Investigating the Attribute XP System

[bobucles]

I've been playing around with the skill stats and progress mod, which is a fantastic little debug tool. It lists all the hidden XP levels for a duplicant's skills, including the XP needed to level up the attribute. I've learned a few things about skills, and confirmed a few things that the forums have known for quite some time.

- Attribute gains seem to be time based, the more time spent on a task, the more XP gained. For example Jean is a novice mechanic and got 160XP from using the rock crusher. Rowan was an expert mechanic and got 104 XP because he was faster.

- Attributes gained through skill points do not change the XP required to level up. However if the dupe is working faster, they'll have fewer opportunities to gain XP.

- Attributes gained or lost through special traits similarly do not change XP needs. So buffs like twinkletoes are fantastic, while weaknesses like anemic are very bad.

- Attribute bonuses from interests DO count as inherent level ups, so you may start at skill lvl 7 but have to pay a steep XP price to reach level 8. Bummer.

- Supplying does not generate XP so watering farms, storing food etc. are dead end jobs. Leave it up to autosweepers.

- Hamster wheels provide both athletics and machinery training.

- Toilets and mopping provide strength training.

- Critter ranching does not generate XP, which seems like a pretty serious oversight. For now, +7 ranching interest seems the best option.

- Science skill does increase attribute XP gain. One smart duplicant got 88XP while a dumdum got 47XP from doing the same research.

 

It appears that science is absolutely, positively, the most important interest and trait for a duplicant. Other interests may have more immediate utility in the early game, but more XP snowballs into better everything. 

[mathmanican]

So +7 Researcher +3 Quick Learning is the boss.

[bmilohill]

3 hours ago, bobucles said:

- Toilets provide strength training.

Going to do my best to not make a joke

[Slvrsrfr]

this.good.ty!

[Yunru]

8 hours ago, bobucles said:

Critter ranching does not generate XP, which seems like a pretty serious oversight. For now, +7 ranching interest seems the best option.

From what I've read egg serenading does, but only egg serenading.

[bobucles]

From a quick test it looks like plant harvesting and the farm station provides agri XP, but applying the farmer's touch gives machine XP. I will not claim to understand it.

[Daxterr]

I've played 1000+ hours, and I didn't know half this ****. Thanks!

 

Edit: oops I didn't mean to quote anything. Fixed.

[nakomaru]

7 hours ago, mathmanican said:

So +7 Researcher +3 Quick Learning is the boss.

Quick learning was my preferred trait for a while, but if you play for a long time, quick learning over e.g buff means you have a cap of 23 learning instead of 23 strength.

You're going to cap whatever you train in the end (except impossible to cap ones) so traits allowing you to exceed 20 should be part of the consideration.

+7 also means you have only one interest and are getting up to +3 morale from interests rather than up to +9.

Just some thoughts for considering your ideal dupes. Buff and 3 good interests (e.g. research, tidying, operating) are ideal for me.

[FantasticMoose]

57 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Just some thoughts for considering your ideal dupes. Buff and 3 good interests (e.g. research, tidying, operating) are ideal for me.

It's worth noting that Tidying is just a bad Supplying though.

2 Morale worth of skills in both and suplying gives strenght, carry cap AND access to suit wearing.

1-2 dupes with tidying for emptying pipes is handy.
Everybody needs supply into suits though.

Tidy needs a buff.

[nakomaru]

32 minutes ago, FantasticMoose said:

It's worth noting that Tidying is just a bad Supplying though.

Yes, but for me they are equal. All of my dupes will have all researching, supplying, operating and tidying skills. All four of those are what I consider "good" interests. In addition, I will consider one decorating and one digging interest in the colony.

[FantasticMoose]

11 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Yes, but for me they are equal. All of my dupes will have all researching, supplying, operating and tidying skills. All four of those are what I consider "good" interests. In addition, I will consider one decorating and one digging interest in the colony.

As long as supplying gives carry cap on top of strenght they can't be equal though.
Unless you mean in the sense of the childbeggar from india being equal to the queen of england because they are both human.

Eventually all dupes will have all skills, this does not make the skills equal in any sense.
What really matters is what you pick up first.
+2 strength or +2 strength , 400 carry cap, closer to suit wearing.
One of those is litterally strictly better.

Also, digging gives 3 morale opposed to tidy/supplys 2, so this I don't follow at all.
When we're at the point where we're considering things after we picked them up, digging is "best" in the sense it gives +3 morale, and other stuff might only give +2.

[nakomaru]

I guess I should repeat myself. Yes, one is strictly better. But for my evaluation of them when considering what interests I will accept from the selection, they are just as good as each other. That is because all four of my "good interests" are always on all of my dupes. My dupes do not have all skills even in the extreme late game so not everything is good in my evaluation.

If we are buffing skills, I would look at something like construction first, something I have never trained since the new system was introduced.

33 minutes ago, FantasticMoose said:

Also, digging gives 3 morale opposed to tidy/supplys 2, so this I don't follow at all.
When we're at the point where we're considering things after we picked them up, digging is "best" in the sense it gives +3 morale, and other stuff might only give +2.

Digging gives a total of -3 morale when trained with interest. I don't need digging after I have dug out the whole map, but for the purpose of progressing through the game I will take up to 1 digging interest in my colony.

It seems you have confused my personal evaluations of skills which are necessarily dependent on playstyle as universal edicts.

[FantasticMoose]

I just don't understand why you consider tidy equal to supply, so I'm trying to pick your brain to figure out if you're seeing something I'm not.
I do love carry cap in any form, but i consider the tidy skill points too expensive compared to getting more suits or time reducing skills.
Sure, when I'm done giving dupes everything relevant for what they do, I will default to tidy because of the strenght. If I had the option though i'd default to athletics, so that's not even a great selling point, it's more a "nothing else to pick up".

