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Hi ODDizee,

It's definitely a problem, I reported this a while ago:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42875.msg422617#msg422617

At the time I also pinged the 1.0 feedback topic, because many players were reading it.
There were about 5 confirmations, mostly from people who blamed their mouse.

And yes, it is pretty annoying.

... are solutions being created with mods or is a better improvement from developers only possible?  I am sure some senior members know some modders.  We need less talk and more action.

Actually, I think the all talk in this thread has been fruitful.
No, skill decay is currently not 'moddable', which in my opinion is a missed opportunity.
Many improvements in Rimworld started as a mod once.

What about skills below 10? One of my problems with the current system (and your proposed change), is that all pawns eventually get to level 10 in every skill. That's a lot of usefulness, because pawns fail tasks a lot at levels below 10.

That's yet another excellent point, but it would require a rewrite of the existing code.
I tried to make the smallest addition to the existing code, offering the most flexibility.

Here is the rate of decay for each level in a table:

level   decay

10      1
11      2
12      4
13      6
14      10
15      18
16      28
17      40
18      60
19      80
20      120

Suppose you have a pawn with all 12 skills at level 10. Such a pawn has 660,000 total xp, that's quite a lot. You can use the same amount of xp to make a specialist. The specialist would have two skills at level 20 and one skill at level 15. This table shows more combinations of skills with 660,000 total xp, and how much xp they lose by decay:

                       
#levels      remainder      total decay

2  x 20      15             258
3  x 18      4              180
4  x 16      3              112
5  x 15      2              90
6  x 14      4              60
7  x 12      4              28
8  x 12      1              32
9  x 11      2              18
10 x 11      1              20
12 x 10      0              12

As you can see, the specialist loses xp 21.5 times faster than the Jack of all trades. Of course that's because the levels below 10 are protected, which is something we definitely want to keep.

___

All things considered, I think this would be an elegant solution:

- Use the current decay system as base value.
- Multiply the base value by a number between zero and one.
- The multiplier is zero when total xp is 265,000 or lower.
- The multiplier is one when total xp is 530,000 or higher.
- In between, the multiplier gradually rises in a linear way.

If a pawn has one skill at level 20 and all the rest is zero, there is no decay.
If the pawn has two skills at level 20 and all the rest is zero, there is maximum decay.

This would be easy to code, easy on the CPU, and fairly easy to explain on the wiki.
Tweaking wouldn't be too hard either, there are only two parameters to adjust.

Hmmm, and also: These two parameters could be a way to make skill decay moddable.

- Run Rimworld in windowed mode.
- In the Options menu, uncheck "Run in background".
- Load a game, unpause.
- Open the windows taskmanager, processes tab.

Observe: While the taskmanager is in focus (or any other window) Rimworld is paused, using very little CPU time.

- Minimize the Rimworld window by clicking "_" in the top right.

Observe: Of course you can't see it, but the game is paused. CPU is low.

- Minimize Rimworld by clicking the Rimworld button on the Taskbar.

Bug observed: The game keeps running, CPU usage continues.

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Additional for [1.0.1977]

[1.0.1977] Uses more CPU than [B18], this is not a big problem (More game features, debug lines).
But when the game is minimized by taskbar, CPU usage of [1.0.1977] is far higher than when the game is running normally.

=======
System info:
Win 7 32 bit, dual core CPU

- Run [1.0.1977].
- Open any map (I tested with a small base).
- Set zoom to medium or closer.
- Use the middle mouse to drag the screen.

Observe: Scrolling isn't smooth, it often makes fairly large jumps forward.

- Do the same test in B18

Observe: The scrolling is very smooth.

(I run win 7 32 bit on a dual core)

Ive been experiencing it too, but My mouse is an old sh*tter so I had just blamed it on that.

Hah! My mouse is probably older.
I've been using it for 12 years, so any change in behaviour is easy to spot.

Question to every 1.0 player:

Did anyone notice a difference dragging the screen with the middle mouse button?
On my computer the scrolling isn't smooth anymore, it often makes forward jumps.
To be sure I just reverted to B18, and it's smooth as a whistle.
Now I'm back in 1.0, and the scrolling makes the pretty large jumps again.
(I run win 7 32 bit on a dual core)

Is this a known problem?

...

Like, gaining 2xp in a skill removes 1xp from a random other skill? And maybe that ratio changes as you go so there is a maximum total xp pool you can reach and when you get to that maximum, getting 1xp in one skill removes 1xp from another skill?

