I think that attacking the wall has been nerfed, but it still does build skill. (Target practice, after all.) Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that 1) Your skill gain is based on your perception (i.e., how well you can analyze what you did right or wrong with a given shot,) and 2) your skill gain is also dependent on the accuracy of the weapon. The biggest place that I see this is trying to train archery; Attacking the wall with a self bow and wooden arrow shafts becomes basically useless after 1 level because that combination is so inaccurate. You have to keep getting better and better bows and arrows to keep improving, and even then it takes a number of game days and is kind of a slog.
I’ve been away from the game for a few months, and yeah, it’s amazing how much the animal spawns have been reduced. It’s a bit harder to stay fed. Seems to make sense though, since the animals were really overpopulated back then. When you had a base in a cleared-out section of town, you’d basically have to kill 4-5 hostiles every time you went outside. It was kind of ridiculous. I had to proactively burn all the corpses somewhat regularly in a losing battle to keep the map chunk memory use lower.
I basically always go for ranged builds, (with some minor melee training,) since there are just too many bad things that can happen to a melee character. (This is a largely a matter of preference, of course.) Spears are not that great against hulks or mi-gos, and a zombear encounter may still be a little hairy, but in my experience they’re a passable early weapon set that you can get very early that and will hold you over until you can find something better.
