Stonecutting in A17. A crafting job but uses and levels the construction skill

[mcgnarman]

Ah thank you, I couldn't search for that one.

[Calahan]

@ mcgnarman - Yes this was a recent change in A17. I have merged your thread with the one KillTyrant linked to (thanks for the assist, much appreciated), and I have also edited the main thread to make it easier to find via a search (as you are right it's not easy to find with it's current title).

[JMC]

I'm personally entirely against this newfound A17 philosophy, with respect to crafting jobs giving experience to other categories.
- Having a job's category not give the experience to that same category is entirely unintuitive to any player (new or veteran). In the long run, you're just going to keep ending up with threads like this one due to confusion from newer players. "Why is a(n) X job giving Y experience? This makes no sense."
- Pawns that are capable of crafting, but are incapable of the skill the experience is actually going to become stagnant (with respect to skill). Having a potential experience sink like this in the game is absolutely frustrating. I have never been in a situation where I needed my crafter and constructor to be the same person, and the last thing I need is for my lower-skill crafter to miss out on any potential crafting experience by wasting his time gaining experience in a job he's never going to do.
- There's nothing wrong with allowing workbenches to allow for bills assigned to other jobs. Construction/intellectual jobs at a work bench wouldn't hurt. We already have a workbench for intellectual, actually; the research bench.

That's my two cents on the topic :/

I just realized the skill problem today and well, you beat me to it. Well said.

[Cimanyd]

The Work category "Do general low-skilled labor at work stations. This includes stonecutting, smelting, and more." has nothing to do with the skill "Crafting general items including weapons and tools."

They just happen to share the name Crafting, which is confusing people.

The Crafting skill's actual types of work are Tailoring and Smithing. The list of jobs seen by hovering over Craft in the Work tab use these skills:

• Operate on mechanoids: Crafting
• Do bills at crafting spot: Crafting (except "Make smokeleaf joint" is No skill)
• Works at refinery: No skill (I think? Uses Intellectual slider, but no apparent effect)
• Produce drugs at drug lab: Intellectual
• Cut stone: Construction
• Smelt items: No skill

[Modo44]

The Work category "Do general low-skilled labor at work stations. This includes stonecutting, smelting, and more." has nothing to do with the skill "Crafting general items including weapons and tools."

They just happen to share the name Crafting, which is confusing people.

We're not confused, we're angry about a broken work priorities system. When you put a builder with bad crafting on crafting, they can to irrelevant (to them) stuff like making weapons. When you put a good crafter on crafting, they can very slowly grind stones instead of doing actual crafting. The tooltips are clear, it all works as designed, but the design is terrible. I smell an ugly code hack given how broken this turned out.

[Limdood]

modo, thats not true, as weapons and clothes use the tailoring and smithing jobs.

That being said, this issue is VERY true for smelting, stonecutting, drug making, component making, using a crafting spot, disassembling mechanoids, making mortar shells.

All of those jobs use the same crafting JOB, but many give AND use different skills.  Like modo said, if i want my constructor to gain some construction skill by cutting blocks, i have to enable him to do smelting (slowly), drug making (slowly), disassembling mechs (with a yield penalty if i don't notice in time) and more.  Similarly any other crafter that i want running around doing crafting spot work, smelting, making components, taking apart mechs, and making mortar shells will also try to make stone blocks and drugs if i have bills open for them.

My only ACTUAL solution is to have half a dozen different zones all with the entire map enabled except for a select couple of workstations.  This gets crazily complex to set up and manage and track.

Would love to see new work jobs added (split construction into quality and non-quality, add drugmaking, and stonecutting) OR simply roll stonecutting into construction and drugmaking into research as assignable jobs.

[TheMeInTeam]

Seriously, if a job builds construction skill, it should be a construction job.  This is really simple stuff.

I'm fine with Stonecutting being Construction, but if that's going to be the case, pawns assigned to Construction should be doing it, not pawns assigned to crafting.

Agreed.  I can take or leave the move to construction, that one doesn't matter to me much.  Having the inconsistency is annoying.

