Best and worst skills in A16

[b0rsuk]

I think it's time to have another discussion about relative value of different skills.

Growing - a must have. The emperor skill. Without a decent value of this skill, you can't make food efficiently or grow cheap medicine. Growing is also good at making rooms prettier, the disadvantage (compared to Art) being that it uses more room, time and plant-friendly environment. Surviving without Growing is possible, but very, very inconvenient. It will be mostly berries and hunting (or cannibalism). Trading for food is not reliable. Growing is also a good source of sturdy protective apparel (devilstrand), can provide resource for carpets and armchairs, and make loads of money (even without currently unbalanced smokeleaf). It can also provide drugs. The skill has never been more valuable. Oops, I forgot growing trees for wood.

Construction - a very important skill. Eventually constructors start wandering around without purpose, but for the first year at least constructors are invaluable. Poor constructors take forever to get anything done or repair and waste resources. Actually it may be more required than Growing, because without sowing plants you can survive but if your 3 starting colonists can't construct you're doomed. As a bonus, good constructors make good beds and dining chars / armchairs which give your colonist mood bonus from comfort. I think you can sell furniture now so constructors can also make money, but I don't know how much and who buys it.

Mining - an important skill, crucial if you want to make an underground colony. Without mining, building a ship is extremely tedious (especially now that there's deep mining - you don't want to miss it). But you can do well without mining, just stonecutting will get you very far, and even a bad miner will get you the required steel.

Medicine - important skill, and people say diseases got nastier (I only had flu so far in A16). A bad doctor means scars and infections, and absolutely no installing bionics. But a skill 8-10 doctor can last you an entire game unless something hits him, so the skill is not that great.

Crafting - good to have, but you can loot decent weapons and quality of apparel / armor vests is not that important as long as it's not awful. Material and having enough resource for new apparel matters more. However, good craters can make lots and lots of money, for example selling devilstrand parkas in year-round growing zone.

Shooting
An interesting skill, because unlike others you'd like to have a lot of it on many colonists. But sniping mechanoids aside it's enough to have about 8-10, or at least it feels like it. Very high skill levels don't feel that powerful, you might be destroying your targets' fingers or ears with little effect.

Melee very, very hard to train and of little use. I can't remember a time when I needed more melee fighters. Maybe I should finally play an all melee colony to see how it's like.

Animals - marginal. Most of the useful animals (like alpacas, chickens, dogs, bears) don't need skill at all. Bears do need if you want to train many. But animal herding is absolutely terrible alternative to growing when it comes to feeding a colony. Ironically, hunting is much more faster for generating leather and meat. The skill is not required at all for animals to reproduce, lay eggs or grow wool, and you can buy animals from traders.

Research - not important early, and by midgame you end up with a tolerable researcher one way or another. Even on ice sheet you can start with a sunlamp and potatoes in gravel. Few technologies actually benefit you early - gun turrets, devilstrand, etc.

Art - the only way to make money in ice sheet, but having to rely on exotic goods trading SHIPS is terrible. Art in Rimworld is boring (only sculptures) and serves only two purposes: mood bonus and money. And it's not that great at moneymaking. Also, artists tend to have obnoxious backgrounds and are not useful for anything else.

Cooking - nice to have, but Nutrient Paste Dispenser is actually good alternative and it's like you have an extra colonist. You will want to develop a good cook eventually probably, for the fine meal mood bonus (not all biomes can sustain lavish meals). Early on your people can put up with nutrient paste and... don't really have time to cook.

Social
Oooh, I actually forgot about this skill ! Between "Wanderer joins" and chased colonists, the skill has fallen from important to almost useless! It does give you more options for recruiting, but you will get more colonists anyway. Price reduction is very, very small and not worth talking about. Non-recruiting effects, if they exist, seem marginal to me because I have numerous colonists with Social disabled and they get along fine.

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Moral of the story: Animals, Melee, Social definitely need another pass to make them more useful and interesting. Art works, but is a bit dull. Growing offers many, many benefits and Construction is the hardest to live without.

[Bozobub]

I find it quite difficult to believe hunting generates food faster than the Chickpocalypse .

