Give a shout if you noticed it in your playing as well:
I had Tailoring 5 (25%) - read a book to boost to lvl 6 - Book is marked as Tailoring 6 (6) and marks it as yellow (only good for recipes), but the skill list is reset to Tailoring 5 (0%). When I try to repair clothing, it uses lvl 5 skill. So, I can’t re-read the book again to boost to lvl 6, since it considers that book as ‘6 out of 6’.
Some weirdness going on with lighting? It gets ‘very dark’ @ 20:30 (used to be 21:30), but Zeds still see me as if it’s daylight and come rushing from 20 tiles away (no gunfire or breaking windows here). I’m not sure if this is tied up with some bug with Ninjitsu I’m using, which should silence or hide me, or however it works. Does not seem to be as bad with Silat, but might be my imagination.
Also gets bright around 4:00AM now, instead of old 5:30 or so?
Around full moon, day 50-52.
Keybindings for selecting items and moving left/right are all weird in the menus now? Is there a way to reset all keys to default settings?
So, how to go about increasing actual Tailoring to 6 then? Since repairing and modifying clothing does not seem to increase skill (why!? practice is practice) - in addition to reading the book I have to make bunch of useless/practice stuff? Has grinding been doubled (read+fabricate)?
So, went into the game, read computer book (from lvl 1 → lvl 2), it showed message “You theoretical knowledge has increased to level 2”. Skill list still shows it as lvlv 1. Ok.
How do you go about increasing something like computer skill? There is not enough consoles to hack to get practical skill to ‘useful’ lvl 6-8
I’m not sure how much of this is implemented yet, but I think the way it works is intended to work is that theoretical knowledge gives a bonus to the learning speed for practical knowledge. So getting the book learning will still help you learn practical skills faster. And vice versa should your practical get ahead of your theoretical. As for actually getting skills up, I think the intention is to add in a “practice skill” action, that consumes time/materials, but will improve practical skill, even if no particular items exist to craft (ex. for computers). However I am fairly sure that practice actions are not implemented yes. The feature is very much WIP right now.
I’m playing a version from right before the knowledge update, and will probably keep from updating until the feature gets a bit more complete.
Having more knowledge dramatically increases the rate you gain practical skill xp, and determines whether or not you can attempt an action. Practical skill determines your success rate. So, studying books lets you attempt more complex things just as before, but to become as good at them you have to actually try them out.
There may be some areas where the game checks practical skills when it should use knowledge. If you think you spot something like that, please let me know. Otherwise, aside from some bugs, it’s mostly a complete feature. Having practice actions will make certain parts of it a bit easier but they’re not at all necessary for it to make sense.
That’s somewhat disappointing… I hoped that there was a more obvious distinction, like theoretical skill level determining what recipes you can learn/unlock, and practical skill level determining whether you can actually make them or not.
There is. I just said it. Knowledge determines whether or not you can attempt something (like a recipe) and practical skill determines how likely you are to succeed.
Overall I’m very pleased to read about this feature (though I haven’t personally tested it yet) but the computer skill does raise one significant concern: how to raise that skill without dancing through an army of hostile bots while practicing? The obvious answer is to bring a jackhammer and skip the computers completely, but it sounds like this could render the computer skill useless unless it gets used somewhere else I’m not aware of.
I think the solution for the computer skill practical training is to implement the possibility to train using already existing e-ink tablet PC’s, EletroHack devices, Laptop Computers, Control Laptop’s, etc… at the cost of battery charges of course. Or even the possibility to train using encrypted USB drives or SD-Memory cards, etc…
It will work like when activating a handle-held console to play. The same would apply when training, you activate the device and raise your skill. That way, we not risk ourselves getting killed by bots and zombies alike just to raise our practical skills.
And still be balanced because you would have to look after battery’s or an UPS mod.
Yeah, Vinicius got the base of it. Mostly we need to be able to let you practice computers in other ways, which we already needed anyway.
The idea here though (and it may not be working right in this specific case, I didn’t get a chance to try) is that if your computers knowledge is high enough, you should still be able to attempt the hacking. Reading books tells you what you need to know to get started, it’s a matter of if you actually know what to do when the rubber hits the road.
Maybe it is worth to add “computer practice” as an action, which has nothing to do with particular console actions? E.g. for console in church, it is possible to activte bells. I suggest to add special action, “computer practice” or “hacking practice”, it can be activated by laptop with hackPRO.
On success, it will increase practical knowledge on computers, and will do nothing with console (e.g. no bells activation).
On failure, console will get boroken, with some low chance of electric shock to a player.
Thus, such method of practice is harder than just reading a book (or playing on e-ink PC in a safe basement), but easier than hacking risky consoles in a lab (guarded by spider-bots or TALONs)
@do99z #1. Once I’ve observed a case when character fabrication skill is 1, she already read a book to theoretical level 2 and can’t read any more. And also crafting recepies are limited to level 1, and crafting level 1 items doesn’t increase fabrication skill, it remains on level 1, with 0%.
But this happen only once, I don’t have this problem in other runs so far.
#3. I’m trying to get used to new inventory selection with “.” button, but it is still confusing. And also default letter assigned to “.” for some random inventory item like steak knife makes it harder. So I have to take some junk, assign it to “.” symbol, and then drop it - to be able to selected inventory item under cursor with “.” key.
I think it’d be better to avoid having random “practice hacking this irrelevant computer” stuff, which won’t have much going in the first place, and more about having more useful hackables, with lower consequences and risks. As example, digital locks/keypads to buildings, where the failure consequence is just “the building alarm goes off” and not “Call the murderbots”. There’s lots of computerized systems out there that could be added to the game that generally don’t have access to robot armies IRL
I think we should create a proper Computer skill discussion topic, so we can bring more people to the discussion and further develop this skill that are not being used too much right now.
I’m not sure it merits a topic really. The needed solution is already known and part of a larger recommendation, ie. we need to have ‘practice actions’ using time and resources that improve your practical skills, computers are no different than anything else there.
I believe that hacking could possibly be a multi level actor or even a mini game of sorts, including probing, hacking tool and software development including on the fly on computer terminals etc.
It doesn’t have to be player dependant but character dependent, the better the skill of the character the deeper the hacking effort. You would be prompted with some info about what sub action your character attempted along the way. Examples:
You try out some typical admin bypasses.
you try to scan the ports of the workstation
You try to check some old system backdoors.
You write a script to emulate fake external device to see if it opens up some known vulnerabilities.
Etc. (It could be done with a list of reactions or responses from the system to determine how effective you are vs. it’s defenses)
Why? Because it would move the system away from 0/1 system where you either hack the computer or (pretty quickly) lock yourself out, and - important here - giving you XP only once, to a system where every sub action would be granted with XP bonus, thus creating opportunity for getting this much needed XP globally.
