Professions kinda’ mean different things to different folks.
Are they supposed to be “flavor”, giving you a theme to your survivor for roleplay purposes? If so, do the points they give really matter?
Are they chosen for the starting gear/skills? Frankly, I don’t value skills at the start at all … they’re all incredibly simple to train with a book or practice.
Are they metagame’d - as in, does everyone just pick the most negative profession so they can jack up their starting stats? (I’m 100% guilty of this. My last few characters are all Prostitutes in the 0.9 Ma release for the “bonus points”.)
Anyway, a good 90% of the time, the NPC in the starting shelter gives me a lighter. That completely removes the “didn’t start with fire” issue. (Ok I just tested this … 5 restarts in the Ma release, and I got a lighter 4 times. Once I failed to get an item all together.)
Without NPCs turned on … its still common to find matches/lighter in the shelter basement, and at the worst you’ll have to venture into 1 or 2 homes to find t.
Makeshift crowbars, pipes, boards, nails … all that you can arm yourself with before leaving the shelter. I assumed “smash locker, get rock, make crowbar” was every experienced player’s first hour of the game day. That makes any melee weapon given to professions feel not-too-special, to be honest.
If I start with one, I ditch my pocket knife the instant I find anything better (and even sometimes just leave it on my spawn point before I take my first step). I never use it until a day or two into the world to cut up rags and train tailoring. Butchering animal corpses isn’t a priority for me until after the perishable foods in markets turn to rot. I suppose “I should cut up the Z’s” is a good use for the knife, but often I’m running from clumps of Z’s and not wanting to expose myself by taking the time to butcher, early on.
I wonder how things would feel if there was no way to manually spend points to increase skills and instead you had to rely on a profession to give you any starting points you wanted (though, I admit again, I have pretty much never bought starting skills because they’re so easy to train). Also wonder if all this would feel different if/when we spawned differently. If the shelters were in the basement of, say, apartment buildings or gov’t buildings … and you had to sneak/fight your way outside, that would change things significantly. If you spawned in the hospital, or the shelters were so far outside of town you’d need to feed yourself while traveling TO town.
A “Bike Messenger” or “Paperboy” - collapsible bicycle, a messenger bag & enough driving to not wobble like you need training wheels would be powerful, IMHO. Bicycle isn’t so deadly to make Z-killing trivial early on, either.
