What do you consider to be the most important skill(s)?

[ambi]

For me, it's shooting. Raiders, mechanoids and bugs are the biggest threat to your colony. Having high mining or cooking or crafting is nice, but even a low-skilled pawn can still do these things, just more slowly. However, being able to kill an enemy can mean life or death for your colony.

[MisterSpock]

in the beginning you want ...
food = farming
a fast building = construction
steel = mining

but sometimes you need a fast tech to hydro or gun turrets. then you neen research
2nd skills are cooking, crafting, medic, social

[Mr W]

Ideally you have someone with at least one flame in each skill (between all colonists). A person with a low score in a stat but a flame is better in the long run than the person with the high score and no flame.

[MisterSpock]

Yeah and in shooting:

0 is awefull
5 is ok
10+ is super

yeah and carefull shooter is op, giving you 99% acc

[Nighnmm]

I go with shooting skill first I like to play on hard. Otherwise the game turns into sim city and gets rather boring quickly.

[Hppakee]

Hauling, its the only skill you really need.

[Swirler]

Depends on the map for some of them but;

Growing is number 1. You want that healroot supply pronto. It also helps growing crops which is very important early on and healroot can be an early source of income on just about any map because you need those medical supplies. Your people will get injured, diseased and have operations at some point. Meds are critical for making your colonists survive.
Also useful for growing hops to produce beer. And beer is a fantastic item to make, thanks to it's mood bonus and as an item to sell.
Pro-tips, when operating make sure there is a light nearby and the operating area is "clean". Lights are cheap to make, cleaning is quick. Don't skimp on this.
Making the hospital a central location is important as well. If you're stuck for bed space you can always swap a colonists bed into a hospital one.

Construction number 2. This isn't number 1 because you will build so much stuff that you can train just about any dunce into a pro if construction is all they do. But getting those well built beds and fast building walls is immensely valuable. This skill can also cross over into making furniture to sell in a pinch.
Pro-tips. Plan how and where you want to build your base. This will help smooth over some construction problems some people have. Think about the paths your colonists will want to take.
Laboratories want to be clean and average sized.
Workshops don't have to be clean but you generally want them quite close to your centre to help with reducing colonist walk times. Bigger ones are better but not everyone can afford to make big rooms.
Kitchens want to be near your walk-in freezers. You have built a freezer right? Unless you're in a really cold climate you need a freezer.
You can "train" up your colonists in construction by having them build an item, then cancelling the item while it's being built. You won't lose resources this way. But be careful of using this method on valuable or expensive buildings because there is a "failure" chance of losing items when making something. So wooden dining chairs are a good thing to practice on. Fuel generators are a bad thing to practice on.
Everyone has to use wood early on. Or Steel. Don't be afraid to replace wooden walls with stone ones as soon as it's reasonable. Wood burns.
Using steel to make things is fine, just remember you can deconstruct steel walls and remove steel tiles you find if you're strapped for it.

If you're having problems with colonists building roofs, remove all construction orders (there's a quick way to mass cancel this) and the colonists will automatically make the roofs.
If worst comes to the worst you can manually order them to make the roofs.

Best tip. Have fun with it, this is the part of Rimworld that makes each playthrough different, don't feel bad with a bad build. You'll get better at this as time goes on.


Shooting number 3. While having an ace shot is fantastic and very important for using slow firing weapons you can still make do with colonists who have low shooting scores. Bit of a pain to train up though. Also melee weapons and skill means there is at least the chance to use your combat colonists in a different style.
Some tips. Shooting in darkness is hard really hard. Shooting things behind walls is also hard.
Friendly fire is your biggest source of colonist damage when playing this game. Do your best to space out your colonists and baby-sit them when in combat otherwise they can and will shoot the hell out of each other.
Non-combatant colonists can be a problem. The game still calculates them as equal to a fully functioning combat monster when scaling raids. Be careful taking too many of them

Hauling number 4. Hauling is just "dumb labour" but frankly the only thing more annoying than having colonists who can't shoot is colonists who won't move a sack of potatoes 10 blocks.
This isn't as much of a problem as non combatants because you can "trick" the colonists who refuse to do labour into doing tasks that are pretty much labour tasks tacked on. ie crafting, cooking.
Pro-tips if your colonists aren't hauling it's because it isn't rated as a high enough priority in the jobs tab. Make sure 1-2 of them have hauling as the most important when you need stuff moved.
If all else fails you can manually order them to haul stuff (provided they can haul).
Part of making hauling easier is also involved in base building and planning. If you have to haul chunks of rock from across the map, maybe it's a good idea to just mine a nearby mountain instead.
If you absolutely have to haul clothes and weapons with colonists who refuse to haul you can manually undress them and force them to equip the items that need hauled. A bit annoying but it's a neat trick to use in a tight spot now and again.
Probably the only skill that really requires a lot of player input because the AI can be a bit inefficient at times.


Social number 5. This is one of the hardest skills to level up but if you have someone with a high score in this they're incredibly useful for recruiting prisoners, trade and just being nice to each other. A copy paste from the wiki shows;

The social skill affects the impact of social interactions on other characters' mood, the impact of gifts on faction relations, the recruitment chance for prisoners and trader prices. A small amount of experience is gained every time two colonists have a social interaction with each other.

