Guide to Skill Grinding

wip

Tools of the trade

Books: main source as primer to start raising skills from zero as going no skill to one is nigh impossible without reference or methodic grinding, most specialized books (e.g clothing designer's portfolio) are capable of substituting missing proficiencies. Note that most of the time its easier to craft stuff from books to get there than read the book directly, especially with over 6+ skill books.

NPCs: based on their intelligence can efficient teachers, demanding teaching shit after doing a quest is fast option to grind otherwise hard to start or hard to reach skills. NPCs around can speed up craft or otherwise help with multitasking. Its a good idea to keep NPCs around as they significantly speed up construction, vehicle stuff and long term bulk crafting (in fact you can tell them to craft shit for you). Doing team tasks with npcs in reach who dont have enough skill will make them instead learn from you (solely calculated from their perception + intelligence netto ending up not so smooth when teaching a group through labor, so some npcs are slow naturally)

Fine Cutting: dissections are main method to grind weakpoints and gain medical skills. Starting off from passable (e.g x-acto) to proper (scalpel) and best (autonomous surgery scalpels). The higher quality the more you will learn, but scalpel is always enough, and rhetorically its not so difficult to find a corpse amidst the apocalypse

Morale: explained onwards in focus and traits sections, keep it high no matter what. Dissections and combat related activity will dump morale initially (except for them psychos) but after some time into the character grows indifferent to it.

Skill Level Trivia

0-2: Worthless. Guaranteed fuckup of anything complicated, shouldnt be used as crutch to get outta danger unless its getting ugly real fast. Not enough to do serious stuff but the very time you get 1 in skill its possible to make it up forth

3: "Novice" level - most professions from their spheres start with this on average, enough to maintenance stuff and through doing so to get 6 level in skills

6: "Advanced" level. Average medium for characters specializing in their sphere (e.g surgeons, engineers and militaries) Most interaction skills (e.g survival and cooking) cannot be raised over it naturally or do not have any outright useful function beyond this level

8: "Expert" level. Usually learned from a book then grinded to this level, about all endtier crafts (unless running a modded game) can be crunched from there. If you can get there, you can max the skill fully

10: "Master" level. Guaranteed success or otherwise very high odds of doing complicated tasks (e.g bionics installation). Only few books can bring it up this far and mostly its raised to this level through crafting or extensive use

10+ is unobtanium during normal play in current DDA. Older versions and BN allow to raise skills up to 20 however it serves no practical use besides getting the most juice outta combat skills and installing fourth engine at 12 mechanics

Combat

Marksmanship Always raised in tandem with weapons skill in use, usually the first skill to hit cap for gun nuts

Pistols/SMG/Rifles/Shotgun Can get up through practice panel to 3. The experience gained is based solely on range and damage done so go shoot shit and shoot shit

Launchers The sketchiest thing to raise due to atypically rare book that is best looted through malls library. Can be grinded up through practice via hard to craft novelty launcher from another rare book. Fastest option to raise is to steal water cannons outta firefighter vehicles and find a crowd of zeds to spam over for fast exp since water cannon works through crowds so one shot would be effective as five. Another option for general play exp raise is to use flamethrowers religiously as they work the very same way as water cannons do (just in opposite)

Dissections

Weakpoint
123	the thing
345	the thing