You can mostly work around it right now by setting min skill thresholds (rarely is a constructor so good at actual crafting that crafting benches set on high skill req would allow him there)...same with stone cutting bench which could make only crafters with < x skill work it, then put secondary constructor on crafting.

However it's not intuitive and not particularly useful to have it set up like this.  I see no problem with just making it a construction task.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

modo, thats not true, as weapons and clothes use the tailoring and smithing jobs.

That being said, this issue is VERY true for smelting, stonecutting, drug making, component making, using a crafting spot, disassembling mechanoids, making mortar shells.

All of those jobs use the same crafting JOB, but many give AND use different skills.  Like modo said, if i want my constructor to gain some construction skill by cutting blocks, i have to enable him to do smelting (slowly), drug making (slowly), disassembling mechs (with a yield penalty if i don't notice in time) and more.  Similarly any other crafter that i want running around doing crafting spot work, smelting, making components, taking apart mechs, and making mortar shells will also try to make stone blocks and drugs if i have bills open for them.

My only ACTUAL solution is to have half a dozen different zones all with the entire map enabled except for a select couple of workstations.  This gets crazily complex to set up and manage and track.

Would love to see new work jobs added (split construction into quality and non-quality, add drugmaking, and stonecutting) OR simply roll stonecutting into construction and drugmaking into research as assignable jobs.

Another way to limit stonecutting is to set a minimum construction level for the bill. Set it high enough where only your constructor fits the limit for the bill and no one else will try to do the job.

You could also use the AC-Enhanced Crafting mod. That mod has a drop down box where you can select which pawn will do a job.

[khearn]

But if you make stonecutting so that only high skill builders can do it, you can't have your pawn with a double-flame passion but low construction skill do it to level up.

Skills that use/exercise a skill, really need to be seperated in the work tab from skills that use/exercise a different skill. Stonecutting is a construction skill, drug making is an intellectual skill, bowmaking is a crafting skill. They shouldn't all be in a work category that is gated on crafting skill.

[RazorHed]

I really wouldn't care much that making blocks raises construction except that it seems to be the biggest priority to cut those blocks over doing any other construction. Now if I want to have a specific pawn build stuff I cant also have a second pawn with a lower skill make blocks because seems like the higher skill guy takes over the block cutting always and the lower skill guy fails at making expensive component stuff.  Maybe masonry should be a skill for making blocks.

[DariusWolfe]

RazorHed: set a maximum skill for your stonecutting bills. It's tedious, but it should do what you need.

[RazorHed]

ahhh good Idea  thanks

[cultist]

But if you make stonecutting so that only high skill builders can do it, you can't have your pawn with a double-flame passion but low construction skill do it to level up.

Stonecutting has been terrible for leveling crafting for at least 2 alphas now. The gain is so slow it makes almost no difference. Sure, you set your best crafter to stonecut early on, but that's not how you level crafting.

[mcgnarman]

I'm personally entirely against this newfound A17 philosophy, with respect to crafting jobs giving experience to other categories.
- Having a job's category not give the experience to that same category is entirely unintuitive to any player (new or veteran). In the long run, you're just going to keep ending up with threads like this one due to confusion from newer players. "Why is a(n) X job giving Y experience? This makes no sense."
- Pawns that are capable of crafting, but are incapable of the skill the experience is actually going to become stagnant (with respect to skill). Having a potential experience sink like this in the game is absolutely frustrating. I have never been in a situation where I needed my crafter and constructor to be the same person, and the last thing I need is for my lower-skill crafter to miss out on any potential crafting experience by wasting his time gaining experience in a job he's never going to do.
- There's nothing wrong with allowing workbenches to allow for bills assigned to other jobs. Construction/intellectual jobs at a work bench wouldn't hurt. We already have a workbench for intellectual, actually; the research bench.

That's my two cents on the topic :/

I just realized the skill problem today and well, you beat me to it. Well said.

Huh I guess I never thought of it that way in regards to drug making. I guess I was so used to uses stonecuttinng as a crutch for increasing crafting.

I can kind of see it's worth now.