Reduce Crafting Time As Skill Increases

[Blaze]

I’ve made so many amplifier circuits and power converters that I should be able to do this in my sleep.

[Zireael]

I like the idea. Perhaps starting from recipe skill level + 5/6?

[kevin.granade]

Yea that’s a reasonable idea. We have that kind of thing already for other activities, but not crafting or construction, should be fairly easy to add, the hard part is determining the values to use.

[kilozombie]

Increase it via skill levels specifically ABOVE the requirement.

i.e.

At 1 above, 25% decrease in time
At 2 above, 40% decrease in time
At 3 above, 50% decrease in time
At 4 above, 60% decrease in time
At 5 above, 65% decrease in time
At 6 above, 70% decrease in time
At 7 above and further, 75% decrease in time

So, for low level crafts, this can get powerful quickly (expert knitters spend way less time on easy things). The increase is 15, 10, 10, 5, 5, 5.

[Datanazush]

I’d have to say that for the more complex crafts you wouldn’t get that much of a craft speed boost. I can’t see a professionally crafted Zweihander taking less than a few hours to do. It’d probably also be the same way for cooking. You might be good enough to get the prep done quickly, but you can’t speed up the cooking process that much.

[kilozombie]

Yeah, that’s true. I’m not sure how we’d break that up, though. Maybe progressively decrease the gains depending on the complexity of the craft?

So the patterns would be for, in terms of skill levels for crafts:

level 0: start at 25% 15 10 10 5 5 5 (to 75%)
level 1: start at 20% 10 10 10 5 5 5 (to 65%)
level 2: start at 20% 10 10 5 5 5 5 (to 60%)
level 3: start at 15% 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 (to 45%)
level 4: start at 15% 5 5 5 5 5 5 0 (to 40%)
level 5: start at 10% 5 5 5 5 5 0 0 (to 30%)
level 6 and on: start at 5% 5 5 5 5 5 0 0 (to 25%)

Also, the first is actually balanced mostly- it’s just that if skill rust is off, you can easily get to 7 above level 6 crafts and break the system.

[ShinQuickMan]

I agree with incorporating both Zirael’s and Datazanush’s more nuanced approach. Decreaced crafting time should only come at higher levels, and cap at low percentages (15-25% faster crafting, at most).

In fact, I’d also advocate increasing crafting times at lower levels if there’s some manner to do this without making things too frustrating on the player.

[kilozombie]

It’s game vs realism, the same argument I think the devs are always trying to figure out.

I think that a 10% difference, even on complicated “long-taking” tasks is still too negligible to be worth it whatsoever.

For things like power convertors mentioned in the post… that’s level 1, right? If you’ve got Level 7 Electronics (very difficult) then it’s logical for it to go MUCH faster.

[Hague]

Well, I’m on the fence about it. Certain tasks you could complete really quickly based on skill but some tasks shouldn’t. For instance, cooking always requires time, it’s assumed that if you skip the time requirement, you’ve failed at the recipe, especially when it comes to boiling things. While this is a more complicated concept, why not make it so a player can batch a series of tasks together provided they have enough materials for each thing. For every task you attempt to complete at the same time, it has a higher chance for failure or is subject to a direct malus to the skill for the second, third, and so on iterations of a particular ability based on the order in which you select the tasks. So say you want to saw 2 heavy sticks at once, since you have high enough of the relevant skill, it’s easy, you can start both tasks at the same time and complete them at their respective completion times, which, in this instance, is the exact same time. A more complicated example would be batching a 3 course meal of mac and cheese, beans and rice, and some cracklins. You would need separate sets of items per the recipes, or 1 cooking implement and hotplate for each action in this case, since you are essentially cooking everything at the same time. Works with upgrades too, so if you have one hotplate and an integrated toolset CBM, you can use 1 to cook a meal and another to boil the tea you’re drinking with the meal

Seems like you should be able to batch reading books with your tasks if doing the task is rote enough for you that you can be distracted whilst you do it. Obviously taking a penalty to the resulting skill gains and skill checks.

[kevin.granade]

Very loosely, if we did this it would likely take the current time if your skill level = the recipe difficulty level. If skill is lower it’d take longer, and if skill is higher it would take a shorter amount of time.
To make sure it doesn’t get silly with high skills (such as near-instantaneously completing crafts with very high skill), we’d probably set some ideal time to craft, and assess a penalty based on skill level compared to crafting difficulty.
As your skill increases, the penalty asymptotically approaches 0, bringing the actual time to craft closer to the ideal time to craft.

The reason not to do the batching thing is that it’s unnecessarily complex, both to implement and to interact with. We’re planning on having some processes that take significant time, but don’t require supervision set up to proceed independently of what the player is doing, but I don’t see any benefit to having active multi-tasking across multiple tasks.

[RAM]

I prefer procedural stuff, a flat 10% would not seem to be that ridiculous. 100 90 81 72.9…
Or maybe 10% of current minus 50% of original or something…
Indexing it to a list seems a bit arbitrary to me…

[Hague]

It’s cool, it was just a thought I had. I do a lot of cooking and the sign of a really good chef is not in the ability to prepare just one dish, but also to prepare multiple dishes in quantity at a decent speed. That is partially based on the size and quality of your facilities. I suppose it probably is a bit much for a little gain. That said, even without batch processing, it would be a nice quality-of-life enhancement if there were a way to queue multiple crafting tasks at one time to be completed in-order. Probably add a keystroke that lets you add the task to the queue, and then a key to run the queue. It runs until it completes or you’re interrupted, either by lack of materials (your fire went out, you calculated wrong) or other, normal interruptions.

