Exosuit Mastery tips/tricks

[jlarner]

Does anyone have any idea what tasks contribute to Exosuit Engineer mastery?  It doesn't seem to match Gofer and Courier (even though it's in the same 'line' on the jobs board).  Gofer and Courier seem to be boosted by completing supply or storage jobs, and I can consistently gain 40+ points/cycle on dupes mastering those jobs (although I'd love to hear any suggestions which might push that to 50+).

Exosuit Engineer however, seems to get 25 points/cycle regardless of what my dupe does.  I've tried repeated storage tasks, building supply tasks, other supply tasks, operating tasks (I wondered if with the name Engineer in the title, maybe it had been coded wrongly), athletics training, sitting there idle all day, doing stuff while wearing an atmo suit.  Nothing seems to make any difference, they always get 25 points/cycle...

Any pointers/suggestions/ideas most welcome!

[WanderingKid]

All the supply jobs (Gofer, Courier, Exosuit) are based on time doing the job.  Active Experience for Supply is at the Active_Exprience_Very_Slow setting.  The specific award experience is:

In general, using gofer as a sample, you will get 10% / cycle passive experience.  That's just from being in the job.

Active experience is approximately 2.5%/ cycle for ~70% job activity (downtime/sleep/etc is the other 30%), and 5% / cycle for a dupe with supply interest.

Typically, with my dupes prioritizing supply/storage and having an interest in it, it will take 55-60 cycles to get just the exosuit engineer trained.  It is the bottleneck for any speedruns involving an astronaut.

EDIT: I should add that only the Researcher job has # of successes included in the experience gain, which is why high learning can trump research interest.  So if you're hauling stuff across the map for the entire cycle, or you setup a local system so your supply dupe does nothing but grab stuff from a receptacle and shoves it into a compactor, the time actively doing the job is all that matters, not how often it's completed.

[jlarner]

That's really interesting, but like I said, it doesn't match what I'm seeing in game. 

I've tried loading a save 6-7 times, and getting my dupe to do different activities for the whole cycle (including being idle), and his mastery gain is always exactly the same.  Have you definitely seen work activities making a difference to mastery point gain for Exosuit Engineer? If I'm right, then it always takes exactly 60 cycles for a Suppy-interest dupe to master Exosuit Engineer... If what you're saying is correct, I should be able to get the 41/42 points/cycle I can get for Gofer or Courier for Exosuit Engineer which would let me master it in under 40 cycles, and as things stand it doesn't seem to work that way.  Maybe that's a bug and I should file a report, but I'd like to know if it's just because of something I've done or if it's as widespread as 'every dupe with the Exosuit Engineer job'.

I'm not sure what you mean by 10%/cycle... is that 10 points/cycle (because I'm pretty sure it's more than that), or 10% of a level 1 job (which would be 25/cycle, and coincides exactly with I'm seeing)?  Actually, I guess that it's the latter, because you said 'using gofer as a sample'...

 

[WanderingKid]

1 hour ago, jlarner said:

I'm not sure what you mean by 10%/cycle... is that 10 points/cycle (because I'm pretty sure it's more than that), or 10% of a level 1 job (which would be 25/cycle, and coincides exactly with I'm seeing)?  Actually, I guess that it's the latter, because you said 'using gofer as a sample'...

It takes 250 xp for basic role mastery, so yes, that's the 10%/25 points / cycle.

I believe MaterialsManager is the correct active xp gain for Exosuit Engineer, not Hauler, but I'd really have to dig around for it.  I didn't strip the code, someone who does mod work was kind enough to extract the key points for the logic, so I don't have all of it.

It's certainly possible that Exosuit Engineer behaves differently, as I've never sat down with the exosuit engineer, I did most of my testing and confirmations on the Gofer level and expanded my assumptions (yeah, that word) from there.

 

[jlarner]

Looking at that code snippet again, it seems likely to me that 'Hauler' is the gofer job, and MaterialsManager is the Courier job.  I'm assuming the function is called when a storage/supply job has been completed - but that means that Exosuit Engineer isn't included.

I had a look at digging into the code myself, but I'm on a Mac, and it looks like that makes it much more difficult

[jlarner]

So, I managed to work out how to decompile my Mac code, and I've been poking around.  So far, my 'discoveries' are as follows:

- There doesn't seem to be any Workables (i.e. Dupe tasks) which give active XP towards Exosuit Engineer. You get your 25/cycle 'passive' points, and it doesn't matter what tasks you do

- Only Artists (i.e. not Art Students or Master Artists) get active XP for doing art

- Neither of the cooking jobs seem to have any way of achieving active XP either

Now, these all seem like bugs to me (and tbh I'm not sure I could actually be right), but my preliminary testing in game seems to support all of them.  Can someone verify any of the above, and stop me feel like I'm losing my mind?