How to keep your crafter at max skill.

[Tam]

Crafter without "too smart" or "great memory" loses high crafting skill too fast and gains it back too slow even with burning passion.
How do you keep your crafter at 20 or 19 skills ?

[Jaggid Edje]

I keep them constantly working on crafting at least part of every day. If I don't "need" them to make anything, I craft things to sell/gift to other factions.

[Markus Reese]

Yup, as above? Open a gift shop. Set them up their own art table and have them make just really good wooden sculptures. Sculptures have a high work investment, and most maps wood is renewable. Else just keep a good stone supply and have them do the stonecutting.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by twistedmelon:

Yup, as above? Open a gift shop. Set them up their own art table and have them make just really good wooden sculptures. Sculptures have a high work investment, and most maps wood is renewable. Else just keep a good stone supply and have them do the stonecutting.

Sculptures is artistic skill not crafting, but the same applies to artists, so it's still good advice.

[XelNigma]

I have no need to keep them max level. The different between lcl 18-20 isnt big enough for me to worry about. Nearly all there work is going to be excellent to masterwork any way.

[ROE]

All my crrafters have the Great Memory trait. That trait helps a whole lot.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by XelNigma:

I have no need to keep them max level. The different between lcl 18-20 isnt big enough for me to worry about. Nearly all there work is going to be excellent to masterwork any way.

A skill level 20 crafter is 50% more likely to craft a masterwork item than a skill level 18 one and 20% more likely to craft an excellent item.
If I were hiring, and knew those numbers, I know who I'd hire.

[Tam]

Originally posted by XelNigma:

I have no need to keep them max level. The different between lcl 18-20 isnt big enough for me to worry about. Nearly all there work is going to be excellent to masterwork any way.

20 vs 18 difference is huge afaik

[Markus Reese]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

Originally posted by twistedmelon:

Yup, as above? Open a gift shop. Set them up their own art table and have them make just really good wooden sculptures. Sculptures have a high work investment, and most maps wood is renewable. Else just keep a good stone supply and have them do the stonecutting.

Sculptures is artistic skill not crafting, but the same applies to artists, so it's still good advice.

Oop, right. Brain short. I was thinking my artist. My smith was making wooden plate armor. Tons of work for the material investment.

[Mr W]

The short answer is to keep them busy crafting all the time even if it is on junk items that you don't really need. Wooden swords, for example.

[Dreagon]

And if you don't want to keep them crafting all the time there's always mods.

[Akadai]

Depending on how far you want to go with mods, I could throw a couple ideas out there. Me personally, skill degrading was a big turn off for me, so I simply installed a no skill decay mod. Don't really care if it might seem cheaty or not, skill decay is not for me

Vanilla Expanded has a skill books mod, where you can write your own skill books. Depending on the quality of the book will depend how many skill points a pawn can get from it. Writers also gain skill in the book they are currently writing. So readers and writers will gain. Writing a book takes a pretty long time, it's like 5000 work amount. High quality books also sell for a decent amount

[Jaggid Edje]

Explanding on what @Akadai is throwing out there, another mod that adjusts the skill decay is RimmsQoL.

You can set it to leave skill decay on, but not allow a skill to actually lose a level, so the farthest it would decay is the bottom of the current skill level.
You can also set it to slow down the skill decay, or to ramp it up a bit but make it so that once a pawn reaches skill 20 it will no longer decay, thus making it a bit harder to get to 20, but making 20 permanent once it is achieved.
Lot of flexibility with RimmsQoL to leave decay on but tweak it to your preferences, basically.

[XelNigma]

I just ran a little test to see if the claim of a lvl 20 crafter would be double as likly to craft a masterwork.

Lvl 17 no passion crafter vs lvl 20 double passion.
Both locked in identical rooms with piles and piles of devilstrand with DeepStorage set to only hold each quality to easy counting.
Then I set them to make shirts forever.

And to my surprise the lvl 17 guy was not only the first to knock out a masterwork but his first 2 masterworks before lvl 20 even had one. Tho by the end of the day I was disappointed by the results.

Some how they have the exact same numbers.
1 Normal
12 Good
11 Excellent
2 Masterwork

The level 17 is still lvl 17 at the end of the day and I made double sure neather of them had a trait that gave them an advantage/disadvantage like perfectionist or somthing.

Granted, this is a TINNY pool to draw any solid conclusions from for long timem play.
But its enough for me to confidently say what ever difference they have is so minor I dont worry about keeping them at lvl 20.

a lvl 20 isnt going to be churning out masterworks most of the time. Good and excellent will still be the norm.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by XelNigma:

I just ran a little test to see if the claim of a lvl 20 crafter would be double as likly to craft a masterwork.

I didn't say double, I said 50% more likely, as in 1.5x.
This is just simply a fact, you can see it yourself in the game code, no need to run a test.

And if you are going to run a test, at least run a sample size that makes the test statistically relevant. We're talking the difference of something around 6% vs. 10.5% for skill 18 and 20 respectively, the sample size you did is completely meaningless when dealing with those kinds of values.

[Pyrodes]

I just use the mod mad skills so I don't have to worry about skill degradation, it's just a feature made to make you suffer if you take the time to level up your colonists' skills.