PLEASE FIX MENDING!!!!!!!!!!!

[Bigfatcat999]

I have spent 140 game days looting everywhere with the specific intent to get my mending up to 5 and only at 4.9. Looted Milton, broken railroad, Mystery Lake, got the clothing prepper's cache, Old Spence Homestead, and it feels like the gap between 4 and 5 is 20% too wide.

[ManicManiac]

I don't think there is really anything to fix.
Mending is going to increase as you survive, to speed things along you can make "unnecessary" repairs (if you don't mind wasting cloth).
Skill books speed this up too.

[ajb1978]

20 minutes ago, ManicManiac said:

I don't think there is really anything to fix.

It's not really "broken" per se, it's just heavily out of balance with every other skill in the game.  Cooking, carcass harvesting, rifle, revolver, bow, firestarting, ice fishing...you can get them all up to level 5 fairly quickly.  Heck I have an on again off again Interloper game that's on day I think 70, and I've already got level 5 firestarting, carcass harvesting, archery, cooking, and level 3 fishing.  Mending is still stuck at level 2, and the rate I'm going likely will still be at level 2 up until maybe day 300 or beyond.  If I play that long.

[ManicManiac]

12 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

it's just heavily out of balance with every other skill in the game.

Perhaps, though if we have a sewing kit (with its "tool" bonus) I think the odds of any clothing repair are something like 95-100% (I don't remember exactly) by level 3.  Beyond that the other two levels are really just about saving time... or boosting the "base chance" which is useful after we wear out all of our sewing kits and we have to resort to Fishing Tackle.   

I think given those two factors... the slow progression to level 5 (I think) works out fine. 

Edited September 6, 2020 by ManicManiac

[ajb1978]

12 minutes ago, ManicManiac said:

we wear out all of our sewing kits and we have to resort to Fishing Tackle.   

Off topic, but funny thing is I prefer fishing tackle over sewing kits.  The line is going to snap while fishing sooner or later.  May as well get a few free repairs out of it before it does!

[ManicManiac]

7 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

prefer fishing tackle over sewing kits

Agreed.  I like to use the fishing tackle from mending, and wear it down to about 10%.  After that then I'll dedicated it to fishing (since the condition doesn't factor into the chance of the line breaking.  I really only use the sewing kits until I reach level 4 (just because of the aforementioned boost to the mending chance of success for the lower levels).

I think that getting the most out of fishing tackle, before it snaps due to fishing, is definitely the wiser long term strategy.

Edited September 6, 2020 by ManicManiac

[Patriot]

I don't see mending as broken. If anything being able to use the fishing hook to sew with until it is nearly all used up and then fish with it as though it were at 100% is broken. I'm not gonna complain about that though.

[ToAsT]

On 9/5/2020 at 3:34 PM, Bigfatcat999 said:

I have spent 140 game days looting everywhere with the specific intent to get my mending up to 5 and only at 4.9. Looted Milton, broken railroad, Mystery Lake, got the clothing prepper's cache, Old Spence Homestead, and it feels like the gap between 4 and 5 is 20% too wide.

I have to agree. Even with tons and tons of unnecessary repairs, I went through an absurd amount of cloth, sewing kits, fishing tackle across multiple regions just to get to Level 5 Mending. I believe it took me about 180 days (with the last 30 days or so being me specifically focusing on repairs every day rather than actually "playing" the game). At the very least, they should include skill increases when you craft clothing, since you're essentially using the same skill. Perhaps for every hour spent crafting, you get 1 point in Mending.

Edited September 8, 2020 by ToAsT

[Patriot]

1 hour ago, ToAsT said:

I have to agree. Even with tons and tons of unnecessary repairs, I went through an absurd amount of cloth, sewing kits, fishing tackle across multiple regions just to get to Level 5 Mending. I believe it took me about 180 days (with the last 30 days or so being me specifically focusing on repairs every day rather than actually "playing" the game). At the very least, they should include skill increases when you craft clothing, since you're essentially using the same skill. Perhaps for every hour spent crafting, you get 1 point in Mending.

