Mending Skill Overhaul

[Cyclone35]

I'm sure we are all aware that the mending skill is not really balance in terms of progression and trying to get to lvl 5. Players have gotten the hang of avoiding danger, so their clothing rarely gets damage, not to mention how easy it is to repair your clothing. In addition, players don't feel the need to repair clothing they don't plan on wearing, your not going to enter someone's house and repair a set of sports socks you don't need. If you want to encourage players to dedicate time towards improving their mending skill, there needs to be some design changes to the system. Here are some ideas that came to mind, feel free to share some more down below.

1. XP & skill books: The amount of XP given for repairing clothes and reading skill books is too low. Its hard enough to get to lvl 2 midway through your playthrough without a skill book. To put it simply, we should acquire more XP at the start compared to what we get now. As for skill books, why exactly does it not immediately raise you to lvl 2? Meanwhile a book about fishing and revolver training gets you right up to lvl 2. The books should give you more XP since its so hard to lvl up.

2. Crafting Clothing: When you craft arrows at a workbench, it gives you XP towards archery. Wouldn't it make sense to give you mending XP when you craft clothing from animal pelts? You use a sewing kit to repair your clothing, but you also use it to craft animal clothing. Not just anyone can craft clothing on their own without practice and experience. A persons ability to craft clothing should contribute to your mending skill.

3. Repair Complexity: Each piece of clothing you repair has different values in terms of time, condition restored, and required resources (wool scarf: 30 min/1 cloth/+60% vs mariners pea coat: 2 hours/2 cloth/+30%). When you try to repair more complicated clothing, it should reward you with more XP compared to repairing weaker clothing that's easier to mend. 

These changes are designed to make it more efficient to increase your mending skill, without overly complicating the main system. 

[DavidKS]

I'm not a programmer, but all of these suggestions seem quite fair, balanced, and easy to implement. 

[hozz1235]

I guess it depends on what difficulty you play at, but I feel skill progression is almost too easy.  Sure, mending takes time.  My approach to level it is to mend the items which require the least amount of time and material because, as you said, you still get that point.  So, find a pair of cotton socks, mend it to 100% then break it down.  Rinse, Repeat.

[Lexilogo]

These are all good suggestions, but I'd like to say these are kind of symptomatic of problems with Skills as a whole, and Hinterland should really consider a Skills rework update. Maybe as part of a revised TFTFT roadmap, or as part of a 2nd Survival DLC if they want to do one, or etc.

Some examples of silly things from other skills:

• Cooking being based on individual cooked items rather than total calorie value, resulting in 0.01 weight wolf meat cookout fests
• Secondary Skills in general being an odd, vestigial feature, especially Gun Cleaning when we have three major skills devoted to firearms that it could be rolled into
• Fire Starting requires 200 total fires started to reach Level 5 which, uh, yeah, even if you are starting a fire every single day that's the better part of an in-game year, most legitimate players will only hit Level 5 by farming dozens of campfires made out of single twigs

The system is certainly functional, but could be a whole lot better than it currently is. Right now, only a handful of skills actually breed excitement for players to reach them, and many of them essentially demand players understand how to farm skillpoints in unintuitive ways, rather than serve their intended purpose of giving players exciting power rewards for how they spend their survival time.

 

[Dan_]

I'm in full agreement with the OP, and would like to add the caveat that at mending 4, your repairs always seem to have a 100% success chance when done with a sewing kit. Only when repairing the bedroll with your bare hands is when you have a 85% base chance, so I'm guessing the sewing kit and fishing tackle add the remaining % chance on top of that. I think it would make sense you could still fail at level 4, provided getting to level 5 doesn't take 400 days when playing in a more casual manner, for example, mending clothes only when they reach 70% condition, etc.

I'm in the middle of my only long term playthrough after TFTFT and I hit level 5 cooking, carcass harvesting, archery and fire starting by around day 140, without resorting to any power levelling tactics (not that I think it's wrong to use them, I did in the past and I just choose not do it lately). This was done by basically moving around, looting and killing big game once I had the bow. I don't think any of the skills are unbalanced as far as levelling progression go, mending is the lone exception.

I also would like to point out that some skills are meant to be reworked in the near future with TFTFT, so I'm anxious to see Mending changed to incorporate crafting and maybe a smithing skill introduced, with debuffs and bonuses applied when forging, etc.