Talented

Get more out of those hard-earned skill points.

You have swung that axe ten thousand times. You have mined until your arms ached and cooked enough to feed a village. So why does the tree still give you three logs, the same as it did on your very first morning?

Talented makes the climb pay. The levels you have already earned start being worth something, and they keep paying more the higher you go.

As the numbers climb, you'll be rewarded with:

• Bigger hauls: chopping, mining and fighting all start giving more as the skill climbs
• Better crafts: gear that comes out a cut above, and an upgrade bench that stops eating it
• Food worth cooking: a good cook's meals hold their best instead of fading from the first bite
• Farms worth planting: put down whole patches at once, neatly spaced, eventually anywhere
• A base that lasts: fires that never need feeding and walls the rain stops chewing on
• Death with dignity: lose progress in what you fight with, not in everything you have built
• Pathfinding: a brand new skill for the ones who would rather see what is over the next ridge

Every number in it is yours to change, and the defaults are the way it is meant to be played.

Extra drops

As a skill climbs you earn extra drops from what that skill is used on: another handful of wood from a tree, another swing's worth from a rock, more off a kill.

You earn them at even steps up the skill, and how many you have at skill 100 is yours to set. Chopping, mining and fighting each have their own number, so you can be generous with one and leave another alone.

The climb to each one comes in two halves. The first half pays nothing. You are still learning it. In the second half the next extra starts arriving early, seldom at first and nearly every time by the point you have earned it outright.

So with the setting at 4: nothing until skill 12, then an extra now and again from 13, more and more often through the twenties, and from 25 on it is every time, while you start working toward the second.

A green swirl marks the early ones. The extras you have earned outright arrive quietly, so what you are seeing is a roll that turned up before you were owed it.

A notice marks the ones you earn outright. Reaching the level where the next extra is yours every time arrives on a card, so the level the swirl stops appearing at is the level you are told about.

Woodcutting says it twice, because felling a tree and cutting up what fell are counted apart. A standing trunk drops no wood, so each has its own levels and its own words.

By default a kill pays 4, a felled trunk 6, logs and small trees 2, and a mined rock 4. Boss drops are left out unless you turn them on.

Being told

Most of what a skill gives you here is quiet by nature. Rain stops marking your walls, a fire stops asking for fuel, a patch gets a row longer. None of it announces itself, and a reward nobody notices is not much of a reward, so the game says when it happens.

The big ones take the middle of the screen. Something you could not do before and will not unlock again. Once each, per character.

The rest arrive on a card. More of what you already had, which comes in threes and fours and sixes: another bonus roll, another planting shape.

If a death takes a level back and you climb to it again, the big one arrives on a card too, since by then you know.

Death penalty

A death takes points off every skill you have. Talented limits that to the skills you fight with, so what you built, cooked, farmed and sailed for survives untouched.

talented_skills in the console lists every skill by name, which is what you need if you want to spare more of them.

Farming

Crop snapping

From Farming 10, crops snap to an even grid set by the first one you plant. Rows stay square and evenly spaced however fast you place them, and a field you come back to later lines up with what is already there.

Multi-planting

From Farming 15 you plant more than one at a time, and the patch grows as you level. The two sides unlock separately. The long side comes at 15, 35 and 60 and the short side at 25, 50 and 80, so the patch goes 2x1, 2x2, 3x2, 3x3, 4x3 and finally 4x4.

Hold Alt and scroll to cycle the layout pattern before you place.

Every plant beyond the one under your cursor costs reduced stamina, 75% of a normal planting by default, so a full patch is cheaper than placing each seed by hand.

Any biome

From Farming 60, your crops will take anywhere.

Cooking

Food plateau

Food normally starts losing value the moment you eat it. Food cooked by a skilled cook holds its full value for a stretch first, and only then begins to fade.

How long depends on the cook. At Cooking 100 it is 75% of the food's duration. A 30 minute meal stays at full strength for 22 of them. At Cooking 50 it is half that, 11 minutes.

The food HUD tints a meal green while it is still at full value, so you can see at a glance what is still working and what is on the way down.