[Thirite]

Research is a really lame skill game design wise. All your pawn does is sit perfectly still for hours while getting research points. And when you have all the research unlocked, it's useless. It seriously needs a rework from the ground up.

[Stormfox]

Some comments or suggestions on how to make skills feel more useful:

Growing
I think this one needs to be solved the other way round, i.e. making foodcrops a bit less effective and safe to spam. If for example growth times were roughly doubled and nutrition costs for pawns reduced by about 40%, we would get the following effects and design space:

The crops could be differentiated more into "work efficient" and "quick and safe" on one axis and of course ground type tolerance on the other. If for example corn took 25 gamedays to grow under normal conditions but was notably more efficient than the other types in regards to farm size and work needed per nutrition, then corn would be the "easy crop", but be risky to grow in the colder areas because the growth time is near the total growth period and it would be prone to cold snaps.
On the other hand, lets say potatoes stay as the robust and quick crop type, but are the least efficient overall. They would become the go-to crop for difficult biomes in the early game until they get replaced by, say, corn and rice, when you have greenhouses or hydroponics or both.

The lesser total amount of foodstuffs would make creating and selling a huge surplus all the time much more work and space intensive as right now, helping out with the "the first 1k money are relatively hard, after that you swim in it" problem (of course many other things need to be changed for that, too, but that does not fit this topic).

Animals
A while ago, there was a thread here where someone suggested animal traps and similar things for hunting. What if we combined those with this skill? Being able to hunt with less work effort and more safely, but perhaps some kind of material investment for the traps and slower would make this a skill that is desireable for more than a few edge cases.

Social
Perhaps making "free" extra colonists more rare but implementing something similar to what the hospitality mod has, i.e. being able to recruit visitors in addition to captives, would help with making this more useful. Also, the haggling bonus could be buffed (I would suggest making the base price gap harsher from currently +/- 25% to 30 or even 35 and doubling the haggling bonus). Additionally, perhaps high social skill people can do something similar to the "kind" trait or prevent or break up fistfights or stuff like that? Perhaps check into that mod that makes "leaders" and borrow some concepts to apply to this skill?

[Limdood]

disagree with almost all of these.

IMO:

growing...marginal...it levels fast and you only need 5 for most things, 8 at max.  harvest failed happens at low growing, but its not a very serious concern.  I suppose you don't want a colony where EVERYONE is incapable of plant work, but literally anyone can manage growing.

construction - crucial on sea ice or the extreme weather challenges, useful anywhere else, as higher quality furniture is always nice, but again, unless you're on sea ice or NO ONE can do it, you'll still be fine.

mining - as a skill its near the bottom of the list.  even 0 skill miners get the job done eventually, there is NO benefit of higher mining except speed...no quality gain, no reduction in waste, no "succeed or die" - this is one skill i don't care what level it is, only if pawns can or can't do it.

Medicine - really useful.  it CAN have it's impact minimized with liberal penoxycyline use (and i haven't had an infection on a treated injury yet in A16, got em all the time in A15 for bad torso arm or leg injuries), but if you don't want to have to pay for penox/neutro or you want to install prosthetics, you'll need a good doctor...good doctoring improves pawn uptime after an injury too, better treatment = faster healing.

Crafting - IMO the skill i consider most critical in the game.  If i have a good crafter, he'll crank out insulating, good apparel and whatever weapons i want, when i want.  Before long mmy colonists all end up with exactly the right gun or plasteel longswords. 

Shooting - good to have a few decent shooters for snipers, but anyone can point a gun.  I certainly look at this skill, and it weighs into who i take or not, but i won't turn away a good pawn or take a bad pawn because their shooting changed my mind.

Melee - completely overshadowed by the brawler trait.  a brawler will be fantastic no matter their melee skill (which will be high anyways), and almost any other pawn will have close enough shooting/melee skills that a gun would be better, or will have 0 or 1 in the violent skills...in which case they get grenades or a personal shield and longsword.

