Help to understand "Gain character XP with specialty XP"

[andbruu]

So Food & Housing will grant me Character XP over time, with better food and housing increasing the rate.
If I have set "Gain character XP with specialty XP" > 0, I will also gain character XP when I gain specialty XP.
Does food and housing affect how fast specialty XP generates character XP, either directly or indirectrly?
I suspect it does indirectly, as I assume that my housing/food rating affects how much specialty XP I gain, which in turn affects the "active" generation of character XP.

I would love to have confermation of my assumption, or knowledge of the true mechanics.

[Other]

Your guess is basically correct. You have an XP multiplier, which factors in your food, housing, and some server settings; that multiplier is then applied to the base amount of XP you get for various things. The base amount of Character XP (which is what gets you new stars) is 1 per day. The base amount of skill XP depends on the task, but is usually in the range of 0.1 - 10. With the "Gain character XP with specialty XP" setting, the specified proportion of skill XP is also added to character XP; your XP multiplier is factored into that in the base -> actual step of the calculation of the skill XP.

As an example:
- you have an XP multiplier of 100, and the character-from-skill multiplier is set to 0.1
- While the server is online for 24 hours, you will gain 100 character XP. Early game that might be several stars, while late game that could be half a star or less
- You do a single job using a skill you have that awards 5 base XP, which gives you 500 XP in the skill
- That skill XP then gives you 50 Character XP (equivalent to 12 hours of server uptime)

Since 5 base skill XP is easy to get (cleaning one wood snarl with logging is worth 0.1, so 50 wood snarls would get you 5 base XP, and that doesn't count any logging XP from felling trees, chopping up the trunk, or processing it into boards or hewn logs), that shows that the example multiplier of 0.1 is much too high unless the server is being balanced around everyone being active exactly the same amount. The total XP needed to advance a skill from 1 to 7 is in the 100k to 500k range (91 times the amount you see at level 1 to get to level 2, with the amount for each level going up as the square of the current level), so even a multiplier of 0.001 will get you at least 100 character XP from maxing a single skill, which is generally more than enough to get the star for the next skill.