What are the best/most implemented skills so far?

[Stormlock]

Figured it'd help new players to know.

Farming and cooking seem quite useful to me; once you get to ~+10 seeds and ~15 cooking (which doesn't take that long once you get a farm set up to supply ingredients) you can make food that really buffs the stats you want to raise.

Carpentry does eventually lead to beds, but you need to get it to pretty high levels to make decent ones. Not much other value in it imo unless you want to make a bunch of furniture for your house to look cool.

Blacksmithing is... really barren. It can make some machine related stuff eventually, but mostly it's just furniture that's way harder to make than with wood. And you can't make weapons or armour. I'd avoid it unless you're going for guns, because you can smith ammo. Eventually.

No idea about jewelry, mine is still level 1. Should be viable to level up by making glass windows I think?

Mining is very good if you worship Opatos for getting ores to raise favour. As a side effect, you'll eventually be able to mine iron and other high level materials, but there's not much use for it except to make a really nice boomerang and better tools, and you can get iron and steel from enemy drops anyways. Level it up by mining lots of empty dirt tiles.

Crafting is super useful, it unlocks a bunch of stuff and more importantly lets you dismantle stronger stuff. Easiest way to get a lot of the best materials, honestly. Easiest way to level it up is dismantling stuff in bulk, like all the soil lumps you get from mining.

Sculpting... I'm not sure. You can eventually make stone furniture including beds, and you can also turn cut stone into statues. Maybe high level sculpting makes more rare/valuable statues? I haven't raised mine past 5 or so.

Weaving is pretty useful because you can make 30 slot backpacks and fire/cold blankets, but I don't know a good way to get enough materials for it easily. Best I can suggest is picking up every cobweb you find, but that's super tedious. Can you farm cotton? That would be very helpful.

Alchemy seems non existent as far as I can tell? I found an alchemy table but no recipes for it to get started.

Pickpocketing lets you steal not just furniture, but the contents of chests and wardrobes and stuff in towns. Actually quite a few platinum coins sitting around to be had that way, but otherwise not very useful from what I can see, if you want easy money music is much easier and faster. Maybe it's good for stealing stuff from NPCs eventually? Mine is only like level 3. I didn't have trouble with getting caught, but that might be because I already have stealth at like level 15.

Has anyone messed with the gene splicing stuff? I remember seeing it somewhere but forgot where. No idea how that works.

Most other stuff just kind of does what it says on the tin, I can't remember anything else that surprised me.

[Vanguard]

Performing for megabucks

[Ace Dreamer]

Having dabbled with most skills allow me to share my findings thus far:

Farming and Cooking: It's how you gain stats in this game. There is no cap for farming, the more you have the better your crops/trees. Cooking soft caps at 50 (55 for an end game cake) But i'd argue 25 is more than enough to net you a couple of 5 ingridient dishes and unlock the two food skills if you want them.

Carpentry, Crafting, Weaving, Blacksmithing: Soft caps at 55, 25, 30 and 40 respectively. Making your own things is extreemely important as you can copy things you make on stations. A simple mid game exaple is making a chest from a lightweight meterial, upgrading it with wrenches, and then copying the upgraded chest. Through the use of farming, your trees and cotton can surpass any natural occuring resource and make the best beds.

PS: remember you can learn most items in the game by breaking them down repetedly when within 5 levels of their craft level. If you are unlucky with a specific recipe, simply level your craft, buy that thing with tickets and break it down until you unlock it.

Mining, Crafting: Used for mining and dismantling items, the main ways of getting rare ores and gems. It's really hard and the start since you don't have enough skill to even mine a node made from the same thing as your tool, but eventually you will be able to compensate for weak pickaxe/hammer materials through skill.

Sculpting: You can use sculpting and dismantling in order to change the state of an item. Scultpures, when dismantled, have a 50% chance to refund a log. Even if made out of iron. This allows you to get iron logs, and then use that iron log to make a "wooden" sword which has all the properties of an iron sword, i.e. hits way harder than the hardest wood.

In the same way, dismantling an axe will give a stone 50% of the time, and dismantling a latern will give scrap of the same material as the ignot used, 50% of the time.

Pickpocketing: Can be bipassed as certain cests in cities are meant to be bought with tickets which are way faster than raising pickpocket or alerting the guards.

Gene manipulation: Even i, who is 150+ hours into my game are nowhere near gene edditing. It requires unfathomable power and min-maxing your followers is done after getting their egg and "reincarnating" them in an incubator (another massive power drain) while giving them end game milk. Granted if you want to utilise some of the endless genes you have hoarded up to this point, flipping it on and making 3 people work the pain wheel to power it isn't a bad idea.