Animals - hit or miss...some maps have no animals, obviously little use there.  some maps are inhospitable to animals, no animal skill use there either.  other maps have numerous boars, alpacas, or predators.  If you HAVE the animal skill on those maps, it can be great.  20 hauling animals can really open up the workload of other pawns, despite the awkward system, 4 bears released around a corner onto pirates can be really effective (you'll likely need new bears afterwards though), and alpaca wool is amazing.  The big problem here is that low animal skill is near impossible to train up, and can easily be lethal.  Low animal skill is pretty darned close to useless for animal use.

research - either you focus on it or you don't...skill helps, but the fact that research projects can be teamed up on with multiple people at multiple benches means the investment of time, resources, and manpower can make up for lack of skill, conversely, even an 18 skill pawn won't get anything researched if he does other stuff than researching.  This skill also eventually becomes ABSOLUTELY useless as you hit the end of the research tree, and has diminishing returns up to that (you focus on what you need most, eventually you're researching incendiary IEDs "just because" without ever planning to use them).

Art - As far as A16 goes, now one of the most useless skills in the game.  it is hard to sell (exotic goods ONLY, and caravans don't carry much silver), too heavy to transport, and the impressive room benefits can be otherwise easily obtained with cleanliness, good flooring, and some decent furniture (tables, beds, chairs, chess tables all add to beauty).  For money making, tailoring or growing (drugs) will nearly always kick the snot out of art.

cooking - with the unintuitive, micromanagy way that nutrient paste dispensers work, cooking is another vital skill.  Fine meals give an 11 point mood boost over nutrient paste...thats a pretty hefty amount.  In early colonies where beauty and cleanliness are tough, late colonies where the "expectations" mood boost is gone, and any colony where a long-term bad event happens (bonded animal or relative death spring to mind), that fine meal can be THE factor in staving off breaks.  Get an impressive dining room and any time someone is feeling down, you can send them to eat a meal...drug mood boost with NONE of the side effects.  Alongside crafting and medicine (and construction, to a lesser degree), a 6+ in cooking is something I routinely look for...passion to get to even higher skill (for more meat per butcher) is a definite plus too.

Social - the ability to CHOOSE which pawns you get is massively useful.  wanderers and refugees give you no, or almost no preview of the pawn you get.  slaves tend to either not show up (you have too many pawns) or show up too early to be able to consistently afford any good ones.  Of all of the "free pawn" methods, only escape pod crashes give you a clear preview and choice, and even then, if you're not in a hostile enough environment, they may not join you, forcing you to capture and recruit (using social) to be sure you get them.  This means that captured raiders remain one of the best sources of cherry picked good pawns.  Admittedly, since prison breaks were added, then in A16 the free pawn events feel like they happen more, social is LESS useful than it was, but is still vital for snagging really good pawns.  Plus if you don't start with decent social, its a complete crapshoot about ever being able to consistently recruit prisoners.

I'll agree melee needs a boost...but more importantly, it needs a FIX...there is an inherent problem in the fact that the brawler trait is exponentially more useful than the skill.

Social suffers from the problem of it being just a random % roll twice a day to recruit, and there seems little difference between a 0.6% chance to recruit a 99 difficulty prisoner with 4 social, or a 1.3% chance to recruit the same prisoner with social 16. 

Animal SKILL is fine...the %s for taming could use some tweaking....a cumulative % gain per attempt feels like a necessity....taming boars with decent animal skill at a 7.5% success chance is really tedious, especially when each failure has 1/3 the chance of taming to turn the boar, and nearby boars into manhunter.  by all means keep the manhunter failure, but make each failed tame attempt add that % or half that % to the next attempt....that is how animals are trained after all...repetition.

Mining and growing need a serious look as SKILLS....as things you can do in a colony, they're fine...vital even.  As skills that show some progression...some improvement as they level, they're sadly lacking.  Mining skill could be linked to chance to produce stone chunks, growing skill could adjust the yield or even growing times...in fact the growing skill references "ongoing care" to the plant...a 1-10% reduction in growing times, or a 1-20% increase in yield are certainly in the realm of the realistic and the possible.

