There was a thread on this, but it quickly ran off topic and I didn’t see any answers given.
So, any mechanics tasks that will increase skill after you get to 11? I want that third engine for my bus / mobile home / warehouse.
Cannot find exact reference right now, but I remember reading that crafting task requiring n level of a primary skill can train this skill up to floor(n+n/4)+1. So any craft requiring mechanics 9 or higher SHOULD train mechanics to 12.
In practice - I’ve observed the effect, but with lower levels, never had any skill that high. So - could you check if it works for you?
I didn’t know the equation, but I did know the effect. The problem is that I don’t think I have any crafting recipes high enough difficulty for mechanics. You can get the same thing from installing (and repairing I think) vehicle parts. But it’s harder to tell which tasks are at a useful skill level. Tasks aren’t listed in skill difficulty order for installation and not all tasks are shown all the time. (i.e. it only lists installation tasks for a particular location that are suitable for that location).
You can only see what repair tasks take in skill if you actually have a damaged part to repair on a vehicle.
Aaanyway, I checked again and the only one I can find is Skill level 9 - 6000 hp gas turbine engine. Hmm, I guess I could check that helicopter crash site.
From my own observations, I gained some very marginal skill in mechanics past 11 by simply repairing, installing and breaking down various vehicles, mostly armored ones. I cannot tell which tasks gave appreciable amounts of experience, but I do know that none of them required 10 mechanics skill, which would fit the usual formula, so I believe actions listed above contribute some experience regardless of skill.
For perspective, however, this form of grinding up skill would likely require the same amount of effort as building up at least three or four mobile death bases to get to 12, from my (extremely) rough estimate. I do think this is perhaps an odd quirk to the mechanics skill, as 11 functions as a VERY hard stop to skill growth, but once you hit 12 you could conceivably just grind all the way up to 16 by simply installing and removing a third engine to a vehicle repeatedly, assuming that skill requirement gave full XP on an order far beyond simple repairing tasks.
Aftershock adds a recipe in Lab journal-Curie to build mininukes that requires Mechanics 10, so there’s that.
What’s Aftershock like in general? Does it bump up the mob danger a lot or is it mostly items and recipes?
It’s basically just all the future-tech that has been stripped from mainline, so far as I’m tracking. I can’t seem to survive long enough to find many of the more high-end creatures, and I’m pretty code-illiterate so I couldn’t tell you much by going into the files themselves. Could be something in there, but as far as I know it’s just items (pretty damn cool items, mind; I miss my hard-light longbow).
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Thanks! I’ll give it a try.
Time to take a backup then find if I can sneak another mod into my save file. 
[EDIT] Change of plan.
I’m just going to change the mininuke launcher recipe to take skill 9 to make not 8. I should be able to get to level 12 with that by making a bunch of launchers and throwing them away.
"type": "recipe",
"result": "mininuke_launcher",
"category": "CC_WEAPON",
"subcategory": "CSC_WEAPON_RANGED",
"skill_used": "mechanics",
"skills_required": [ "gun", 3 ],
"difficulty": 9,
"time": "4 h",
"book_learn": [ [ "recipe_mininuke_launch", 5 ] ],
"using": [ [ "welding_standard", 20 ] ],
"qualities": [ { "id": "SAW_M_FINE", "level": 1 }, { "id": "SCREW_FINE", "level": 1 }, { "id": "WRENCH_FINE", "level": 1 } ],
"components": [
[ [ "pipe", 2 ], [ "rebar", 2 ] ],
[ [ "duct_tape", 200 ] ],
[ [ "2x4", 2 ], [ "stick", 2 ] ],
[ [ "spring", 2 ] ],
[ [ "steel_chunk", 3 ], [ "scrap", 9 ] ]
]