Simplifying Skill ListsAs the list of workshops has increased over time, the list of skills has blossomed with it. However, many skills are only useful for performing one or two rare tasks, and many skills are simply unnecessarily fine-grained (e.g. Fish Dissector, which is
totally different from Fish Cleaning).
This causes problems with migrants. How many players have thrown a wave of lye-makers and bowyers under a bridge and then slammed it down in frustration? Or gotten a cheese maker who doesn't know how to milk an animal, leaving your workshop inefficient until they train up a pointless secondary skill? Or what good is it when one of your precious strange moods goes to a woodcrafter on a wood-starved map?
In this thread, I'd like us to propose ways to pare down the skills list to fix some of the above issues. To avoid a tl;dr post, I've put the reasoning in spoiler blocks above each set of proposals.
All of these skills involve cutting an animal to pieces with varying degrees of precision. The dissection labors currently only apply to 4 kinds of vermin which do not appear in all biomes, and extracts are currently useless except as trade goods and all require glass vials which may be burdensome to create in many embark locations.
Proposal 1a. Merge Animal Dissection into Butchery. Merge Fish Dissection into Fish Cleaning.
Proposal 1b. As above, but also merge Butchery and Fish Cleaning; retain separate workshops.
Producing crossbows and ammunition is a mess right now. Wooden & bone crossbows come from the bowyer's shop and use the Bowyer skill. Fletching wooden & bone ammunition requires woodcrafting & bone carving. Metal crossbows and ammo require Weaponsmithing.
Since wooden & bone crossbows are nigh useless in melee, they are often disfavored. Additionally, training up a Weaponsmith gets you better crossbows as well as better ammo, melee weapons, and trap components. The end result is that Bowyers are generally unwelcome baggage, and the Bowyer's workshop is only kept around to satisfy strange moods once forges come online.
Proposal 2a. Move all bolt-making & crossbow-making (i.e. metal) to the Bowyer skill. Move wooden & bone arrow fletching to the Bowyer's Workshop instead of the overloaded Craftsdwarf's Shop.
Proposal 2b. Eliminate the Bowyer skill and move all bow-making to Weaponsmithing. Retain the bowyer's workshop, but move arrow-making there. Leave the skill for making bolts as a craft skill.
Proposal 2c. As 2b, but eliminate the bowyer's workshop, and move all wood & bone crossbow making to the Craftsdwarf's Workshop.
Siege Engineers are good for only three things: (a) building catapults & their parts, (b) building ballistas and their parts, (c) building ballista ammo. The parts are essentially just large wooden furniture, and there's not much complexity to shaving down a tree and bolting a head on it compared to most carpentry tasks. The actual complexity of assembling a large wooden machine could be handled well by the fort's resident Mechanics.
Proposal 3. Merge Siege Engineering into Carpentry. Require Mechanics for the assembly of the parts.
When you break it down, nearly everything done by stone, wood, and bone crafters is a variation of carving with either knives, awls, or chisels. There is little reason for these to be separated as labors. Sure, material differences require some minor changes in technique, but not to the degree that a master bone carver would have no idea how to work with wood. Since all of these crafts are of similar value (except that wood is always as low as it can get and extremely useful for more important things), I don't see the value in separate skills except to make you cry wimpy, elven tears when a child exits a strange mood as a Legendary Woodcrafter.
Metal crafting and wax working also involve similar techniques of casting into molds, cleaning the final products, and then embellishing it with small tools. (Wax intermediaries are often essential to making molds.)
The potter who doesn't know how to do a simple glaze is a poor one indeed. I could see a separate skill if we were talking about ornately painted pottery, but the game only has simple tin & ash glasses to whiten or brown/green the pottery, respectively. Glazing seems like a logical extension of the pottery skill. (Side note: Painting seems like a pretty cool idea to add.)
On the other hand, weaving and tailoring are truly separate skillsets. There's a lot of overlap in making clothes from fabric and leather, but from experience, there's a lot of difference too, so I'm split on that issue. Glassblowing is just different from all the other skills.
Proposal 4. Merge Woodcrafting, Bone Carving, and Stone Crafting into Carving.
Proposal 5. Merge Metalcrafting and Wax Working into Casting.
Proposal 6. Merge Glazing into Pottery.
Proposal 7. Merge Leatherworking into Clothesmaking? (Retain separate shops.)
There's a lot of skill separation in farmers that doesn't really follow well with how a lot of farms traditionally worked, and sometimes this causes inefficiencies in workshop use.
Why would a skilled Cheese Maker know nothing about Milking (or vice versa considering milk is food in DF)?
While Shearing and Spinning are often done separately in modern times, it was very common for sheep, goat, etc. farmers to wash, comb, card, and spin wool themselves. Why not combine them?
Why are wood burning, lye making, and potash making all separate skills for a grand total of 4 products, all of which involve burning wood to ashes or beyond? (And on a related note, how is wood burning something that a furnace operator can't do, considering that the furnace operator also works the kiln for gypsum plaster and pearlash?)
The end result is that you have a lot of fine-grained skills that offer no improvement in the quality of the resulting goods that leave someone saying, "Oh, great... another High Master Milker for the suicide squad."
Proposal 8. Merge Cheese Maker and Milker into Dairy Farmer.
Proposal 9. Merge Spinner and Shearer into Wool Gathering.
Proposal 10a. Merge Potash Maker and Lye Maker into Ashery Worker. Merge Wood Burner into Furnace Operator.
Proposal 10b. Merge Potash Maker, Lye Maker,
and Wood Burner into Ashery Worker.
Pump Operating just involves turning a wheel. Pressing just involves feeding stuff into a machine and turning a crank. Even milling is a fairly simple process, with quern or millstone. All of these are basically unskilled labors operating simple, heavy machines that produce products with no quality multiplier.
Proposal 11. Merge Pump Operating, Pressing, and Milling into Machine Operator.
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Topic: Skill Consolidation (Read 7924 times)