Art is such a minor skill, and always has been such...i'd almost rather see the art and construction skills either merged, or reference each other....constructed furniture, namely beds and chairs could base their comfort and rest effectiveness off construction, but beauty off of art.  Construction as a skill is fine, but it needs separate JOBS in the work tab for quality work and for building work....i want everyone somewhat capable to build my walls and doors fast, but i don't want Johnny Useless, who is only assigned to construction to keep him from being idle to build the new beds with his 1 construction skill when i have Engie at skill 16.

Crafting needs to be split into tailoring and smithing/machining.  flat out "crafting" such as stones, smokeweed, or components could use those values (like plant cutting uses growing for speed) but wouldn't be a registered skill. 

Research, needs a system overhaul....there should not be a skill that can STOP working completely. skill could use a tweak to keep people from sticking 4 researchers on a project to power out breakthroughs if an endless research perk ever crops up.  Maybe a % chance to get a breakthrough that slowly builds up based on time spend researching...individual per pawn per project means more pawns gives more chances to succeed, but high skill still gives more consistent results.

[Blastoderm]

Research
IMO worst thing about this skill is that once you research vital tech, it's a dead weight. Research should affect more than, well, research speed. Mechanoid disassembly efficency maybe, hi tech drug production etc.
Mining
As long as there will be no sustainable or permanent mining source, it's a waste. Almost everyone can mine, no resources will be ever lost or pawn injured. It becomes MUCH more important with Deep Core Drilling mod where you can mine small aounts of inexhaustable resources but with longer time. Without mods - never had problems with mining entire map even with 0-1 mining skills.
Shooting
Never saw much difference with shooting. Sniping mechanoids usually just take more time and swarms of raiders killed by massive bulletstorm.
Melee
Useless skill because melee is useless and so dangerous that it hadly can outperform ranged. Every melee is a gamble of traumas, lost limbs and other nasty stuff that almost never happen in ranged combat. Hope there will be some improvement in the future.
Social
Game already provides you with pawns from events and wasting gazillion of food hoping to recruit with 0.5-1% is not worth it. Discount is negligable given you can earn so much money that discount hardly will be noticable. Leendary 20 skill will get you a 10% discount.
Cooking
Very important. Fast and better meals with short but nice mood buff keeps colonies alive and kicking.
Crafting
THE most important skill. Related to almost anything. Better clothes, better guns, better armor.
Medicine
Always good but just so random. Legendary doctors fail as much as 5 skilled ones.
Artistic
can't imagine any use for it. Statues? When they get expensive, only ships can buy them. Beauty can be raised by other means and overall it's not a great source of income.

[Perq]

Growing is super useful because there is never a point where the job is done. There is always something to plant.
Animal handling, research and construction (to some degree) suffers from it. Once you get your most important research projects done, research becomes absolutely useless. And once you get all your animals trained, animal handling becomes useless.

I think there simply should be things that pawns having those skills can perform to never be obsolete.
Few ideas:
- Animal handling skill of the owner affects the rate at which animals haul, help colonists and so on. I'd put a limit on how many animals can one handler have, preferably scaling with his skill level, so that having more than one would be profitable.
Have the hauling/help skills of animals be a deteriorating bar - if there is no handler to take care of animals, they will continually go wild, and stop doing what they are supposed to.
Because handler would have to spend far more time taking care of animals, I'd increase the rate at which animals haul, and also enable them to haul outside of the area they are directed to, so they are more useful overall. Maybe add something else that animals can do. :?
- Research affecting medical skills, or something. D: Or construction and medical? Simply expanding the research tree, so that you quite never can research everything and instead have to chose what kind of colony you will be can help.
- Construction isn't that much affected by it, since you can build things and sell them (which I personally find very tedious), but I guess something could be added to it. No idea what, tho. :V

[SpaceDorf]

For myself I split the evaluation of the skills in how important they are for survival and how many people I need for it in the different phases of the game.

Building & Growing

Always and Always needed, the number of different useful plants, and the quality of construction and speed, especially when dealing with stone walls is very important.
Also a green thumb grower is the best possible colonist of all.

Medic
you always need a medic, but I tend to set everyone who has talent for it to work at it,
because many hands get the job done faster. One talented surgeon is important later.

