Skill Rust - Which Option Do You Play With?

[Taikei_no_Yuurei]

I started with the game on normal int and it took me a while to get to the point where that even mattered. When I finally did get a character to live that long I thought it was a cool little feature at first, but then I found myself running around looking for new clothes to practice my sewing on every day, and it just wasn’t fun running back to my base to grab my needle or something just to stop my hard earned tailoring skill from depleting. And with skill gains requiring difficult tasks instead of just cooking water or something, each % really is hard earned.

I tried intcapped for a bit, but it was really the same. I could just ignore a couple of skills that I had at 0% because I got them from books. Now I play with skill rust off, because it is just a tedious chore as opposed to an interesting activity.

I should also note this was on a 14 int character. My chances of skill rust were minimal, but it was still very frustrating to keep them from happening, especially when high levels can degrade while you sleep.

[Codeslamer]

I play with it off. Having it on makes sense for some things but then there are the things where you can cook extremely high skilled meals and then change to eating tinned food and junk food for a bit, where when you next try and cook you find that you can’t even fry some spam.

Who forgets how to fry spam? Who ever needs to learn how to fry spam in the first place?

[Rhodri]

Who ever needs to learn how to fry spam in the first place?

Forum moderators/administrators.

[Muaddib]

I play with Enhanced Memory Banks turned on.

[Misterspork]

This is my first post here.

I recently started playing the game again and made an archer character starting off in the wilderness, and up until this point I had been playing with the default rust setting.

When I lost a skill point in archery because I had been walking towards a mansion I could see rather than shooting every animal on sight that is when I decided to turn rust off. It makes zero sense to me that a person who has been training in archery his entire life would simply forget what he’s learned while walking down the street. Zero sense.

I read earlier in this thread a suggestion that did make sense and I would particularly enjoy, that it would make more sense if things still rusted but that things you have more skill in rust much more slowly.

It would be hard to attain and retain a new skill that you had never studied before but doesn’t take much effort at all to maintain a skill that you’re an expert in. But I think you shouldn’t be able to go beneath one skill point. You’d remember at least the basics of what you’ve learned and so it doesn’t make sense to completely forget.

[Rhodri]

[quote=“Misterspork, post:65, topic:7911”]This is my first post here.

I recently started playing the game again and made an archer character starting off in the wilderness, and up until this point I had been playing with the default rust setting.

When I lost a skill point in archery because I had been walking towards a mansion I could see rather than shooting every animal on sight that is when I decided to turn rust off. It makes zero sense to me that a person who has been training in archery his entire life would simply forget what he’s learned while walking down the street. Zero sense.

I read earlier in this thread a suggestion that did make sense and I would particularly enjoy, that it would make more sense if things still rusted but that things you have more skill in rust much more slowly.

It would be hard to attain and retain a new skill that you had never studied before but doesn’t take much effort at all to maintain a skill that you’re an expert in. But I think you shouldn’t be able to go beneath one skill point. You’d remember at least the basics of what you’ve learned and so it doesn’t make sense to completely forget.[/quote]

Welcome to the forums, MisterSpork!

I found a picture of you when you were a weetle babby!

[Okiemurse]

Rust off.

I’ve got so much of this game’s world to explore and do and play with I can’t be bothered to grind out repetitive skill practice.

[Valpo]

[quote=“Misterspork, post:65, topic:7911”]This is my first post here.

I recently started playing the game again and made an archer character starting off in the wilderness, and up until this point I had been playing with the default rust setting.

When I lost a skill point in archery because I had been walking towards a mansion I could see rather than shooting every animal on sight that is when I decided to turn rust off. It makes zero sense to me that a person who has been training in archery his entire life would simply forget what he’s learned while walking down the street. Zero sense.

I read earlier in this thread a suggestion that did make sense and I would particularly enjoy, that it would make more sense if things still rusted but that things you have more skill in rust much more slowly.

It would be hard to attain and retain a new skill that you had never studied before but doesn’t take much effort at all to maintain a skill that you’re an expert in. But I think you shouldn’t be able to go beneath one skill point. You’d remember at least the basics of what you’ve learned and so it doesn’t make sense to completely forget.[/quote]

play with intcap then.
you ll not loose any skill at all just progress. Its a good aproximation to what you wnat imo.

[razor]

Off, seems like a bad feature to me.

For the kind of time frame in which this game is played that is the only realistic option. I am probably only a 6 or 7 on my real life INT score and I retain useful skills for years and decades rather than forgetting things over the course of a month. It has been twenty years since I was conscripted into my home country’s civil defense unit and I have not forgotten the basics of first aid or how to field strip an issued rifle.

