Skill Training Observations

[Vince]

So I decided to start "power leveling" my main character and his hired helper on skills they didn't have today after spending several in-game days playing normally. I tried to find some guidance online before I started, but didn't find a ton beyond vague explanations of what the skills do. So here's some bits of info I've noticed so far in my little experiment. Feel free to contribute any thoughts in the comments to help build on this as these are just what I've observed so far and are not to be taken as dogma.

First some observations:

1. So far I think the most impactful "technical" (IE: Work related) skills for general salvaging are EVA Suits for a general speed increase in everything you do while wearing EVA suits, Hacking for getting PDA files to sell and getting into places you shouldn't be on K-LEG, Spaceship Engineering for general hull work including expanding your ship, electrical engineering which speeds up a ton of things and Mechanical Engineering for the very same reason. The other engineering skills do seem to have an impact, but so far not as much as those I mentioned previously.
   
   
2. When rolling a new character I would prioritize EVA suits and Hacking since they're the biggest pain to train. I would say any of the other skills I mentioned in my previous tip wouldn't be a bad choice as a a secondary priority should you so desire however those can be trained much more simply so are not as important as Hacker and EVA.
   
   
3. If you gain a skill during character creation and notice a "training X" for that same skill during your play through don't worry about training that skill. As far as I can tell there are currently no degrees of skill so you are either skilled in something or you aren't. Reaching 100% training in a skill you already have from character creation doesn't unlock any further benefits from what I've seen and so far I've trained 3 of such skills on my current character. This may simply be a bug in the the skill training system or, based on what I see In the character creator UI, perhaps there will be degrees of skill implemented later? I would personally prefer the latter because I love character skill progression in games.
   
   
4. Based on what I've seen I believe the amount of "actions" done is more important than the amount of overall "work" done. In other words, the completion of a white "action" bar is more important than the orange/blue "progress" bar underneath it. If that's the case then that means doing things that slow you down, like using weaker tools and EVA suits if you're not trained in them, is the best course of action to level the skill. I'm not 100% sold on this one yet though because it seems to work better on my main character than my hired helper who is less skilled. More testing will be needed.
   
   
5. Books seem to be a good replacement for "hands on" training, but unless you get lucky finding the books you want or manage to get to a location that sells them, they're not as time efficient as hands on training done by you directly. I'd say they probably shine when you are relying on super fast forward more for things other than sleeping (IE trips outside of the K-LEG area) but that's just a guess based on what I've seen so far and not based on much experience. Id also wager this is another argument in favor the benefits of The Flotilla since you can be docked and super fast forward as long as you want assuming you have food and water to keep your characters needs taken care of.
   
   
6. Currently if you have a hired helper you typically cannot see their skill training progression or if they train a new skill after you have hired them. You have to visually notice that they're now better at said skill and have your main character "ask about their skills" to confirm if they have indeed finished training the skill. Rarely am I able to see their progress %s and often times it "forgets" so I can no longer see it. I believe that is a bug but if it is not I would suggest to the devs that they make it so that most if not all statuses of the hired helpers become known to the player at all times so long as they are being employed by you or at the very least give a dialogue that manually generates the same amount of info. Currently trying to make your captain and a crew member talk to each other to talk about their skills and feelings is like having a puppet show where you control both puppets and its very tedious with little engagement.
   
   
7. Currently Construction Engineering seems to be bugged. It gives you progress updates in the dialogue window, but your character's status page doesn't reflect it being trained at all. Upon completing training (based on the dialogue box) I have noticed 0 improvements in any of my character's speeds when doing various tasks.

Next some tips from what I've experienced so far:

1. Don't be afraid to fix things that aren't yours or on a derelict. It isn't a crime to restore things on K-LEG and is a good opportunity to get some easy training on any relevant salvaging skills in a safe environment. The only cost will be docking fees, which is why.....
   
   
2. The Flotilla is actually a great place to train pretty much everything that is not combat related. There are no docking fees, you can turn your ship's power off and rely entirely on their life support systems, everything is beat to all hell (even more so than K-LEG) so there's plenty to repair, and if you need to nap or take a dump there's plenty of facilities (although not great ones) available for use. I'd say on new characters I will probably get enough money/food/water to cover several days of needs and just hang out there training skills I didn't get through character creation. This may not get all your skills to 100% on their own, but it will get them pretty darn far along and a little more time on some derelict ships/K-LEG will probably finish any of the others off.
   
