You are right about that reading is a grind. That it is. However, some of that can be overcome by conscious preparation - a quiet reading spot and plenty of food. Being at a remote location, even an evac shelter basement gives a nice boost to game performance. Time just flies by when there is little environment to process. Although sometimes there might an ant nest nearby to slow down the flow of time.
I guess it would be nice if eating and drinking would happen automatically while reading. I find those two to interrupt my reading most often. Also, flicking of lights and timing the sleep properly.
I mean, really, if reading starts to feel like a complete hassle, you could always use the debugging functions to give yourself the proper amount of skills after you’ve found the books, thereby skipping the grind. Then let the time fly by and destroy some of your food.
Passive reading might be worth exploring too as an idea. Basically it’d be automated reading. You would carry a book around and the character would read it whenever, slowly over time. It’d be a nice companion to active and focused reading.[/quote]
Most of the time when I’m safe, the reading stage is just boring. Even if its a short grind, it’s still a grind.
Whenever I spend a week reading out in the woods, only to die shortly after I’m done with that, it’s incredibly frustrating to feel like I’ve wasted so much time.
[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:33, topic:11439”]Read-grind-read would add a weird metagame part to reading, where you’d skip reading on “easy” levels and only read through the hard ones. You could lock yourself out of book leveling if you read it at wrong level.
Additionally, it would make melee combat skill books even less useful than they are now.[/quote]
Are there certain skills that are impossible to level up at all without books at some stage? I can’t remember any. Every tier of a skill should allow something new, which should allow for skill development.
If this is the case, the learning gap could be different for different skills. Alternatively, the skill lock could have a cooldown timer. Another thing to bypass this, is to add in another check that just looks to see if you are using your skill at all. Say you’re locked into level 5 cooking, but you’re creating level 4-5 food that somehow isn’t giving experience. So long as the cooking skill is being used, it would eventually be good enough.
If I originally came off that way, I was not talking about book levels having a hard-set gap. That gap would be based solely on where you started reading after your last non-book level.