How easy do you believe it to be to master a skill? You become a master chef, a master butcher, a master archer, gunman, etc... all in relatively short order. The fella is a veritable genius. So mastering the art of mending in only 100-200 days is not unreasonable.

[Dr. S.]

The mending skill is definitely broken from a game-play perspective, in a number of ways.

First, unlike the other skills, progressing through mending is almost completely irrelevant (unless you're specifically trying for skilled survivor). That's because the tools required (cloth or pelts, sewing kits, fishing tackle) are plentiful, and most players mend in their downtime, when they are stuck indoors anyway due to bad weather. So the benefits (shorter mending times, lower failure rate, higher percentage increase in repair) don't matter. If my survivors were stuck at mending 1 for an entire run, I wouldn't care. That's different than every other skill.

Second, if you do want to get to mending level 5 in anything like a reasonable time, you have to devote yourself to mending in a way that's counterproductive. When I did skilled survivor, I started thinking I would mend anything that got below 90%. This quickly turned into 95%, then 97%, then 99%. That still wasn't enough, so I went around (as ToAsT apparently did) finding old clothes, mending them to 100%, then immediately harvesting them for cloth to mend more old clothes that could then be harvested. Repeat. Even that took a long time. If I had kept to my usual schedule of mending (mending only worn items, when they get to around 75%), it would have easily taken well over 1000 days to get to mending 5. (You have to mend 500 times just to get from level 3 to level 5!) No other skill in the game is like that.

[Patriot]

43 minutes ago, Dr. S. said:

If I had kept to my usual schedule of mending (mending only worn items, when they get to around 75%), it would have easily taken well over 1000 days to get to mending 5. (You have to mend 500 times just to get from level 3 to level 5!) No other skill in the game is like that.

This is GREATLY exaggerated. I too would mend any clothing I found and would then harvest it. However I didn't spend every day doing that I'd often do it when I needed to warm up, but didn't need to sleep. I got to 5 casually keeping it mind at around 130 days.

[Dr. S.]

Oh, I misinterpreted the wikipedia page on mending. It only takes 275 mends to go from level 3 to level 5. Still, that's well over 130 days, unless you are mending two items per day. Even mending one item every other in-game day (which is a lot!), it's over 500 days.

[Patriot]

Well I've only played the game for 300 days. I'm very close to certain it was around day 130 when I finally got level 5 in mending.  Still even if it had taken me 300 days, which i'm certain it did not. That is still 200 days sooner than you're now proposing. On Interloper I suppose 300 days might be the case because of having more scarce resources, but there are a plethora of clothes that can be mended on any other difficulty. Which likely does amount to mending more than a single item a day if you were to average it out.

 

Correction I'm certain it averages to more than 1 a day since I had doubtless mended items far more than 130 times. Sometimes 1 item requires 1-3 mends for a single item. 

Edited September 8, 2020 by Patriot

[ToAsT]

On 9/8/2020 at 1:59 AM, Patriot said:

How easy do you believe it to be to master a skill? You become a master chef, a master butcher, a master archer, gunman, etc... all in relatively short order. The fella is a veritable genius. So mastering the art of mending in only 100-200 days is not unreasonable.

The problem is that improving your mending skill is vastly out of proportion to the other skills in the game, and it requires finite resources to accomplish. I wouldn't consider warming up some tea or coffee in hot water to reasonably improve my cooking skill, but it does. Fire starting, harvesting, gunsmithing, and most of the other skills can be mastered with focused practice within a few weeks of game time, if that. Why should mending clothing be any different?

What's unreasonable is that they don't include crafting clothing from animal hides and guts to be a similar enough task to improve your mending skill.

[Patriot]

3 hours ago, ToAsT said:

What's unreasonable is that they don't include crafting clothing from animal hides and guts to be a similar enough task to improve your mending skill.

I never took note of that, but assuming that's the case that'd be a reasonable complaint.

[odizzido]

I don't think I've ever gotten mending past level two or three. Practicing the skill doesn't help you in any realistic way.

[UTC-10]

Crafting has a base 100% success rate while mending has a potential of failure, with loss of the mending materials, at lower skill levels.  They have different purposes.  Whether or not they interconnect for the purpose of mending skill was the prerogative of the developers.