[RAM]

One could just say that shorter times is an abstraction of batch processing when possible. The times when you boil water in ten seconds would be balanced by the time that you cook those animal steaks sequentially… If it were really important then recipes could have tags as to whether or not they could be compressed, or even a value indicating the minimum time which they would steadily approach. but that all seems like a lot of thought and effort, largely reliant upon the specific thoughts of those adding this, which could lead to excessive debate over whether or not it is faster to boil water in bulk, or if rare steak is safe or if it will give you prions, or whether it being possible to build a railgun twice as quickly at high skill should mean that you can build it twice as swiftly and shoddily at low skill… Seems like a lot of trouble for something that should be fairly minor if folk do not dwell on it…

[ShinQuickMan]

[quote=“kilozombie, post:8, topic:6556”]It’s game vs realism, the same argument I think the devs are always trying to figure out.

I think that a 10% difference, even on complicated “long-taking” tasks is still too negligible to be worth it whatsoever.

For things like power convertors mentioned in the post… that’s level 1, right? If you’ve got Level 7 Electronics (very difficult) then it’s logical for it to go MUCH faster.[/quote]

Actually, I’m mostly weighing this on the metaphorical “gamist” scale. The way I see it, skill level alone should not be the only litmus on significantly faster crafting; you already get access to better and more things to do, and better success rates, when you get a higher level at crafting skills.

That being said… (see below)

It’s cool, it was just a thought I had. I do a lot of cooking and the sign of a really good chef is not in the ability to prepare just one dish, but also to prepare multiple dishes in quantity at a decent speed. That is partially based on the size and quality of your facilities.

There’s an easy solution for some of those things: Have crafting times be affected by both tool level and skill level. So crafting times could be:

A.) Slightly decreased by skill levels. Your hands alone can only work so fast.

B.) Increased when using low-level tools (ie stone hammer). Crude and improvised tools can get the job done, at the cost of efficiency.

C.) Decreased when using better tools based on certain skill level milestones, an/or, within reason, when using more tools than called for (ie significant decrease in time with decent tools at skill level 3, decrease when using more than one of a specified tool for certain recipes, very significant decrease in time with rare tools at skill level 7, and so on). Good tools in good quantity, when in the right hands, can make any job look easy.

In any case, I wouldn’t feel easy having such things implemented unless there were some checks in keeping crafting skills from inflating in power too quickly.

[Womble]

Isn’t this already modelled by failure rates?

[ShinQuickMan]

Isn’t this already modelled by failure rates?

If you mean dynamic changes in crafting times, sure. To some extant.

But it’s not like we should just settle with what we have if we can do better. We’re asking for the moon, or anything (I hope).

[nathiral]

The system Kevin mentioned above is probably fairly ideal.

Ex. crafting an antenna:

at-skill-speed: 2000 moves
optimal-speed: 500 moves

So at skill = required skill level, you craft at 2000 moves. As you increase in skill, it lowers down to 500, but never goes below 500. In this case, it’s a somewhat tricky, but simple in terms of what you’re actually doing, task. So it starts off pretty slow and approaches a 4x speedup once you’re a master.

Ex. cooking meat:
at-skill-speed: 600 moves
optimal-speed: 500 moves

Cooking meat really can’t be sped up that much. You may gain a 15% speedup or something small after being an expert cook.

Cooking is more a system where you should have different types of failure and success based on how good you are - ex. “perfectly cooked steak” being more likely when you’re +10 levels and “burned, unrecognizable mass of charcoal” being more likely when you’re at 0.

If you’re below the skill requirement, you either can’t make it (perhaps for chemical reactions that you don’t understand or mechanical contraptions you don’t understand) or you take much longer.

[Hague]

Cooking is more a system where you should have different types of failure and success based on how good you are - ex. “perfectly cooked steak” being more likely when you’re +10 levels and “burned, unrecognizable mass of charcoal” being more likely when you’re at 0.

You’d need a method to add that special quality to the food when cooked.

Well, I think I’ve seen dented food before, would it be possible to make a change to the damage strings for food items so their preparation and cleanliness can be relative to their repair? Maybe for food it represents contamination or as a replacement for state of decay, perhaps? Since nothing spawns in a reinforced state, you could use the “reinforced” level of repair on food items to represent better prepared meals. How about “Hearty?” So “hearty loaf of breads (8)” “hearty nachos and cheese” et al.

If contamination were added to the scale, that could mean that zombie meat simply becomes human meat that has the lowest repair state, “tainted.” Which could occur when the player fails miserably with food or if one of their ingredients is tainted as well. Some mechanic could be used to cleanse the taint, but the player would still need to be a cannibal.

Perhaps boomer zombie bile could contaminate permeable containers and the like, tainting food, drink, and even medicine held in non-water-resistant containers.

[Zorbeltuss]

This sounds good, but you’d basically have to have two time values for each item (three if items of better quality will be possible).

The first is the time that isn’t really possible to make shorter, processing would in most cases be this, as heating meat on a flame or heating metal with a torch to get ready for the anvil.
The second is were you can take of time without lowering the quality of the product, like getting the ingredients in order and preparing material (either you fail or you have material good enough).
The third if quality will be available is were you can choose to get your skill to use making a quality product or reduce time, in most skills it might be taking your time to get it right or just get the product ready, even without a special quality this might allow for building already reinforced items.

/Zorbeltuss