...

Yes, ultimately it comes down to limiting the length of a n-dimensional vector (normalization).
If I'm not mistaken, the amount of xp you need for the next skill level grows quadratically.
So normalization would be equivalent to a maximum total xp pool.

...

Another thing to consider would be multiple skills; It should still be hard to have high skills in everything. I'm sure you could make up some formula, so that for a single skill, you could get to level 20, but for a handful of skills you could only get to around level 15, and for a lot of skills you'd be stuck around 10 or lower.

decay = c * (s(1)^2 + s(2)^2 + ... + s(n)^2 - s(i)^2)

Where c is a constant, s() is the list of skills, and i is the index of the skill under decay.

In words: Decay is proportional to the sum of the squares of all other skills.

Effect: If you have only one high skill, there's (virtually) no decay.
If you have a few high skills, there's decay.
You can't get many high skills, there would be too much decay.

It would probably take a lot of tweaking to implement this in a balanced way.

There's a fancy way of doing this, but it requires an extra field for each skill.
It's fairly simple:

- The first layer is the main skill level. It grows when the skill is used, there is no decay.
- The second layer decays when the skill isn't used, and grows towards the first layer when the skill is used.

So if a pawn has been using other skills for some period, you'll need a bit of time to recover the original level.

I'm not sure if it's worth the effort, but it does seem to be intuitive.

Howdy folks,

Yesterday I installed rimworld 1.0 and started a game
Crashlanded, cassandra medium, no mods, everything default. Temperate forest with year-round growing, to keep things simple.
I'm a very slow player, I like to plan my base early on and I rarely increase the game-speed. This is how I (apparently) played rimworld for over 2000 hours, lol. I prefer a low number of colonists, and as such I don't have a lot of experience with caravans. As for combat, it is not the most important part of my rimworld game. I gave up on killboxes long ago, stopped using turrets, and tried to survive without power armor.

___

The ability to mod rimworld is really great. Most of my favourite mods have made it into the vanilla game, but there is one mod I will dearly miss in 1.0
It is the small shelf.

In A17 I wanted to start using shelves, but I ran into two problems:

1) After queueing up a number of shelves in the woodworkshop, my haulers would fill the shelves up with weapons. Then I had to manually remove weapons from the storage list, and the haulers had to bring all the weapons back to where they belonged.

2) Most often, I wanted to store small amounts of items, like in the druglab: 1 tile for cloth, 1 tile for neutroamine, 1 tile for herbal medicine, etc. But regular shelves are 2x1 stockpiles, and you need some serious micro to fill them up with two different items.

As a workaround for the first problem, I wrote a simple mod. Then B18 came out, and while browsing mods on steam, I found a mod that sets the default storage for shelves to empty. There was also a mod called "small shelf", this shelf is only one tile in size, and the default is also empty.

Well, I have never built a 2x1 shelf again!
A 1x1 shelf is much more flexible and useful. You can fit them into little alcoves in corridors (at T-junctions in the walls). The 1x1 shelves are much easier to rearrange as well.

___

My colony is now 10 days old, the game progressed without any weird stuff so far.
Some small details:

There's a new message: "Cannot build a roof over an oak tree". Fair enough, but when you build a wall over a tree, there's no message. In both cases the tree is cut down and the build is finished, so the new message is superfluous, in my opinion.

Batteries now need research, which didn't cause a real problem for me. But it pretty much forces you to start research very early. Usually my researcher would spend more time doing hauling jobs, some slow mining, or plantcutting.

The new zoning buttons are very nice! Maybe the name "Expand zone" could use some improvement, though. The button not only expands existing zones, you can also create new zones with it.

When placing beds, I have a hard time seeing the pillow-end, the graphics are very faint.

Hi Rambo,

This issue may be caused by your anti-virus software. I had the same problem, and after some searching, I solved it by exlcuding Rimworld's savegame folder from being scanned.

To check if this is indeed the problem, you can open the taskmanager, and look for a process that uses a lot of CPU during a freeze. In my case, the process was called MsMpEng.exe (it's an anti-malware module in windows).

Just don't use your savegame folder to download shady software, ok?

When adding a medical operation bill, the menu says:

"Administer penoxycyline (teetotaler will be unhappy)"

Teetotalers abhor the idea of gaining pleasure from chemicals, and avoid alcohol and pleasurable drugs.
Penoxycyline doesn't fall into that category.

Hi Mad Season,

Could you try re-enabling your mods?