   
3. A lot of items train multiple skills simultaneously when repairing or restoring. In particular I found bins are really good for training because they're slower to repair (more actions completed) and train at least mechanical, civil, construction and combat engineering. Furniture such as beds and tables seem to be in the same boat but I'm not 100% certain what all they train compared to bins. Surprise surprise, The Flotilla has a good amount of both in need of repair.
   
   
4. It's probably obvious, but if you wanna train Spaceship Engineering you gotta repair hull structures like floors and walls. Any derelict will do, but The Flotilla is perfect for this given it's general state of disrepair with K-LEG getting an easy 2nd place.
   
   
5. For electrical Engineering I found repairing conduits to be a great "set and forget" strategy as well as ship batteries. Any large derelict will do, but again The Flotilla is perfect for this with K-leg being a 2nd or 3rd place.
   
   
6. For Mechanical Engineering I would just stick with repairing bins for the carryover to other skills, however I'd argue this one is the easiest to train since most of the "good" salvage during normal game play trains this skill during repair and restoration.
   
   
7. To train hacking so far the only option I found with any success is to factory reset doors or crates. On The Flotilla (since there is no law) or your own ship you can continually factory reset doors and crates thus getting you hacking training. Once you finish the reset, just set the code to anything and you can factory reset again. This is tedious as all hell and I suspect would be very slow and micro managing. I recommend just getting hacking through character creation or spending the money for the B43-BEGON3 file from the black market to hack PDAs for you. I'd wager you can get it trained up in like a real hours worth of time if you don't mind how annoying this is to do or you don't want to roll a new character just for hacking.
   
   
8. Training EVA is a total chore and I don't recommend training it directly but rather passively and just deal with the debuff. As far as I can tell it just passively trains while completing other tasks while in an EVA suit but is noticeably slower to progress than most of the "Engineering" skills. If anyone has any insights on this one feel free to comment.
   
   Edit: Shout out to Msor in the comments. They confirmed that repairing EVA suits (and I would assume helmets and pressure suits as well) trains the skill. I had a feeling but I couldn't really test this myself since I can't see the training % of the helper who wasn't trained. At some point he just kinda became trained in it and I can't pinpoint when that was.
   
   
9. The meat event is a great opportunity to both get combat skills and make some easy cash. As long as you are careful and are wearing an EVA suit, you are in virtually no danger and can "spar" as long as needed with the only down time being your characters catching their breath. I trained both my main character and his helper in both Armed and Unarmed combat semi-passively while doing salvage runs on infested derelicts I happened to come across. I'm sure you could knock it out in no-time if you focused on it exclusively in one infested ship. A full bag of the various drops sell for 20,000+ easily as a result of your "sparring" so it's lucrative too. The trick is to make sure you are adjacent to as few meat tiles as possible as they all have a chance to "expand" into your tile and thus attempt to wreck your EVA suit and then you.
   
   Edit: Shout out to Msor once again. Apparently the Unarmed skill currently does nothing because the "unarmed" attack uses the Armed Combat skill presumably by mistake. You can still train unarmed if you want though as it trains the skill just fine.

[msor]

Repairing/Restoring EVA and other suits help with EVA training. It is the same skill.
Unarmed skill, currently is unused. Only Melee does matter.

[Shenji]

Good topic, you should put this into the Guides section.

[Vince]

Originally posted by msor:

Repairing/Restoring EVA and other suits help with EVA training. It is the same skill.
Unarmed skill, currently is unused. Only Melee does matter.

I had a feeling EVA repair did based on the skill description but since my character was already trained it was hard for me to tell if all that repair was doing anything for my hired helper who was not trained. I'd still say, given how frequent you come across suits to repair, that it's still fairly slow to train. But that does mean you could just keep bashing a suit on the floor and then repairing it again? Either way That's good to know!

In regards to unarmed where did you hear that? Finding information on the skills is very difficult beyond the few out of date guides and a post from the dev a while back. I felt like it made a difference with the damage dealt in unarmed quick strikes, but that very well could just be confirmation bias on my part. I kinda just stumbled upon it by mistake when I mis-clicked one time and saw how quickly you gained training % and figured "why not?".

[Vince]

Originally posted by Shenji:

Good topic, you should put this into the Guides section.

