you know how to make an atomic lamp, why wouldn't you know how to make an atomic nightlight?

It currently kinda works like that - if you have a book, you can craft its contents. If you don’t have said book, you are unlikely to know how to craft its contents. There are edge cases, but they don’t warrant too much attention.

Getting to higher cooking levels precisely involves "figuring out low level cooking processes", and this includes "Ew, these were horrible and crunchy. Maybe I'll try soaking them like they were beans" for something like cooked acorns.

Could be handwaved like that, but it wouldn’t be too convincing. In this specific case, you can meet the requirements by boiling eggs and making bread.
So it boils down to gameplay arguments.

If you have the recipe in a book: Should be able to attempt it, regardless of skill level.

This could work for all safe recipes and books that you can understand (ie. have enough skill to read the book).
Not for unsafe recipes (because critical failures don’t work) and not for books that you can’t learn from. Though the hard books could have some easy recipes too.

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:38, topic:12277”]Damaging tools is bullshit because for grinders it would be inconsequential (just grab more pots/hammers and grind using recipes with cheaper tools), while for everyone else it would mean wrecking pots while cooking food and somehow managing to burn through hammers and knives like they’re made of plastic whenever attempting any serious construction project. There is no way to balance that against both of those extremes - you can either make tools essentially just components to make grinding unrewarding or make the tools resistant enough that it doesn’t matter. So it solves nothing.
Damaging self is bullshit because for grinders it would be inconsequential (just sleep it off), while for everyone else it would mean having to deal with playing a mong who manages to burn/cut/poison/spray with lemon juice/zap self over and over. And manages that through thick gloves/gas mask/isolating rubber gloves/hazmat. Unless the wounds were so severe that you had to stop crafting right there, it would solve nothing.[/quote]

1: You’ve just covered the entire game. Combat is bullshit, because any damage you can sleep off and we can assume time and resources are infinite. Damage to gear is pointless, just get more gear.
2: You have a point about damaging hammers being silly - maybe damaging tools could be a flag on a recipe? It makes sense to damage a pot making battery acid, not so much making curry. At best they’re practising first aid by repeated self-harm, which honestly is fine by me since you can do that already and that already sounds like me making a salad.
3: Your talk about grinding assumes that it would be better to fail at a higher level recipe than it is to succeed at an easier one - if this isn’t the case, grinding is self-correcting, and all that’s left is realism: You want spares of tools because sometimes you break them, you sometimes hurt yourself, you want protective gear because that will stop you hurting yourself while making dangerous chemicals (great idea, by the way).
4: This entire thread is dedicated to removing grind anyway. Have we progressed any with “practice” crafting yet? If everything is predicated around the idea that grinding is optimal skill gain, then of course this problem will persist.

Hacking - Conceded, I wasn’t considering having to break encryption first, and that would be time prohibitive (though a good profession perk - You know military encryption protocols, therefore you can naturally unlock Hacking Laptops once your skill level is high enough).

Katana design took multiple lifetimes of small improvements by experienced smiths. - So did the rapier. Strip away the mysticism the katana is a decent cutting weapon with pros and cons, and every medieval weapon was forged in the crucible of eternal war that was medieval Europe, while the steel the player uses makes the katana’s design largely unnecessary in the first place.
But fine, the player, as playtime approaches infinite, becomes an experienced smith. They’ve grinded level 10 Smithing, spent a year solid forging enough weapons to outfit every remaining human still alive on the planet. Still impossible? Can a high skill swordsman, high skill smith craft a new katana, or something that resembles one? They might have to try a few times and waste some materials, but they’re a high skill swordsman/smith, they know what they need from a sword - balance, weight, edge, durability, how to work steel, and how to learn from their mistakes. It might be more difficult to learn a new recipe for the first time, and more difficult still if they lack an existing example to study, but that is not the same thing as book-locking.

Still, straight limb bows are probably much easier than the composite ones that would require trial and error to come up with without good knowledge of how they are made.

Sure, you’d need a working knowledge of splicing, a solid understanding of the material properties involved, and be willing to waste some materials experimenting. Trial and error does not a book-wall make. To me, that’s represented admirably by an increased difficulty and having a high level in the related skill.

But you don't understand how to make a robot yet, just how to assemble a flashlight. Taking apart flashlights and then putting them back together doesn't require much understanding of chemistry.

If it’s book-locked, it’s book-locked, you can have enough skill to make a Survivor Mask, but not be able to make a gas mask. You can make a tank drone, you cannot make a lemon battery. You can craft Excalibur from the blood and bones of ancient dragons using a forge of flowing lava, but you cannot take five pieces of Rebar and make them into a claw. Book-locked. You can say they won’t know the recipe at Level 2 - fine, what about level 3? 4? 5? Recipes do not need to unlock when the player can handle the difficulty, they unlock when the player understands enough to conceptualise them. While certain people may lack creative thought, others can easily envision potential applications.