[Sebastian]

Blacksmithing has alot of uses for your base needs, you need it for the sun lamps that will alow you to farm in winter and indoors.

The bunk beeds are cheap, can fit some 6-8 people on them and can be made rather good using farmed material such as cotton, greath for followers untill you can get them all kings beds.

And finnaly you want to level it up for the generator recipe at lvl 40, each generator provides 160mw so you need them if you want to power all your lands.

[HeraldOfOpera]

Jewelry is now used for Rune stuff, which I'm not sure how useful it is but seems at least potentially terrifying.

[Daezz0r]

Gene Editing is super useful just for the sole reason to change their combat AI.
I'm running a fox secretary as healer (from predator) and my latest newcomer, Handmaiden of Lolth on mage (from priest).
Comes quite cheap at just 4 feat points, compared to the useful stuff out there, requiring 20+, 30+, 40+, ... feat points. That's what you need enhanced milk (+X) for eventually, to give a headstart on feat points. (Feed enhanced milk to newly hatched babies)
Other than that, you can put genes into your companions to teach them new skills (orange letters) or give them traits like "Heavy Casting", "From North".

Originally posted by Stormlock:

Can you farm cotton? That would be very helpful.

Yup. Got my seeds from the harvest god apostle. But you can sickle some at merchants guild if I'm not mistaken.

Pickpocketing on higher levels let you basically steal anything right under guards nose' and let's you pick heavier stuff.
Good way to get rid of too much accumulated karma and turn into oren.
--> Luxury standing lamp, paintings, tapestries (at throne rooms/small red/ and at merchants guild/big black-ish/turned red somehow lol), crowns.

[Nhika]

I think farming is the best skill like you said, mainly to setup higher level crops to delegate.
Cooking is okay, but if you "push it" Kettle doesn't really dupe the amount you need until you are "rich" enough to invest into him lol

[SpiralRazor]

There are two mods that fix alchemy and blacksmithing.

One allows for crafting potions, rods etc and the blacksmithing lets you make targeted basic weapons and armors and has a 2nd rarer recipe for "good" quality stuff. Useful for outfitting in the mid game when youre running 3 or 4 pets with humanoid slots.

[Houjuu Byakuren]

Originally posted by Stormlock:

Figured it'd help new players to know.

Farming and cooking seem quite useful to me; once you get to ~+10 seeds and ~15 cooking (which doesn't take that long once you get a farm set up to supply ingredients) you can make food that really buffs the stats you want to raise.

Carpentry does eventually lead to beds, but you need to get it to pretty high levels to make decent ones. Not much other value in it imo unless you want to make a bunch of furniture for your house to look cool.

Blacksmithing is... really barren. It can make some machine related stuff eventually, but mostly it's just furniture that's way harder to make than with wood. And you can't make weapons or armour. I'd avoid it unless you're going for guns, because you can smith ammo. Eventually.

No idea about jewelry, mine is still level 1. Should be viable to level up by making glass windows I think?

Mining is very good if you worship Opatos for getting ores to raise favour. As a side effect, you'll eventually be able to mine iron and other high level materials, but there's not much use for it except to make a really nice boomerang and better tools, and you can get iron and steel from enemy drops anyways. Level it up by mining lots of empty dirt tiles.

Crafting is super useful, it unlocks a bunch of stuff and more importantly lets you dismantle stronger stuff. Easiest way to get a lot of the best materials, honestly. Easiest way to level it up is dismantling stuff in bulk, like all the soil lumps you get from mining.

Sculpting... I'm not sure. You can eventually make stone furniture including beds, and you can also turn cut stone into statues. Maybe high level sculpting makes more rare/valuable statues? I haven't raised mine past 5 or so.

Weaving is pretty useful because you can make 30 slot backpacks and fire/cold blankets, but I don't know a good way to get enough materials for it easily. Best I can suggest is picking up every cobweb you find, but that's super tedious. Can you farm cotton? That would be very helpful.

Alchemy seems non existent as far as I can tell? I found an alchemy table but no recipes for it to get started.

Pickpocketing lets you steal not just furniture, but the contents of chests and wardrobes and stuff in towns. Actually quite a few platinum coins sitting around to be had that way, but otherwise not very useful from what I can see, if you want easy money music is much easier and faster. Maybe it's good for stealing stuff from NPCs eventually? Mine is only like level 3. I didn't have trouble with getting caught, but that might be because I already have stealth at like level 15.

Has anyone messed with the gene splicing stuff? I remember seeing it somewhere but forgot where. No idea how that works.

Most other stuff just kind of does what it says on the tin, I can't remember anything else that surprised me.

You can acquire plastic fibres by dismantling trashbags, too, I believe.