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[i2amroy]

Fungaloids give tainted veggie and specific triffids give biollante IIRC.

[Mookzen]

If you learn to make something, you only going to get better at it and will under no natural circumstances degrade in said ability over the course of time that this game is about. I would be fine will producing an item with less quality or having a higher chance of breaking the components if you haven't done it for a month or more, but suddenly not knowing how to do something you could a few days/weeks ago is silly at its core. I understand the gameplay balance reasons for wanting some sort of skillrust or skillcap but surely there's a more reasonable alternative. Then again it might need to be that area where sacrifices for the good of the gameplay must be made, maybe the radiation-or-what-have-you is messing with everyones memory.

[Akura]

Fungaloids give tainted veggie and specific triffids give biollante IIRC.

Specifically, triffids called biollantes. You'll find them around triffid groves.


By the way, is there any point to diving into a slime pit?

[Skyrunner]

If you learn to make something, you only going to get better at it and will under no natural circumstances degrade in said ability over the course of time that this game is about. I would be fine will producing an item with less quality or having a higher chance of breaking the components if you haven't done it for a month or more, but suddenly not knowing how to do something you could a few days/weeks ago is silly at its core. I understand the gameplay balance reasons for wanting some sort of skillrust or skillcap but surely there's a more reasonable alternative. Then again it might need to be that area where sacrifices for the good of the gameplay must be made, maybe the radiation-or-what-have-you is messing with everyones memory.

I also think that skill degrading, and degrading so fast is weird.

[kilakan]

I tend to turn it off, but another stat to track sort of like morale but called 'shock' or 'fear' could be used to impose temporary/medium turn detriments in skills.  I mean in an apocalypse scenario it's totally plausible that you could be so terrified you forget how to tie your own shoes.

[etgfrog]

hm...what about keeping track of the highest said skill obtains then takes (5+N)^2 days to rust a full level where N is the highest skill minus the skill its at right now. So it would take 25 days to go from level 5 to level 4, then 36 days to go from level 4 to level 3.

[i2amroy]

If you learn to make something, you only going to get better at it and will under no natural circumstances degrade in said ability over the course of time that this game is about. I would be fine will producing an item with less quality or having a higher chance of breaking the components if you haven't done it for a month or more, but suddenly not knowing how to do something you could a few days/weeks ago is silly at its core. I understand the gameplay balance reasons for wanting some sort of skillrust or skillcap but surely there's a more reasonable alternative. Then again it might need to be that area where sacrifices for the good of the gameplay must be made, maybe the radiation-or-what-have-you is messing with everyones memory.

Ah, I forgot to include another point in my earlier post. Another planned thing is to split skill levels into an "applied" and an "actual" level. Skill rust rusts away at your applied level, which is the one you use for all of your rolls. However it can't wear away your actual level, and that is used for tracking what is rusted and what isn't. In that method you will never "forget" how to do something, though your ability to actually perform the task that you remember how to do could certainly do so.

As for the increased speed of decay; it's always going to be there somewhat. This is to counteract the fact that in the real world learning to do many of the skills the player learns in hours would take months-years. In the real world people have to train for years to reach the higher echelons of melee combat, or study for months to reliably learn how to put more complex things together. The fact that the player can sit down with a book and suddenly learn how to put together engines reliably in the space of a day is therefore countered by the slightly faster skill degradation. That said as I've stated the goal is to greatly lower the skill rust rate, and have it only apply to your actual checks, not reduce your true skill rating (though you will need to work off skill rust before you can improve your actual skill scores), something that does happen in the real world (though at a reduced rate). After all I know that I certainly can't do plenty of the more stress/strain related engineering stuff, and I supposedly learned all of that only a year ago. There is a reason why continuing education is required in most professional fields after all.

[Kaitol]

To be fair, the games default time dilation sort of helps wave away mastering things so fast. One in-game day is equivalent to what, roughly a week real life? Plus the motivation of survival is probably a powerful learning incentive, and the hellish conditions wold probably improve a survivors physical stats quite quickly. So it's not immersion breaking-ly bad.

[kilakan]

As well, in a live combat life or death every day scenario, you probably WOULD become a master fighter within a couple of months 'if each day is a week I tend to get to like melee 6-7 in 10 days'...... Either that or you'd be dead and zombie food.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Also there is a thing we are not including in our calculations right now. Just throw your mind back to all of the characters you have played as who died within their first few fights. I know I have sacrificed many a character myself. Now of all characters, not just your own, what is the ratio of people who end up mastering combat when they have to do it every day for weeks and weeks (assuming the time dilation and all) and it looks less absurd. It isn't that every survivor after the apocalypse is able to master any skill they come across. It is that of say the one in a thousand that survive of those one in maybe a hundred that have the ability to master the world.

[BFEL]

The speed which our characters master things is utterly pathetic compared to the speed that the zombies do. I mean hell, they mastered cannibalism in what I assume to be a matter of minutes (don't know how long the conversion process takes)
And SOME of them even mastered things like Acid Puking and Electricity Flinging.

Cheating sons of bitches

[Eclectic Wizard]

We should all remember that we are playing a game where it takes minutes to cross a street

[scrdest]

I'd suggest a system based on repetition - you achieve a level, then it rusts down to a lower level, you re-learn, it decays slower and slower each time you reach a level until it doesn't decay at all, and the number of repeats you need to remember something permanently depends on your INT.

[Mookzen]

I'd suggest a system based on repetition - you achieve a level, then it rusts down to a lower level, you re-learn, it decays slower and slower each time you reach a level until it doesn't decay at all, and the number of repeats you need to remember something permanently depends on your INT.

This is clever, I like it.

[ed boy]

I'd suggest a system based on repetition - you achieve a level, then it rusts down to a lower level, you re-learn, it decays slower and slower each time you reach a level until it doesn't decay at all, and the number of repeats you need to remember something permanently depends on your INT.

How about this as a system?

Spoiler: system (click to show/hide)

Each skill has a small number of associated skills. For example, handguns could be related to rifles and shotguns.
Every X turns, each skill is compared to its associated skills. If skill A is higher than skill B, then some experience is (inefficiently) bled from skill A to skill B. The rate of this skill bleed increases with the difference of skill levels. Skill B may be prohibited from increasing in level, or may be limited in how high a level it can increase to in this manner.

Spoiler: implications of the system (click to show/hide)

If one tries to increase a single skill to a high level, it can increase to a high level initially, but the level drops (relatively) quickly. If the skill is increased again, the level drops again, but at a slower rate. Eventually, when a skill and its associated skills are at the same level, decay drops off entirely.
Training in one skill makes it easier to train in related skills that one would expect to have lots of overlap. Training in related skills would aid your overall skill progress. Imposing a limit on the raising of related skills would avoid becoming too adept in an unused skill.