As it stands, it seems kinda disappointing that the professions we’ve been talking about for so long are being implemented as nothing more than an small modifier to skill points and starting gear.
Are there any plans to make them have a bigger effect?
Seems like they are all getting “unique” items, in the sense you don’t normally spawn with them. Given that the Savant trait affects learning rate of a single skill, I imagine professions could do that too. More variety, the better!
[quote=“Benedict, post:1, topic:758”]As it stands, it seems kinda disappointing that the professions we’ve been talking about for so long are being implemented as nothing more than an small modifier to skill points and starting gear.
Are there any plans to make them have a bigger effect?
Seconded, professions aren’t an implementation right now, they’re a prototype.
I don’t like the faster/slower learning rates.
I think professions should be about starting conditions, and that’s the extent of it.
Because whatever you were before, you aren’t now…
Tbh I think that character generation right now has plenty enough options, and making it more complicated by adding learning rates/skills to them is superfluous. Keep in mind that equipment can be hard to come by in this game, since there is just so much random going on. I’d rather see proffesions give more/more relevant early gear, then mess with learning rates. I’m sure it is easier to implement this way as well.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought we had them in their final form, I was just wondering what extra stuff you guys were planning to add to them 
They’ll be made a more general background thing. Like you’ll be able to spawn in a police station with a sidearm, uniform and some buddies, but obviously right in the middle of a horde. Or you’ll be a junior lab tech in a lab being overrun by blob.
For an idea of this sort of thing in practice, see the scenarios in UnReal World.
I specifically coded the professions in such a way that they can be expanded without breaking save compatibility, so yes, there are plans for more functionality. One thing that I like the sound of is giving some sort of skill buff, except I haven’t quite settled on how I’d want to implement that yet. I thought that just boosting skill comprehension would work, but then I looked into things, and realized that it didn’t do what I wanted it to.
I also kinda want to put in a profession that starts with some kind of bow or the ability to make one, since they’re annoyingly hard to come by, and the skill book only gets you to the point where you can craft arrows, not bows themselves.
If you start with 1 point in survival and archery, you are able to craft your own bow and arrows from the boot. You just need 2x 3 feet string and some wood. They’re pretty easy to come by, and quite useful in the daytime.
I made some suggestions as to new professions in some other thread someplace, can’t recall where, but this is pretty much exactly one I was thinking of suggesting.
You can take a crossbow from a crossbow trap, use it against a wall until you’re lvl 1 in archery (but you’ll need to set it off to get the bolts), train your survival by butchering random things, make wood arrows (allows you to train archery), and finally make a bow using string from traps and a stick from the forest. So you really only need to find traps, and those seem quite common even without setting foot in a town. Until you have a bow, throwing rocks works fairly well.