In fact, trait time:

Perk: Inventive: You’re adept at thinking outside of the box. You automatically learn recipes at lower skill levels than normal, and unlock many recipes that you would otherwise need to learn from books. 2 points.
Flaw: Limited: While you’re alright when you’re following instructions, you have trouble applying things you learn to wider world applications. The level you need to learn recipes on your own is drastically increased. 1 point.

Vodka and pickles.

Okay, that’s a compelling reason to drastically lower the skill required for certain recipes, but at least according to the game “putting dead things in rotten wine” is equal in complexity to reliably producing wide spectrum anti-parasitic drug treatments, creating synthetic adrenaline, and producing non-toxic, safe to ingest pharmaceuticals, and must be treated as such, making them a highly competent and skilled chemist.

It currently kinda works like that - if you have a book, you can craft its contents. If you don't have said book, you are unlikely to know how to craft its contents. There are edge cases, but they don't warrant too much attention.

If you lose the book, you lose the recipe.
If you disassemble the atomic lamp, you cannot craft the atomic coffee maker, if you learn from one book how to convert machines to using plutonium for power, you cannot apply that knowledge to making a lamp.

It’s much easier to gain familiarity and experience creating plutonium cells that you can safely stick into your own body than it is to make a permanent light source from almost identical materials. The justification is pretty thin.

Getting to higher cooking levels precisely involves "figuring out low level cooking processes", and this includes "Ew, these were horrible and crunchy. Maybe I'll try soaking them like they were beans" for something like cooked acorns.

Could be handwaved like that, but it wouldn’t be too convincing. In this specific case, you can meet the requirements by boiling eggs and making bread.
So it boils down to gameplay arguments.

You can reach the difficulty level for making acorns, sure, but go back to what I said: Complex recipes unlock higher than their difficulty level. By the time you can safely produce adrenaline shots out of bleach, you probably know various methods for treating food - something humans have known since around the time they discovered fire.

quote]If you have the recipe in a book: Should be able to attempt it, regardless of skill level.[/quote]

This could work for all safe recipes and books that you can understand (ie. have enough skill to read the book).
Not for unsafe recipes (because critical failures don’t work) and not for books that you can’t learn from. Though the hard books could have some easy recipes too.
[/quote]

That’s fair, dangerous recipes might have a minimum skill level to attempt them - you can’t reliably succeed, but you are competent enough that you will at least “not fail critically dangerously”. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, the framework appears to already be in place to allow attempts on recipes whose difficulty level exceeds your skill.

Anything to reduce the binary nature of skills is a good potential improvement for making skills less grindy and annoying.

[quote=“Pantalion, post:39, topic:12277”]1: You’ve just covered the entire game. Combat is bullshit, because any damage you can sleep off and we can assume time and resources are infinite. Damage to gear is pointless, just get more gear.
2: You have a point about damaging hammers being silly - maybe damaging tools could be a flag on a recipe? It makes sense to damage a pot making battery acid, not so much making curry. At best they’re practising first aid by repeated self-harm, which honestly is fine by me since you can do that already and that already sounds like me making a salad.
3: Your talk about grinding assumes that it would be better to fail at a higher level recipe than it is to succeed at an easier one - if this isn’t the case, grinding is self-correcting, and all that’s left is realism: You want spares of tools because sometimes you break them, you sometimes hurt yourself, you want protective gear because that will stop you hurting yourself while making dangerous chemicals (great idea, by the way).
4: This entire thread is dedicated to removing grind anyway. Have we progressed any with “practice” crafting yet? If everything is predicated around the idea that grinding is optimal skill gain, then of course this problem will persist.[/quote]

  1. Your counter-argument goes like “chopping own foot with a hatchet is bad, therefore surgery is bad”. Pretty dumb to put it lightly.
    Combat damage can force you to stop fighting and then generally isn’t fully healed after you wake up. Damage from crafting would need to be as high as damage from combat to matter. Like, “You fail crafting vegetable aspic and give self third degree burns”.
    “You cut yourself while making salad” would be inconsequential and only annoying.
    I actually agree about gear damage being stupid. It is tedious and only really matters very early on.
  2. Tool damage would mandate adding tool selection to crafting menu. For vast majority of those selections, the only purpose of this selection would be to pick the item to get damaged.
    Tool damage would make hauling around improvised tools a good idea. That is, collecting rocks to craft extra rock pots to use in chemistry projects.
    Tool damage would exacerbate existing problems like gear repair tedium and special casing of toolset bionic.
    Finally, it would achieve nothing, because pots are common enough that you could easily get all the spares you’d need, and even if you couldn’t get a spare, you could just repair the current tool. The only “industry” affected would be forging, which doesn’t need it because forge setup is a pain and doesn’t need any extra nerfs.
    tl;dr tool damage is bullshit and a bad idea
  3. It is always better to use the recipe that costs the least but still trains the skill. Tool damage does nothing to prevent that, it only means that expensive tools wouldn’t help with faster grinding.
    This “realism” would be of the annoying, unrealistic kind - randomly breaking tools (much more often than in real life, if it is to matter at all) making it necessary to haul a giant sack of “just in case” toolboxes in the trunk of the car, while not actually slowing down grinders because tool damage has to be slow enough not to make the non-grinder furious about yet another “jacking simulator” and “clothing washing simulator”. Grinders would just use the recipes that don’t use up expensive tools. Protective gear could be just included into recipe requirements as explicit requirement, otherwise it would just lead to layering scarves and gloves.
  4. This is magical thinking - asserting grind isn’t optimal won’t help to make it not-optimal. Until someone finds a way to make grinding suboptimal, everything needs to assume that grinding is optimal.
Sure, you'd need a working knowledge of splicing, a solid understanding of the material properties involved, and be willing to waste some materials experimenting. Trial and error does not a book-wall make. To me, that's represented admirably by an increased difficulty and having a high level in the related skill.

