XP Multiplier from books nerfed?

[Monii]

I remember playing a while ago and when I read the Beginner Carpentry book I would get XP really fast. Now I get 3XP for sawing two logs, and it seems like building stuff (with the beginner carpentry book fully read) gives really slow XP compared to last time. Has the XP gain been nerfed, or is it a bug? I also have the fast learner trait, so I'm not sure whether that's causing it to bug. Cheers.

[Qloos]

The skills themselves have been redone recently to favor characters with a specific role. If you are leveling something you are not proficient in you gain exp at 25% the base rate.

Professions
Professions now often give skill points, and these tie in directly to the learning speed in those skills as well as the starting skill level. This is to further diversity character creation and make the professions feel like an actual previous experience exists instead of starting characters as blank slate.

Also professions are not all necessarily free, so there is the potential for some more powerful start professions to require negative traits to balance. Unemployed gives 8 points to start. This is very important for reasons that will be clear when we talk about the new traits.

So you may pick the Carpenter profession, and right out of the bat this gives you 3 points in carpentry. This not only means starting on level 3, but the carpenter will gain a 50% boost to XP in that skill.

The scaling goes as follows, based on the starting skill level:

0) 0.25x speed (eek)
1) 1x speed
2) 1.25x speed
3) 1.5x speed
4) 1.5x speed
5) -

This multiplier is permanent for the entire game. Even when you get to level 1 in a 0 level skill, you retain the x4 time to learn it.

The idea being that now, a carpenter with skills ONLY in carpentry may advance in carpentry at a fast speed. Their hopes of becoming an expert farmer any time soon are remote. So this further diversifies characters to provide much more varied runs in single player, and provides more potential for teamwork and specific roles in MP and ultimately NPCs. However a carpenter being doomed to ONLY ever be able to learn carpentry quickly is going to be in trouble, so enter:

[SwissArmyKnife]

Do you have any trait bonus to Carpentry in your build?

If not, then you're getting 25% of the normal rate of XP for everything you do. Fast Learner gives you 30% more XP to everything so that's 32.5% XP plus the 3x multiplier from books put you at 97.5% XP gain.

At least, that's my understanding of how the percentages are applied...

[Monii]

Ahhhh I see I see. I picked unemployed cause I thought the professions were only bonuses and I wanted lots of positive traits. Thanks guys

[muricaderp]

yeah, it's why reading is so darn important lol. having that x8 multiplier for carpentry really help cut down on the amount of trees i have to well.....cut down lol. (because u can turn logs into planks and planks into sticks, saving on trees when u are gaining skill.)