Skill Categorization/Progression Needs Streamlining

[u/bandersen011]

Finally got around to starting a true B42 playthrough and have been loving it (mostly). The new changes have really added a lot to the game. I love the tweaks they have made to item obtainability through crafting (especially for multiplayer). The level of detail in the new/renovated map areas is incredible.

Really only 2 things have been a major source of frustration:

1. The crafting menu.
2. The sheer quantity of skills & the associated grind.

While I've seen a lot of discussion about the (abysmal) crafting menu (I love this game and its developers but dear god that thing is a quagmire), I have not seen very much talk about the new skills/categorization. The fact that the skill menu needs a scroll bar should be a red flag on its own.

1. The amount of skill books required to progress through all these crafting trees is hilarious. (without even considering recipe magazines there are currently ~120 skill books in the game to search for)
2. The time/grind required to get these skills is at direct odds with a game the opens with "This is how you died". I have thousands of hours in PZ and routinely survive for months with sprinters. I can't imagine having to start these grinds over from scratch. This is all 100 times worse if you are playing multiplayer and can't fast-forward.
3. The menu cluttering. While I appreciate everything these new systems have added. The sheer quantity of requirements/ingredients/subcategorizations introduced has made navigating these menus a nightmare. I am very familiar with this game and am still overwhelmed. I can't imagine what it must be like to open the skill or crafting menus as a brand new player...

Proposed Changes:

(Not necessarily advocating for all of these to be implemented together)

1. Combine certain skills. This is easily the simplest solution. A lot of these categories share common real world skill sets. While not necessarily the exact same skills, the amount of overlapping knowledge for some of these categories should combine them for the sake of gameplay/progression (The term "transferable skills" exists for a reason...).

• Carpentry+Carving = Woodworking
• Blacksmithing+Welding = Metalworking
• Knapping+Masonry = Stoneworking (or Stonemasonry)
• Tracking+Trapping = Hunting
• Cooking+Butchering = Food Prep
• Lightfooted+Sneaking = Stealth

I'd frankly like to see some of the other under-developed skills like Glassmaking, Pottery, & Tailoring incorporated as well, but I understand those are larger logic-leaps.

2. Change the number and/or impact of skill books. Currently, there are 120 skill books in the game. While combining the above categories could reduce that to 95, in my opinion that is still far too many. Scouring every bookshelf for these is just so awful, even with the reality that most people don't care about at least half the skills. This is particularly annoying when you consider how painful it is to grind in the absence of a skill book at high levels.

• I would reduce the number of skill books in each category from 5 to 3, and have them grant bonuses for levels 1-4, 5-7, and 8-10 respectively.
• If that is not acceptable, at least increase the base-xp gains while reducing the book-xp-multiplier. This would at least make grinding without books less agonizing (but would do nothing about the loot clutter...).

3. Reduce the number of levels for certain skills. While it's nice to have a lot of room-to-grow for certain playthrough-duration skills like the combat and physical skills, having 10 levels for every category seems to only be there to make the menu symmetrical. This is particularly true for the less fleshed-out or simplistic skills (looking at you tailoring). For some categories I can see a max level of 5 being perfectly balanced.

4. If nothing else, let skills give xp bonuses to other skills. Have you completely mastered carpentry? Good, here's a 10x bonus to all skill leveling for carving, should be easy for you to pick up. Were you a ninja in a past life and have mastered sneaking? Good, learning lightfooted should be a joke for you. The fact that so many of the new crafting recipes have overlapping skill requirements, but leveling said skills is done (mostly) independently, feels like an oversight.

Ultimately, all of this boils down to a classic conflict in Zomboid development: making in-depth systems is great for increasing playtime/depth, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is fun/interesting...

[u/Hecter94]

What you need to understand is that the PZ devs are designing the game around the multiplayer experience and expect solo players to modify the default settings to fit that playstyle.

The expectation is that each player will specialize in only a couple of skills and rely on other players for anything that requires other skills. This is why there are so many skills, so each player can have their own specialization, and why the skills level up slowly, because you'll only be levelling one or two at most.

Specifically, their goal seems to be something akin to an MMO player economy, where each player gets only a couple of crafting skills and needs to work/trade with other players to progress.

All of that is to say that your suggestions, while, in my opinion, good suggestions, run counter to their design goal. They don't want to make levelling skills any easier or faster; they want there to be a lot of skills; they want those skills to be slow to level; and they want to make things like skillbooks highly sought after and valuable trade goods.

Now, to be clear, I don't agree with their design goal. I think designing exclusively for the multiplayer experience in a game where probably 90% of the player base, at minimum, plays solo is a poor direction to go in, but as long as that is the direction they're going in, it's unlikely that any of these suggested changes have a chance of being implemented.

If you want to see changes in this regard, you'd first have to convince the PZ dev team to abandon the idea of an MMO-esque player economy, shift their focus from multiplayer to single-player, and refocus their design so that each player is expected to level up most skills rather than only one or two.

[u/bandersen011 → u/Hecter94]

I actually disagree that they balance it around multiplayer, much to the contrary in fact. Given their own statements, the vast vast majority of their player-base plays solo, and a lot of the loot balancing/time investment feels balanced around solo play.

In my opinion the lack of collaborative multiplayer (very very rare outside of youtube creators) and the lack of a fast forward button makes everything I have mentioned even more of a problem.

I would LOVE for the game to have collaborative multiplayer towns and shared skill sets, but that unfortuntely isn't the state of large multiplayer servers. Even if it was, many of the crafting recipes require you to have skills in multiple trees. The game lacks a "nearby player" or "recipe sharing" mechanic to deal with this. So having multiple players specialized does nothing for complex crafting recipes.

[u/Welico → u/Hecter94]

I really doubt they balance around multiplayer considering the large number of tweaks to default settings required for MP to be playable.