No, it would just result in someone randomly learning how to make reflex recurve bows after making enough plastic bottles and pilot lights.

Recipes do not need to unlock when the player can handle the difficulty, they unlock when the player understands enough to conceptualise them.

“Conceptualize” is far from “design”, except for things that rely on something like material working difficulty.

You can make a tank drone, you cannot make a lemon battery.

You can’t make a tank drone. Not at 99 in all skills.
And being really good in one thing doesn’t mean you can do anything similar. Crafting broadswords all life won’t make you understand katanas. Making heroin won’t do much to let you design a process to make meth using cheap tools and subpar components.
Some recipes could autolearn at higher level. The problem is, that requires a lot of work - finding all those recipes and changing them. And that work requires either someone doing it or someone giving good arguments for why should it be done by someone else.

you can have enough skill to make a Survivor Mask, but not be able to make a gas mask

The survivor mask doesn’t have its own filter, it uses the one from gas mask used to craft it.

If you lose the book, you lose the recipe.

You don’t lose the book.
The chance of it happening is so low that it would be a waste of time to implement countermeasures.

If you disassemble the atomic lamp, you cannot craft the atomic coffee maker, if you learn from one book how to convert machines to using plutonium for power, you cannot apply that knowledge to making a lamp.

Makes perfect sense.
Lamp isn’t a coffee maker. The atomic coffee maker uses technomagic to make really strong coffee, lamp just glows.
Plutonium battery mod drains its fuel pretty fast, while the lamp and coffee maker manage to subsist on it forever.

It's much easier to gain familiarity and experience creating plutonium cells that you can safely stick into your own body than it is to make a permanent light source from almost identical materials. The justification is pretty thin.

Plutonium cell in power storage bionic could be removed because it doesn’t make sense. Plutonium isn’t a rechargeable battery.

Anything to reduce the binary nature of skills is a good potential improvement for making skills less grindy and annoying.

The problem is, it’s hard to come up with good limiters and rewards for extra skill levels, especially ones that don’t require redesigning a lot.

Penalties for critical failure must matter in downtime, not be too annoying and not be too unrealistic. This rules out tool/hp damage (all 3 points), effects that prevent crafting (last two), smell bringing hordes (all 3 if crafting in a vehicle, otherwise last 2), no skill gain for critical failure (last one), damage/loss of nearby tools/components not involved in crafting (all 3), zeroing focus (first one), morale drop (first two), mutations or bionic damage (last one, not counting annoyance because danger is “overriding” it).
Basically, the only good critical failure is just losing components used to craft things.
Producing subpar on low rolls results could work as a way of making skills less binary, but would do nothing to prevent grinding. It would slow down grinding if it replaced the “you fail but waste no components”, but not prevent it.

Rewards aren’t much easier. A reward would need to matter, not be unbalanced and not be too unrealistic. Rules out extra/free crafts (last one, except for some chemistry stuff), producing instantly-reinforced items (first one), unreliably cutting down on craft time (first and last), extra skill gain (first one), morale gain (first one),
“Masterworks” could work, but could be a big problem to design around if the bonuses actually mattered. It would be better to just make the factory-made, spawned items masterwork grade (flawless) when it comes to stats, and baseline player-crafted items flawed. The only really fitting masterwork quality I can think of would be making them immune to damage, so that you don’t need to repair them (gear damage is not a good mechanic).
Producing useful byproducts could work, but would require a lot of extra work to make it work. Also, the byproducts shouldn’t be more useful than main products, otherwise the product/byproduct should be swapped and recipe level increased.
Unlocking other recipes would require someone to do all the work of marking similar recipes. This would be a simple “research” system, where you could invent naginatas by crafting enough katanas. Could work, but would require lots of json changes to make it work.

So critical failure/success system would be hard to make useful.

Passive bonuses/penalties from skills could be better: slower/faster crafting, “skill as a component” allowing high skill to bypass some component/tool requirements, unlocking useful byproducts.
All of those would require significant changes to the jsons to shine, though.