I appreciate that! I was considering it but since most of my information is anecdotal at best I didn't want to put something out that made me sound like an authority on the matter. Perhaps I will if I can refine some of the information some more based on other's feedback and my own fooling around?

[msor]

Originally posted by Vince:

Originally posted by msor:

Repairing/Restoring EVA and other suits help with EVA training. It is the same skill.
Unarmed skill, currently is unused. Only Melee does matter.

In regards to unarmed where did you hear that?.

From game files. Every weapon, every hit mode are well described for modding purpose. Currently, there are no weapon that use Unarmed skill.

[Vince]

Originally posted by msor:

Originally posted by Vince:

In regards to unarmed where did you hear that?.

From game files. Every weapon, every hit mode are well described for modding purpose. Currently, there are no weapon that use Unarmed skill.

Yeah that makes plenty of sense. I'm not really one to go digging into game files and such, but was hoping maybe there was a post somewhere I had missed.

With that being said, are your fists considered "weapons" as far as the game is concerned? There is an unarmed attack option you can use and so far I have seen fairly consistant damage regardless of what my characters are carrying at the time. I imagined it worked in one of 2 ways; either it didn't take weapons into consideration at all and just your strength level and if whether or not you were skilled or it used your fists as the "weapon" for damage calculation. If it's the former then I'd argue it's possibly working as intended, just in a very limited capacity since it doesn't affect knuckle dusters. If it's the latter, then it could just be an oversight and the fact my characters are trained in armed melee causes the "fist" weapon to game the damage increase.

I'm not trying to argue with your here and believe what you're telling me, I am just trying to better understand how these things work under the hood since it sounds like you have some experience in that.

[msor]

Originally posted by Vince:

Originally posted by msor:

From game files. Every weapon, every hit mode are well described for modding purpose. Currently, there are no weapon that use Unarmed skill.

Yeah that makes plenty of sense. I'm not really one to go digging into game files and such, but was hoping maybe there was a post somewhere I had missed.

With that being said, are your fists considered "weapons" as far as the game is concerned? There is an unarmed attack option you can use and so far I have seen fairly consistant damage regardless of what my characters are carrying at the time. I imagined it worked in one of 2 ways; either it didn't take weapons into consideration at all and just your strength level and if whether or not you were skilled or it used your fists as the "weapon" for damage calculation. If it's the former then I'd argue it's possibly working as intended, just in a very limited capacity since it doesn't affect knuckle dusters. If it's the latter, then it could just be an oversight and the fact my characters are trained in armed melee causes the "fist" weapon to game the damage increase.

I'm not trying to argue with your here and believe what you're telling me, I am just trying to better understand how these things work under the hood since it sounds like you have some experience in that.

Yes, there are "Fists" in this list. Technically, they are just hit methods that require "empty" hand. And yes - they require Melee skill, not Unarmed.

[Vince]

Originally posted by msor:

Originally posted by Vince:

Yeah that makes plenty of sense. I'm not really one to go digging into game files and such, but was hoping maybe there was a post somewhere I had missed.

With that being said, are your fists considered "weapons" as far as the game is concerned? There is an unarmed attack option you can use and so far I have seen fairly consistant damage regardless of what my characters are carrying at the time. I imagined it worked in one of 2 ways; either it didn't take weapons into consideration at all and just your strength level and if whether or not you were skilled or it used your fists as the "weapon" for damage calculation. If it's the former then I'd argue it's possibly working as intended, just in a very limited capacity since it doesn't affect knuckle dusters. If it's the latter, then it could just be an oversight and the fact my characters are trained in armed melee causes the "fist" weapon to game the damage increase.

I'm not trying to argue with your here and believe what you're telling me, I am just trying to better understand how these things work under the hood since it sounds like you have some experience in that.

Yes, there are "Fists" in this list. Technically, they are just hit methods that require "empty" hand. And yes - they require Melee skill, not Unarmed.

Very interesting... thanks! Must just be an oversight since the attack method trains unarmed as you would expect. The increase in damage must have always been there and I just didn't notice beforehand. I'll update the section about training melee that unarmed doesn't work.

[jason]

You can check on the status of an npc's training through the debug console. Suppose you wanted to know about John Doe's state of combat engineering.
1. Hit F3 to open the debug console.
2. getcond John_Doe Combat

Among the stats listed should be something about his combat engineering level. If it's still being trained then it should be between 0 and 100, though it is a long decimal value. Capitalization matters and use an underscore to replace any spaces in names. Use a capital for the first letter of the trait you're interested in.

