Is it just me or many crafting skills are useless?

[Tazor]

Especially at high levels. Let's break it down.

Carpentry seems like the most useful one for me. Easy to make large storage containers. Rain barrels. And base building for those who don't want to claim a building.

Cooking gives you some small bonuses to your calories count as it gets higher.

Farming is useful if you don't want to loot for food. Otherwise food is plentiful.

First aid does nothing.

Electrical is useless beyond the first level I think. For hotwiring. You need the magazine to operate generators. Huge grind.

Metalworking is a pain to level if you don't have enough propane. You can fix up the bodywork on cars but cars are plentiful. The boxes are better than the carpentry ones. But the grind.

Mechanics. Again, cars are everywhere. Get to level 2 by breaking down random cars and you can have any car you want.

Tailoring can save you from a surprise attack with the extra padding.

[Armagenesis]

First aid is the only one I genuinely feel as being completely useless. Other skills have some use, albeit not major. Like how you can craft battery-powered table lamp at level 6 electrical, cooking allowing you to use rotten food as ingredients at level 8, and tailoring allowing you to patch holes at level 8.

Also, mechanics being useless? High level mechanic skill is the difference between having a great vehicle with huge storage space and a beater.

[Kaia]

Electrical has no legitimate use beyond level 3.
Lvl 2 lets you transport the best oven, the deep fryer (large capaciy). Lvl 3 is debatable but lets you transport washing/drying machines. Beyond that it's indeed pointless.

Metalworking itself is largely useless, save for some very fringe use you may want to do with base building intermediary see through doors for those who are paranoiac about getting jumped by a door hugging zombie. But by and large it's only used for mechanics.

First aid increases bandage life and fracture heal time. I do agree that it's low on the desirability list, but it's not quite "nothing" either. It should obviously be reworked.

Cooking has uses in some very rare loot scenarios. That is until you get your hands on cabbage seeds and manage to get a farm going.

Farming: strong disagree. It's all dependent on your loot settings and population settings. Not everyone plays on normal plentiful loot pinata settings. If you play on high pop and insanely rare or none loot, you will need to engage with both cooking and farming because you simply will not be able to loot enough and visit enough places and those places will be bare.

Mechanics Not just about hot-wiring. When you stop dying in the first 3 weeks, you eventually realize you will want to maintain cars, and that's done through mechanics. If anything, out of the ones you mentioned, Mechanics is with carpentry one of the few skills that is useful up to a high level.


So in summary, the most egregious examples here are Electrical and First aid. One has by and large no meaningful recipes and incentives to go beyond level 2 or 3. The other one really can be skipped all together and it won't meaningfully affect a run.

I also think Tailoring is largely useless the way it is now, especially if you play with back vulnerability on. Most of the year will be too hot to stack layers without gimping your day, and thus the benefits tailoring brings are severely reduced by both the lack of layers, back vulnerability, and simply the fact that the most regularly bit areas are the ones where it's hardest to stack layers on.

[★Rainmaker★]

On one of the B42 news articles I saw that a possible new skill was going to be.........

Pottery

I mean that's a meme.

Seriously. Going to have me thinking what the difference between Pottery 2 and 7 is, and not only that but also care?

My Mitch the Potted Plant is going in a Pottery 1 pot and wither away in a week.

[Kaia]

Originally posted by ★Rainmaker★:

On one of the B42 news articles I saw that a possible new skill was going to be.........

Pottery

I mean that's a meme.

Seriously. Going to have me thinking what the difference between Pottery 2 and 7 is, and not only that but also care?

My Mitch the Potted Plant is going in a Pottery 1 pot and wither away in a week.

Yeah who knows. I took it as a very secondary skill just for funzies and giggles.

I assume pottery is where you will make things like clay pots for gathering water instead of buckets, and where you'll be making kilns for firing clay bricks or to forge some metal, stuff like that.

It's very difficult to foresee the difference between that at level 2 and level 7, but i would think it's all dependant on the number of recipes attached to it and how well they are spread out.

For instance the issue with eletrical is that there are bupkis useful recipes, and everything is frontloaded in lvl 1 to 3.

[Nordil(Hun)]

Originally posted by ★Rainmaker★:

On one of the B42 news articles I saw that a possible new skill was going to be.........

Pottery

I mean that's a meme.

Seriously. Going to have me thinking what the difference between Pottery 2 and 7 is, and not only that but also care?

My Mitch the Potted Plant is going in a Pottery 1 pot and wither away in a week.

With pottery 7, you will be able to prepare entry level cultist pots. You will be able to adequately make the motifs and the writing on them.
Thus you can trade them with the local Mythos cult, or you can start your own:)

Also from level 3 pottery, your crafted pot for the night will not leak anymore, so no more cleaning up the sh1t and piss that poured out on the ground.

[Tazor]

Originally posted by Kaia:

Originally posted by ★Rainmaker★:

On one of the B42 news articles I saw that a possible new skill was going to be.........

Pottery

I mean that's a meme.

