Which skill is the easiest to learn? Which is the hardest?

[Kahranna]

Animals: easy
Artistic: very easy
Construction: very easy
Cooking: middle
Crafting: very easy
Growing: very
Medicine: middle
Melee: very hard
Mining: very easy
Intellectual: easy af
Shooting: hard
Social: hard

[Ser Kitteh]

We can talk about skill rates all we want but I think the thing to focus on is on the levelling method themselves. Others have already spoken on others but my main focus is on Shooting and Melee which in my opinion are the hardest with Shooting being harder than Melee.

The reason is pretty clear, you need to engage in combat to level them up. The old "shoot at sleeping spot forever" and "beat up prisoners" works but it's a very "gamey" way to do it. I'd rather see every time after a raid or a prison break or whatever, people who engaged in fighting get a bit of experience in what they do. We have mods for fighting dummies and shooting ranges but without dedicated training periods, it's very haphazard. We can grind just about any skill from mining to cooking, why not fighting? Even if it gives a quarter XP for each shot/stab, I'd rather that than nothing at all.

Lastly, Tynan, is it possible to have pop ups indicating level ups? You know, like every time something rots away we get a message at the top? I think mentions of levels increasing would increase enjoyment because we see/hear the progress. I check my colonist skills only once in a while, it'd be nice to know they are in fact getting better at what they're doing.

[Bostich04]

Easy: mining, growing
Hard: crafting, melee,

[gipothegip]

I find melee and shooting are really slow to level, and lack opportunities to level them at a decent pace.

Social can be a tad slow as well.

If I feel any skill is too easy, it's probably construction or crafting.

[Alenerel]

Shooting, melee, medicine and animals. The problem with shooting and melee is that you can only train them while fighting (or using tricks that disable your pawns for a LONG TIME like shooting at a downed animal or to an animal spot), and this is a problem cause literally the pawn's lives depend on it.
Medicine is a bit easier cause every operation you perform gives you a huge xp, but its still not very nice to have to mutilate enemies to get that, there is no "good/benevolent" way of training it.

About animals, you said you were reworking it so I have nothing to say until I see the results.

[giannikampa]

I literally could never see cooking reach 20/20, not even 19/20.

Could only have my only constructor get to 20/20 for a few days keeping him on construction all-the-time but as soon as there were no more construction jobs to keep him practiceing it dropped and i could never rise it back.
Same way I can have crafter on 20/20 if he only crafts all his life, as soon as he goes to sleep it drops to 19/20.
This on a year 5026 pretty peaceful colony.
Special mention for melee: may be the impossible to raise skill.

Edit:
All my examples are of people at max passion

[Kori]

The hardest skills in my opinion are

-Social !!
-Melee
-Shooting
-Medicine

I wouldn't necessarily increase their gain rates, but add alternative methods to increase them in your pawn's daily life, independent of events or luck.
Like some sort of combat training or studying anatomy with books or corpses.

All other skills are fine already.

[Golden]

HARD:
Shooting
Melee
Social
Medicine

All other skills can be raised relatively easily.

For me it seems that a lack of opportunity to use the skill on a continuing basis means that it is VERY hard to level.  I include shooting here because I don't like to clear my maps of animals just to raise that skill.

[Hydreos]

Hello Tynan, in my opinion, the easiest to hardest skills to level up are :

Intellectual : Nothing hard to do, just left the pawn do the job in good conditions. It's easy but balanced, the only use of intellectual skill is for researching.

Artistic : Very easy.

Construction : There is always something to build and a lot of ways to level up this skill.

Mining : It's similar to intellectual but it's a bit more dangerous skill to level up.

Crafting : Easy to level up when you have time and materials.

Social : Just let the pawns chatting with prisonners and the skill will improve without difficulty, it's a bit long to level up maybe.

Growing : Easy but take a very long time to level up.

Cooking : Easy but take a very long time to level up.

Medicine : We can use prisonners to level up this skill, average time to level up.

Animals : It's hard to level up, we need a lot of animals and a lot of time to level up this skill.

Shooting : Hard to level up even with a shooting stand.

Melee : The hardest of all, we can't train this without risk.

[Toast]

Hard: Melee, Social, Medicine

(Because the opportunities to train are rare/fraught with danger)

Medium: Cooking, Crafting

(There are no dangers involved in leveling up beyond food poisoning and low-value items, but it takes a ton of time and materials)

Easier: everything else

[Maverik]

Animals: middle
Artistic: very easy
Construction: easy
Cooking: middle (easy but slow)
Crafting: easy
Growing: middle
Medicine: hard/easy (Depends If you use exploits like practice with prisoners..)
Melee: very hard
Mining: easy
Intellectual: very easy
Shooting: hard
Social: very hard

[Crioware]

So far I think the easiest to learn are: Mining, Crafting, Growing, and Intellectual. All these can be made so that they are done pretty much all day every day, making it pretty easy to level up, growing also has the benefit of leveling from tree cutting.

Intermediate Difficulty: Medicine, Animals, Art, and Construction. Medicine and animals are pretty situational IMO because it depends on whether you actively keep animals and prisoners. If you can capture raiders and the like medicine becomes extremely easy to do, and animals the same way. Training boars 1-70 in hauling will level you up pretty good.


Hard: Social, melee, and shooting. Social takes a lot of effort from a dedicated person and a steady supply of people to use it on (i.e. prisoners). Melee and shooting both are using fairly sparingly compared to the rest of the skills in the game. Leveling up shooting either takes hunting or raids, and melee is used almost exclusively in raids. So lots of risk for little reward

[jchavezriva]

Mining definitely grows fast. Not unnaceptably fast, but is still way above average.

Mining is what i always send my useless pawns to do.
I just pick a massive randomly selected area deep in a mountain for him to mine, and before i notice he is above lvl 10 already.

[9ofSpades]

Let's start with the "slow-to-learn" skills. Descending.
1)Melee - have to agree with SilencerRolf on this one. Even if melee was a good skill, to begin with(compared to shooting, obviously) it would be still to bothersome to learn.
2)Social
3)Medicine
All these skills have one thing in common, - a lack of a good source of constant training, compared to mining for example. Shooting also falls into this category, but colonists even with 0 shooting are useful enough, not to mind the speed of leveling. If I may make a suggestion, that would be allowing pawns to somehow train these skills.

Notable skill is Cooking. It is just very slow to level compared to the likes of construction.

On the easier side of things is:
1)Researching - the fastest, as long as you can dedicate somebody to slave behind a research bench 24/15
2)Mining - if you have a mountain, that is.
3)Construction, Artistic, Crafting
4)Growing - is a bit slower than the others, unless you specifically plant all the growing zones in the world. That said, I don't think it's unbalanced or too slow. Just slower than the other ones.
5)Animals skill is... fine? But you probably want to play a dedicated husbandry game. Otherwise, animals are something I usually don't bother with.

I agree with what most people have said on this forum post. I in general agree with this list in particular except that in my experience social is not too difficult to overcome since I often take prisoners. I would add that at certain levels the skill point loss/gain ratio becomes near impossible to overcome. This usually means my level 20 master skills usually fall down to 19 during the night.  I am not against certain skills being harder to learn and master than others. This gives value more to an expert melee pawn compared to an expert miner for example. The skills of a doctor and of a cook should not level the same IMO since the value of the skills and "product" differ greatly.

[Kori]

Maybe you could include things like

-training targets for shooting
-training dummies for melee
-a workstation for medicine like this one: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1214615921
-a mirror for social (yeah I've played too much Sims)