Each point increases social interaction impact by 10%

Each point increases gift impact by 5%

Each point increases recruitment chance by 5%

Each point makes trade prices 0.5% better

Medicine number 6. This could be higher if you're dealing with lots of raids. But it's quite fast to level up (you can always get your people injured in a variety of ways to help level this if you really really need that medic).
Trying to patch people up with a bad medic is well, painful. Operations are usually just not an option with a bad medic either.
You can also fix up animals that get injured as well to help level medicine.

Mining number 7 becomes more important with a very mountainous region. Less so if you have less mountains. This one has a very fluid value which is obviously map dependent. Could go up to 2-3 or 8-useless depending on how many mountains you'll have to cut through.
*shrug*

Number 8-useless depending on your circumstances. Research, Cooking, animal handling, crafting and art are all skills that can be increased easily and/or only really become more important if your map has very specific features.
_Research can be useful, I won't argue with that but you only really need about half of the research techs available to have the basis for a good colony. Tribal starts can be pretty harsh with a bad researcher although tribal starts in general seem worse than colonist starts thanks to the horrible debuff to tribal research speed.
_Cooking is relatively quick to level and anyone can make a simple meal, which is all you really need early on. It's nice to have a good cook to avoid food poisoning obviously.
Having a good cook helps make meals quicker and butcher more meat from animals, so if you're reliant on animals for food then this skill will become more useful.
Pro-tips don't eat simple meals dropped by raiders if you can avoid it. They have a high chance to give you food poisoning. I know this isn't always an option but food poisoning during a raid is a problem to watch out for.
Also stop your colonists from eating raw meat/veg. They get a mood debuff from eating raw food and sometimes the colonists are too stupid to eat the prepared meals next to them. Corn is okay and berries give a "gluttonous" bonus to mood.
6_9
_Animal handling is more useful if you have some animals that aren't useless to tame. (Aniamls that can haul things are usually good to have) Unfortunately with so many events that wipe out animals and the cost of keeping the animals and the time taken to look after them and so on means this skill isn't that important.
A bit of a time sink but they're not bad to make a profit on if you have a colonist who is born to be a zookeeper.
pro-tips For animals to haul items they have a "chance" to haul them (provided they are trained in hauling) obviously this chance is higher for items that are marked for hauling near them. You can use animal handlers with bonded animals into draft mode to attract the animals then undraft them to help corral the animals to haul what you want.
_Crafting is more of a late game skill. It's useless early on but later on in the game it's good for making better quality weapons and armour. Pretty slow to level though. Stonecutting helps level it early.
This skill has an umbrella that covers smithing, tailoring and crafting recipes.
I will admit that tailoring clothes that are of reasonable quality is important to have if you live in an extreme biome, ie somewhere cold or hot.
_Art is useless. Not important early, and you're not going to have the resources to spare on the ridiculously high cost of some pieces of art. Not to mention the time to craft the art is quite long.
However it is a useful source of income in mid-late game. And it can help in making bedrooms more or less valuable for those colonists who are greedy/jealous.
Makes for some funny descriptions though. Currently there is a bug with some art focusing on the 6th of winter 5499. Tynan has said this is fixed for the next update.

[Kira]

You want to start with a grower that can make you a good supply of herbal meds right of the bat. It takes awhile to grow and you will only get 1- 1.5 yields before winter. You will also enjoy higher yields since they fail less when harvesting. Protip: Set several low level growers to plant all your stuff asap, but only allow your high levels to pick it.

Construction is also very important. You want to make high quality beds to improve the quality of rest your people get. Less time resting is more time working, obviously. So having a high level constructer improves everything else. This also ties into growing, after your food and medicine is planted make sure to plant a huge area of trees. They will be used crafting dozens of beds until you get superior or better. It takes a very long time to grow, often all the way after winter into the next year. By then you should have a really high level constructor to use all the wood.

Crafting. Higher quality gear has better stats. More defences, less injury, and possibly avoid the downed state. You can pass this one and just collect gear from the raiders or buy it from ships if you want. I think the mods really make this a better skill. Being able to craft kevlar and power armor make this skill really good.

Honorable mention to animal training. You need tons of food to make this work well and a lot of time invested into just walking around the map bringing food to wild animals. I have mixed feelings about it, but once you get an army of wargs, foxes, ect hauling all your junk it really pays off. You can train some excess animals in release instead of butering them. They can soak up some hits so your people don't get hurt.

[SquareDildo]

Construction, Mining, Shooting, Medicine.

In The Lost Tribe scenario, Growing is VERY important because you start with almost no medicine. In general the recent change to healroot (required skill 7) made high levels more desirable.

Construction lets you build stuff fast and get mood bonuses from comfortable furniture.
Mining is the most reliable way of getting resources.
Shooting, so you can defend against the only kind of events that can destroy a colony.
Medicine, so you don't lose people, pets or livestock, don't mess up operations and get away with worse medicine.

Least useful:
Animals (maybe chickens, but generally there's nothing you NEED animals for)
Art (useless in early game and later you can easily get an artist or two. Takes a looong time to pay off, and not every biome has wood for makings places prettier.
Research (tends to raise quickly anyway, the most important thing is a passion flame, useless in late game when you've researched everything except if you're a tribe)

[Ficelle]

Shooting and growing.

If i start solo, i want these 2 at 8+ and burning passion.
Shooting for hunting and defending, farming for food and medecine (usefull only when a second guy joins, but still very usefull in the long run)

Bonus for decent scores in mining and building.

Provided he can do a bit of everything else and he has no bad traits, it is enough to start.