Crafting
is the lategame skill where you need most people working in .. just because it takes up so much time until the stuff gets finished, and there are just so many workbenches connected to this one skill. It's important through the anoyance it causes.



Mining Speed may not be important but is very usefull, a talented miner digging out five blocks while the untalented one digs out one makes all the difference in early and midgame ressource collecting

Animal Handling not very usefull most of the time, but it sucks not having it, for the additional haulbots ..

Artists ..meh,  sometimes I use them, sometimes I don't .. they are really the one-trick pony of the rim.

[b0rsuk]

Research is a really lame skill game design wise. All your pawn does is sit perfectly still for hours while getting research points. And when you have all the research unlocked, it's useless. It seriously needs a rework from the ground up.

I fully agree. And the research itself is boring - predictable, hierarchical tech tree, nothing like in Master of Magic or Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island (boardgame). My suggestions for more dynamic research like researching cures for diseases as you encounter them, researching ancient artifacts before use, weather stations, predicting solar flare/storms/volcanic winter, autopsy etc have been repeatedly ignored so I gave up. But at least in recent Rimworld version Research takes longer to become useless, and it may actually be viable to build multiple research benches.

[Stormfox]

Crafting needs to be split into tailoring and smithing/machining.  flat out "crafting" such as stones, smokeweed, or components could use those values (like plant cutting uses growing for speed) but wouldn't be a registered skill. 

Yup, crafting governs too many skills all at once. Perhaps make "crafting" and "artisan" or something, with crafting being for all simple tasks like smelting, stonecutting and building furniture, while artisan is for all artworks but also for gear? Constructing would then only be used for stuff like walls, doors, roofs, power plants and perhaps work stations, but not beds or tables.

I think this could balance the three skills nicely without having to introduce a new one.

- Animal handling skill of the owner affects the rate at which animals haul, help colonists and so on. I'd put a limit on how many animals can one handler have, preferably scaling with his skill level, so that having more than one would be profitable.
Have the hauling/help skills of animals be a deteriorating bar - if there is no handler to take care of animals, they will continually go wild, and stop doing what they are supposed to.
Because handler would have to spend far more time taking care of animals, I'd increase the rate at which animals haul, and also enable them to haul outside of the area they are directed to, so they are more useful overall. Maybe add something else that animals can do. :?

I really, really dig that concept. Perfect extension of the animals skill to keep it useful.

[cmitc1]

I would put doctor over mining, due to the fact that mining becomes significantly less useful when you reach later game, and have less need for mining, while doctoring is a skill that is needed  forever.

I completely agree with growing being at the top. and also, melee is strong, don't underestimate it.

[b0rsuk]

Some posts, like Limdood's, made me look at it differently. We definitely need to separate growing JOB from growing SKILL. I meant the thread mainly for discussion of skill value. This is potentially true for all skills, not just Growing.

Also, it would help if you disclosed how you typically play. I play vanilla on 2nd hardest difficulty level, often in Ice Sheet.

Growing - the benefit of the skill is the ability to plant Healroot and Devilstrand. Devilstrand is nice to have, but not necessary. Planting and harvesting is faster, which matters more in biomes with generous winter (short or none). As of A16, even Desert is considered a generous biome because plant don't need to be watered or don't have any other form of upkeep (they do in cold biomes). Finally, there's harvest fail chance. 50% at skill 0, 20% at skill 4, 3% at 10. This is a big deal if your growing space is limited (sunlamp). You can't train Growing effectively in biomes with harsh winter, so starting values are even more important there.Also, harvest fail chance is a big deal if for some reason you can't plant and have to harvest berries. But I can see how the SKILL is not so important in temperate forest, arid shrubland, desert, and rainforest. You can train anywhere, anytime. On ice sheet - the cheapest way to train a room of flowers in gravel. You need a lamp and heaters.

Mining - I would not put it over Doctor. I'd rather have a good doctor than a miner. While it seems to affect only mining _speed_ , this is important if your colonist has other duties as well. Especially if the miner has to walk long distances over snow.