Were I a Cataclysm character with skill rust on I would have forgotten these things before I even completed first training.

[mdtexeira]

Yeah off. I would perhaps play with it on were there an amalgamation of the various changes mentioned here, such as:

Higher skills decay slower
Recipes stay accessible regardless
Physical skills’ rust rates be factored off of Dex instead of Int (to reflect muscle memory)

Also, I think a certain amount of time should pass before rust even begins to happen. Like half a season, dependent on the length of seasons in the options. If you don’t do something at all for half a season, you might start forgetting it a bit, especially if you weren’t that proficient or grounded in the practice to begin with. Also, I think that your top three skills above, say, 6 should be considered specializations and be immune to rust altogether. Lastly, different skills should have different rust rates altogether. As someone who has studied cooking, survival skills, and electronics in my real life, the underlying principles of cooking are easier to grasp and harder to forget than those of electronics.

[vultures]

Yeah, try and forget how to swim in RL.

But wait!
Does RL stand for RogueLike or RealLife?

[Sunflash]

skill /rust/ would make sense. lose your edge at something youve not practiced mich recently. you may not make the BEST fried spam after not cooling for a week, you you still know HOW to fry spam.

currently however, we habe something more like skill /loss/. this penalizes you for not grinding everything .

a somewhat complicated yet possibly more solid approch would be tieing spme things to skill tiers or something of tha nature.t

[Bumpkin]

Wait, you can lose skill ranks? All my rusty skills seem to sit at 0% of the last level I achieved. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my skill level actually drop a rank. (I ranked speaking and bartering up to 1 in a no-NPC world just to keep an eye on them, and they’re sitting at pink 0%)

I’m playing IntCap and my guy has 12 intelligence. Is this just not an issue for me because high int or something?

[AllisonW]

[quote=“Bumpkin, post:73, topic:7911”]Wait, you can lose skill ranks? All my rusty skills seem to sit at 0% of the last level I achieved. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my skill level actually drop a rank. (I ranked speaking and bartering up to 1 in a no-NPC world just to keep an eye on them, and they’re sitting at pink 0%)

I’m playing IntCap and my guy has 12 intelligence. Is this just not an issue for me because high int or something?[/quote]

It’s because you switched from the default setting of Int to IntCap. IntCap and VanillaCap prevent skill rust from actually taking away skill levels and restrict them to removing progress you’ve made from one level to the next. If you switched back to Int, those pink 0%s would start turning into lost ranks.

[grisamentum]

[quote=“raccoon, post:35, topic:7911”][quote=“Bonevomit, post:31, topic:7911”]It plateus at 7, so it’s not so bad for super high skills.

In my opinion, if you can handle making it so far in the game that skill rust actually matters, you can handle skill rust.[/quote]

This is how I feel. I keep skill rust at the vanilla setting.

Aside from early on in the game, I don’t grind my skills. I just use them naturally, as needed, and let my character develop however his story has him develop.

The game is balanced so that having about 7 levels in a skill makes you an expert, and 10 levels makes you world class expert. If your character actually uses a skill naturally in his/her daily life, they’ll attain world-class skill in less than a year, and keep it. If you don’t use it all the time, then you still are able to get an expert level of skill, eventually.

Skill rust only seems annoying if you’re grinding and micro-managing those skills. If anything, becoming a world-class expert seems too easy.[/quote]

I think this highlights a bigger problem with the game generally. You can pick any background - like hobo stripper lost submissive (or any other idiotic joke background) and become a world-class chemical engineer? Sure, sure. It was really just society that was holding you back this whole time.

So then skill rust gets added as a band-aid to address this absurdity. And no surprise, skill rust is annoying and most people just turn it off.

[FrAvatar]

I set it to IntCap.

[Coolthulhu]

You can pick any background - like hobo stripper lost submissive (or any other idiotic joke background) and become a world-class chemical engineer? Sure, sure. It was really just society that was holding you back this whole time.

10/10
I’d sig it, but I don’t sig quotes.

[Bumpkin]

It’s because you switched from the default setting of Int to IntCap. IntCap and VanillaCap prevent skill rust from actually taking away skill levels and restrict them to removing progress you’ve made from one level to the next. If you switched back to Int, those pink 0%s would start turning into lost ranks.

Ah, thanks. Sounds like IntCap is the way to go then.

[Nickal]

Always played with vanilla because I never really thought about it. Now that I think about it I’m prob gonna change to IntCap which sounds fair to me.

[TinHeadDays]

Personally, I never use the Cap unless I set my cities to one and have low spawning rate. For me, it helps with immersion!