[Vince]

Originally posted by jason:

You can check on the status of an npc's training through the debug console. Suppose you wanted to know about John Doe's state of combat engineering.
1. Hit F3 to open the debug console.
2. getcond John_Doe Combat

Among the stats listed should be something about his combat engineering level. If it's still being trained then it should be between 0 and 100, though it is a long decimal value. Capitalization matters and use an underscore to replace any spaces in names. Use a capital for the first letter of the trait you're interested in.

Awesome info, thank you for that! I will probably use that for now and hopefully in the future that little issue will be ironed out.

[Lemures]

I'd like there to be an option within the crew section to run an evaluation, which would update their details and provide an employee page to read the same way you can goto the port kiosk and scan your ship to re evaluate it.

This was incredibly helpful Vince, thank you. I had just started poking around with skills and training for myself. :)

[Vince]

Originally posted by Lemures:

I'd like there to be an option within the crew section to run an evaluation, which would update their details and provide an employee page to read the same way you can goto the port kiosk and scan your ship to re evaluate it.

This was incredibly helpful Vince, thank you. I had just started poking around with skills and training for myself. :)

I like this idea a lot. What i was alluding to was some sort of conversation option specifically for crew members. "Ask about skills" would be for non-crew and something else would be for crew and you'd get a full diagnostic.

Id say a merging of both ideas would be great as you could make it a conversation option, but it results in that "evaluation" process like an employer would do with their employee.

You're very welcome!

[McOrigin]

Found your little guide with Google. Thank you very much for putting this together!

I've bought the PDA hacking programm from the fence and apparently cannot use it, because I suck at hacking.
I've rest a few doors but had no idea I could redo this to train hacking. Will give it a shot and see when the hacking program becomes usable. I hope it does at some point!

[gekkobear]

For hacking training (if anyone is curious, as I was).
Yes, resetting doors are an easy way to grind.
I'm assuming hacking crates is comparable (if not identical).

My hacking untrained run the first time I got hacking was when my Nav went haywire and I had to debug it.
That also gives training, but not much.
(first time out, did NOT get me to 1%, from what I can tell, maybe the same a door reset)

One more point of note, and this is an important one.
My untrained 18 year old at start was doing this at 1X speed, for about 11 minutes, to reset the door once.
12 door hacks had him at 10%
(6 got him to 5%, which showed as well, it took 2 for 1%)

My ongoing run that has some skills from doing repairs to get cash (Electrical engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and 75% into Robotic) can do a door reset with 1% hacking at 4X speed.
So it only takes about 3 minutes 45 seconds game time for each reset...
But I had to do this 23 times to go from 5% to 10%.
(which was 6 times for my 1X speed skill test)

Which means training % is from TIME spent, not TASKS completed.
Working faster does NOT mean you learn faster, and if you have skills that speed this up, you will have to reset the door a LOT more times overall.

Doing this (if you can afford to spend 21-22 game hours rent/mortgage doing it, as that's about what I calculate it would take) before you have skills that let you go faster would mean fewer clicks overall.

It's possible, but it will be somewhat painful; and more painful if you're better skilled otherwise. Bummer for my run, I might restart now that I know this.

[1Erik1]

Hey man I found a ridicolously easy way to train EVA suits. Just sleep with them on. All the hours spend sleeping with EVA suits help train them. I am like 50% done with EVA training after sleeping with them for a few days (though I had to use a whole lotta hygiene packs afterwards as the dirtiness scales beyond the visual indicator on the bottom so stack up on those).

Also doing fitness or strength training before sleeping actually increases fitness and strength during sleep. (Though I also used the stimulant to help with muscle and bone density growth, might also be an effect from that)

Perhaps your character wakes up a bunch of times and goes exercising during the fast forwarded time? The lore did mention people generally having insomnia issues.

Oh also a good way to train a bunch of different skills is to use the torch as a weapon and use a different torch to restore it every time it gets low. The amount of xp seems to scale much higher on this. Perhaps because xp scales with the price of the thing you are trying to repair? Torches are easy to get, damage and repair multiple times rather than for example fusion reactors, while being quiet expensive themselves.