Social - cherry picking colonists doesn't work well because there are so many wanderers. After a few wanderers, other recruits stop coming unless you're ruthless and kill off bad newcomers.

Crafting - I still maintain that the skill is not that important. You can get by with a skill 5 crafter, enough to mostly dodge the Awful quality. And early game you just don't need it. Material is much more important than normal vs superior quality.
Yesterday my ice sheet colony was lacking in long range weapons, which is pretty important with plentiful mechanoids. I had a survival rifle, an awful assault rifle, and a sniper rifle. Then a pirate raid came and I looted 2 assault rifles and a survival rifle not counting other goodies like LMGs. They were quite okay, Poor-Normal quality and over 90% health.

[SpaceDorf]

Since we went into a change discussion I add my 2 cent.

I would like to mix up following skills :

Construction
Crafting
Art
the Removed Repair Skill

into these other skills :

Construction -> as in Construction Worker, Mason and Carpenter, builts and maintains walls, furniture and simple workbenches

Mechanic      -> builts, repairs and maintains everything that is above industrial level, also used to craft weapons and other technical stuff.

Tailor           -> crafts anything to do with fabrics

Mining         -> should be used to cut stone blocks and smooth floors

Medical        -> should craft Medicine and Drugs. Drugs should get a similiar mechanic to food     poisoning. ( respect the chemistry )

Crafter         -> makes anything left over, including art

[b0rsuk]

Firefighting disabled. Hauling disabled. Incapable of violence. Will never do cleaning. The vast majority of these are strictly psychological. And if they don't stem from physical health problems, they are not impossible. What about Social skill being used for counseling and psychiatric treatment ? Using Social skill, one colonist could talk another into unblocking a skill, or maybe make a colonist discover a hidden passion (more likely if colonist has few passions). To balance it out, traumatic events could give colonists mental scars, and they would lose a passion for something or stop doing some kind of work. So colonists with high Social would always be in demand and have something to do. Currently they're only useful early.

[Sola]

Best:
Construction - "fail to construct" is a problem, as it causes waste of resources and time.  High skill prevents this.  Higher skill also means faster construction, which saves time.  Higher skill also means better furniture, which is increased money, mood, and time (rest efficiency).  I simply will not start a game without someone that has a burning passion in this.

Mining - Except on bases that literally have zero rocks (ice sheet, sea ice), the ability to clear rocks (and do it quickly) is important.  One of my starting colonists must at least have an interest in mining.

Shooting - Your primary defense for most of the game.  Either an interest, or an inherently high skill on one of my colonists in paramount.

Good skills:
Cooking - An interest in this is great to have.  at 6, fine meals cost just as much resource as a simple meal, and provide a mood boost.  Higher skill is faster cooking, and this game is all about managing time.

Growing - An interest in this is great to have.  Even if you're not collecting healroot at the start of the game, having someone that's able to reliably sow and harvest rice makes survival much easier.

Research - An interest in this is great to have.  Even if the colonist starts at zero, your one dedicated researcher will eventually be able to carry your technology by himself.

Less Important:

Crafting - Great for rocks, but partially offset by having a workshop with two tools cabinets.  You can make a fully functional army entirely comprised of drops from raids, though.  Tailoring is a non-issue.

Medicine - Good if you have it, but even a colony of zero-medicine pawns can keep you alive.  Glitterworld medicine makes up for a lot of shortcomings where bionics are involved.

Don't really care:
Melee - I'll equip all my shooters with clubs and swords if the need ever arises.  Not once have I said, "I wish I had someone with 15 in melee right now."

Social - Someone will come with a passable value in this skill eventually.  I can keep my desired pawn imprisoned and try indefinitely until then.

Animals - I really tried to like this, but taming is just too risky, and training will happen eventually.  I don't really need that dog to start hauling any time soon.
I tried to force-tame bears in a couple colonies, and even when I had a 16 animals guy on it.  He tamed two bears, then died to a third one after a failed taming attempt.  Simply a terrible risk:reward ratio.

Art - There are other ways to get beauty in your room.  There are other ways to get money.  Art is largely a non-issue for me.