I hardly ever pick it up in my colonies. On my current arboria run I think I might have made 2 or 3 plumbers in my 24 dupes.
On the other hand I have 22 people in suitwearing (which means supply) and 2 more skilling towards it.

Ed: And yeah building needs a buff.
I still pick it up as a time saver though, before picking up tidy.
Construction with refined metals and other advanced materials should be gated behind building.

[nakomaru]

19 minutes ago, FantasticMoose said:

I just don't understand why you consider tidy equal to supply, so I'm trying to pick your brain to figure out if you're seeing something I'm not.

It seems I play very differently from most people. I only ever play with 3 active dupes on 10x speed. I'm currently on cycle 17161. The early game goes by extremely quickly. So, while supplying is more ideal than tidying, in the end it's not much a time difference between when all my dupes have one but not the other. Accepting tidying is an almost imperceptible sacrifice for me for saving a little time on rerolling, even though I use an AHK script to do it for me.

Only one digging as I edited above is because once I dig out the asteroid I don't need digging anymore, so I untrain it. Until then it's very useful but only 1/3rd of my dupes having it is enough except for big projects. Similarly with decorating.

[FantasticMoose]

10 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

It seems I play very differently from most people. I only ever play with 3 active dupes on 10x speed. I'm currently on cycle 17161. The early game goes by extremely quickly. So, while supplying is more ideal than tidying, in the end it's not much a time difference between when all my dupes have one but not the other. Accepting tidying is an almost imperceptible sacrifice for me for saving a little time on rerolling, even though I use an AHK script to do it for me.

Only one digging as I edited above is because once I dig out the asteroid I don't need digging anymore, so I untrain it. Until then it's very useful but only 1/3rd of my dupes having it is enough. Similarly with decorating.

And here I am around cycle 120 with 24 dupes considering wether I've been to slow to get ready to head topside.
Yeah, I see how that does change the perspective somewhat.

I'll concur on the decorator being amongst lowest picks though.
At 24 dupes I have 2 with artistic interests, and I'm considering retraining one.
Got 9 superduperhards as I'm not even close to done with the digging yet.

How do you prevent dupes from killing themselves at speed x10?
Are you just really careful with orders or do you have catlike reflexes or something?

Ed: I'm assuming stupid amounts of automation and stuff like that for the lategame, but isn't the early game like a huge grind of watching research and digging being done?
I guess x10 speed helps a ton here.

[nakomaru]

27 minutes ago, FantasticMoose said:

How do you prevent dupes from killing themselves at speed x10?

Well, I didn't say they always live >_>

If something happens it's usually because they didn't have a ladder, or because they refuse to dig themselves out of a place that has tile+dig order scheduled when they could just dig to free themselves.

It's a bit slow, but the safest and easiest to assign excavation technique for me is to just build solid rows of ladders every 3 tiles with the local rock, with dig orders in between. When they are done you can deconstruct them easily one row at a time from the top.

When going up or down, I build a solid vertical ladder before any digging. If you want them to do less work but you to do more work, you can assign an S pattern digging around the ladder too, but I tend to just wait (easier at superspeed).

27 minutes ago, FantasticMoose said:

Ed: I'm assuming stupid amounts of automation and stuff like that for the lategame, but isn't the early game like a huge grind of watching research and digging being done?
I guess x10 speed helps a ton here.

Yes, exactly so. I do not like the low framerates that happen when I try to build high population colonies, so I changed my playstyle to accommodate high performance. Which meant 3 dupes. Which meant high game speed. It's no problem, and in fact better than 3x with high populations in some cases such as building a ladder straight up. Currently 60fps at 3x, 47fps at 10x.

Plus, many things such as planetary mass and geyser output and wild plant production are only dependent on time which is a solid win for low pop high speed.

[FantasticMoose]

1 minute ago, nakomaru said:

Well, I didn't say they always live >_>

If something happens it's usually because they didn't have a ladder, or because they refuse to dig themselves out of a place that has tile+dig order scheduled when they could just dig to free themselves.

It's a bit slow, but the safest and easiest to assign excavation technique for me is to just build solid rows of ladders every 3 tiles with the local rock. with dig orders in between. When they are done you can deconstruct them easily one row at a time from the top.

When going up or down, I build a solid vertical ladder before any digging. If you want them to do less work but you to do more work, you can assign an S pattern digging around the ladder too, but I tend to just wait (easier at superspeed).

Same procedures as me it seems.
I never bother with the S digs though I just prio 6 the ladders.
But yeah somehow Turner will end up on that ledge you didn't notice in the caustic Biome and suffocate to death.

Stuff must be going really slow at 3 dupes though.
I'm just itching to go to 32 dupes in my current colony, as I could use a bit more speed and my SPOM is 4x anyways.

Actually I'm only at 23 dupes and at cycle 140, so I'm even more behind than I remembered.

That or I have a corpse to find somewhere.

[Red Shark]

On 8/12/2019 at 5:50 PM, Yunru said:

From what I've read egg serenading does, but only egg serenading.

I think they buffed the XP it gives too. I have a Carnivore-achieved colony from one of the Launch Updates. @ Cycle 100 my ranch dupes have:

- Leira: +2 Skill
- Meep: +2 Skill
- Ari: +2 Skill
- Ashkan: +1 Skill
- Ellie: +1 Skill

vs. my Post Launch game (with ~20% less eggs / lullabies), since my dupes ate BBQ instead of raw meat)

- Catalina: +4 Skill
- Max: +1 Skill
- Frankie: +4 Skill

But I only observed skill-up messages from lullabies, never grooming. (Which I think we already knew)