Skill rust is silly, even without Forgetful trait… IMO if you make three chainsaws one day and can’t remember how to make them second day is just silly.
Yea, I just play with skill rust off and don’t take the forgetful trait myself (since I find removing skill rust while taking the forgetful trait to ruin the challenge personally).
I’ve always played with the skill rust set to the ‘1’ setting, where it doesn’t degrade any lower than your current skill level, but your progress to the next level degrades. It’s got the touch that Cata tries to implement in practice being necessary, but doesn’t make it annoying so you drop all the way to 0 in construction because you haven’t needed to build anything recently.
The only problem with 1 is that I had 19 in mechanics just be repairing a vehicle (using integrated toolset with internal furnace) in no time at all and that was with it set to 0. With no rust I can see getting to whatever the heck the maximum is with relatively no difficulty.
Skill rust is unrealistic (and brutal) in this game at the moment, so I turn it off. That being said, I spent a week of game time in a secure garage with piles of food and fresh water, building a super-car and ended up with 44 mechanics skill.
Personally, I’d like to see something along the lines of the following:
Skill rust only takes effect when your focus is very low. If you maintain a high focus, you can avoid it.
Skill rust does not affect any skill that has been used or has rusted within the last day. All skills that are eligible can rust at the same time.
The chance for skill rust to occur is based on a combination of how long ago the skill was last used and how high the skill is. Base chance might be +1% for every day the skill hasn’t been used.
If a skill is at the (0%) training level, it has only half as much chance of rusting. This makes it easier for you to lose training between skill levels than to drop from one skill level to the lower level.
The same reduced chance applies to skills below 1 (0%).
Finally, Intelligence can add or subtract from how much you lose when a skill rusts. The amount lost could be random, but there should always be a minimum of 1% and a reasonable maximum (10% at most).
Optionally, instead of losing a % of skill, skill rust could remove a recipe you have learned for that skill.
But if you think about it , i haven’t used my bike for 2 years , i still can use it just fine. Skill rust is way , way too fast now , when you get a skill over 10 level , it will rust every 5 seconds you dont use it and that’s juts stupid if you can be expert at one skill and forget most of it while sleeping.
Eventually skill rust will be reworked along with the book reading system and recipe handling. For further details on what the current planned system is, read this comment on Github.