Stacking cooked food

Each piece of food remembers the skill of whoever cooked it. Stack a batch from a lower level in with a better one and the stack is worth the average, weighted by how many of each went in, so topping up a good stack with poor food waters it down.

Turn Stack Foods off if you would rather keep every batch separate.

talented_food in the console prints what you are carrying and what each piece is currently worth.

Crafting

Exceptional crafts

A weapon, tool or piece of armour sometimes comes out one quality level higher than you asked for, whether you crafted it fresh or upgraded it. You still need a workbench good enough to have made that quality.

The chance scales with your skill, reaching 25% at Crafting 100, so roughly 12% at 50.

Weather-proof building

Rain darkens and wears down what you build. From Crafting 30, the pieces you put up stop weathering at all.

Every piece remembers the skill it was built at, and a swing of the hammer brings it up to what you know now. An old base is repaired into shape rather than torn down.

Infinite fires

From Crafting 15, the fires you place burn without being fed.

Ovens and hot tubs are excluded by default, since their fuel is part of what they are for, and the exclusion list is yours to edit. Fires carry the same mark as everything else you have built, so the hammer brings an older one up to date as well.

Tending a station

Loading a smelter, kiln, furnace, refinery, windmill or spinning wheel raises your Crafting skill, the way loading an oven raises Cooking. Both halves count, the ore and the fuel, and each one is worth about four fifths of an ordinary craft.

Collecting what comes out pays nothing, same as taking bread off an oven.

The Forge of Potential

The upgrade station can destroy what you put into it. Crafting skill buys that off in two stages.

First the risk goes. The chance of destroying the item falls away as you climb, reaching zero at Crafting 40.

Then the odds improve. From there on a clean success gets steadily more likely, up to 30 percentage points better by Crafting 100.

Pathfinding

A new skill, raised by going places.

How it climbs

Uncovering map raises it constantly and by a little. Finding something raises it more, and the rarer the find the more it pays:

Everything pays once. Reading the same runestone twice is worth nothing the second time, and somewhere you have already been is worth nothing to walk past again. It is tracked per character and per world, so a new character in the same world earns all of it afresh.

When you reach somewhere, a card names it.

What it pays back

You reveal a larger portion of the fog of war. The radius grows from 50 metres at Pathfinding 0 to 150 at 100.

Your ship sails faster, up to 25% at Pathfinding 100. The speed of the boat is based on the Pathfinding skill of whoever is steering it.

What you pick up underground pays more, and how depends on what you picked up.

A single thing goes by the same steps and the same swirl as the extra drops above, up to 2 more at Pathfinding 100.

A stack pays a share of itself, growing to 100% at Pathfinding 100 and rounded down. A stack of five starts paying one more at Pathfinding 20 and a stack of four at 25, so the bigger the find, the earlier it starts paying you for it. The swirl marks every one that pays; a pile too small for the level you are at pays nothing and shows nothing.

Picking things up out in the world is unaffected, and so are the creatures down there.

Turning it off

This one is a one-way door. Every other setting in Talented can be switched back. Switching Pathfinding off removes the skill from the game, and a skill the game has not been told about is dropped from your character the next time it saves. Whatever level you had reached is gone for good, and the rewards go with it.

The switch takes effect when the game next starts. Thrown while you are playing, the skill stops gaining and stops paying straight away, and it disappears at the next launch.

What is coming

Talented is still being built. Nothing below is promised and none of it has a date, but it is the direction:

• Weapon-based abilities: skill with a weapon doing something more interesting than damage
• More for the gatherers: the quieter skills getting a payoff of their own
• Wild growth: a reason to care about what is already growing out there

Settings

All of these live in dwarfhavengames.talented.cfg, grouped the way the in-game config manager shows them. Nothing here needs touching to play. The defaults are the intended experience, and most of the numbers are there for people who want a different pace.

Combat Drops

Death Penalty

Woodcutting Drops

Mining Drops

Planting

Cooking

Crafting

Forge of Potential

Pathfinding

Debug