Seriously. Going to have me thinking what the difference between Pottery 2 and 7 is, and not only that but also care?

My Mitch the Potted Plant is going in a Pottery 1 pot and wither away in a week.

Yeah who knows. I took it as a very secondary skill just for funzies and giggles.

I assume pottery is where you will make things like clay pots for gathering water instead of buckets, and where you'll be making kilns for firing clay bricks or to forge some metal, stuff like that.

Pottery would be good for making a terracotta heater during winter.

Kind of weird you can't put together a metal oven with metalworking. If you can't find the ones in game.

[★Rainmaker★]

Yup those stoves for heated tents are literally just sheets of metal that you assemble. I mean the Antique Oven is rad and all, but it should definitely be possible to make one for yourself.

[Tazor]

As for mechanics, my current van is awesome. Really good shape overall. Assuming I don't ram it into every zombie, car and pole on the road it will be fine. If it breaks down I just get another one.

[Kaia]

Originally posted by Tazor:

Kind of weird you can't put together a metal oven with metalworking. If you can't find the ones in game.

I don't think it's very sensible to assume the player would be able to make metal furnaces out of whatever metal is in the world.

Real world furnaces are made out of refractory bricks, insulating materials like ceramic fibers, stainless steel and cast iron for the outer structures

That would imply they introduce a more complex depth of materials in the game, the ability for players to learn to recognize it and a whole array of specialty tools that just doesn't make sense in a game like pz.

Using earthwork kilns is so, so much simpler.

Originally posted by Tazor:

As for mechanics, my current van is awesome. Really good shape overall. Assuming I don't ram it into every zombie, car and pole on the road it will be fine. If it breaks down I just get another one.

Famous last words, lol.

[Animalman]

Electrical is not useless is required to move and place Electrical Items
Electrical also lets the sub-craft of liek try to make a remote weapon.
It give the player something to want to try and do

Cooking
Farming
First Aid are like supplementary

So you become better cook by just making optimal meals all the time.
Same u are out of Fresh Food, so you grow something and you get the farm XP
so progressing u towards easier and easier plant maintenance supplementary.
First Aid same, i douse all of the stuff set up all and tend every wound change every bandage when it needs. Gain supplementary.

So its not skill u aim to climb, tho Cooking can be aimed to Climb.
and there are cooking challenges, such as Pizza, and others like Sushi.

Farming there is all the veg is quite easy to get them all then grow them all and profit from them that is a game in such tho fairly easy. Jar the food and that. Tho
if u want to move Bush.
then u need Farming Skills Bush and Flour

Metal Work construction walls and stuff and gates are the best. Since carp is giving you stuff you can't see through. So you got like 8 zombies on your Giant 4 cell Gate.
But you have to open it and let them in in order to get them off it
While metal gates you can just kill them through the gate so you never have the unsafe door opening maneuver.

[Reapoman]

It doesnt matter come b42, its being reworked?

[Kaia]

Originally posted by Reapoman:

It doesnt matter come b42, its being reworked?

yeah it is, but it's not yet entirely clear how it's reworked, or if the issues tied to the lack of recipes or the frontloading of those will be addressed, or if old skills will also be reworked, like first aid for instance.

There's a reasonable expectation that it all will be overhauled, but last we left it off, they were not even done with designing the crafting UI itself, so it's not there yet imo.

[Tazor]

Originally posted by Reapoman:

It doesnt matter come b42, its being reworked?

You mean testing branch of build 42. Which should be here in a few months.

Then a few more months to 1 year until build 42 becomes stable.

Still plenty of time left in build 41. We don't even have clear information on how the skills are being reworked for build 42.

[Tazor]

Originally posted by Animalman:

Electrical is not useless is required to move and place Electrical Items
Electrical also lets the sub-craft of liek try to make a remote weapon.
It give the player something to want to try and do

Metal Work construction walls and stuff and gates are the best. Since carp is giving you stuff you can't see through. So you got like 8 zombies on your Giant 4 cell Gate.
But you have to open it and let them in in order to get them off it
While metal gates you can just kill them through the gate so you never have the unsafe door opening maneuver.

Remote bombs are only available to the engineer. Like all explosives. No other profession can craft them. This one thing being available to all professions would have made electrical quite worthwhile.

As for building a well fortified base... I set up shop in the middle of Rosewood in the firefighter station. After clearing out all the zombies it feels pretty safe. I got a few planks on the ground floor windows and that's it. No zombies inside my base. Plus they can break down even metal barricades as you sleep.

[Kaia]

all aesthetic considerations aside, planks are indeed much more desireable than metal sheets or bars, because they give you a visual indication of how damaged they are. This does not happen with metal barricades, meaning you may very well wake up to broken barricades or half broken ones with no idea of what the damage may be.

Plus, one or two zombies will easily break a metal barricade wile you have your night's sleep, provided you don't have something stupid like 7 levels in metal working.

0 point to electrical for moving furniture purposes past lvl 3.