I didn't change any of the generic talents as I feel they are all good and unique for their respective talent point requirements, when/if I get to other classes this will change. (I'm looking at you engineer and security)


Onto the talent trees, starting from the left: The Grayshirt tree in my honest opinion, kinda sucks. The tree is all about dying... which is kind of lame and makes it least appealing in vanilla I feel, so this one has been overhauled the most, being changed to a tree that focuses more on surviving scenarios you shouldn't of: "Survivalist". Keeping some of the aspects of grayshirt while in general making assistant harder to kill.
The first talent choice Tis' But a Scratch is a very slow passive healing, which I made the earlier talent as its relevancy fades as you get more disposable medicine, while you can technically combine this will a later talent "Play Dead" to maybe survive death, the healing rate wont outheal heavy bleeding and will still take a very long time to bring you up again.
Next up we have the more "nature lover" talents. Starting with Beast Tamer, the Petraptors are a cool concept but not actually that strong, so I've moved them down from a final talent choice to here, if you have ever actually seen one in action, you'll know they die pretty quickly in real fights, so I elected to give a friendly version of Watchers Gaze to them, by making nearby petraptors gain double the health, effectively reducing damage by half, this sounds really strong but it really isn't from my testing, they still struggle in duos to even take down a single raptor and survive.
But if you want to break the plant economy, we have Green Thumb as an alternative, originally I wanted this to just boost plant growth by 100%, but I couldn't seemingly do that with xml, so I switched it to free fertilizer, which does double the plant growth and doubles the production rate of drops. This on it's own while can be strong if you are the kind of person to spam 40 planters next to each other, is a bit lame if you dont do that, so as a bonus I added the wild plants being deconstructed giving double output occasionally.

Now onto the meaty talents that truly help you survive. Still Kicking can be extremely strong if you can keep yourself out of deep bleedout, effectively giving you 25% more health to play with before going down, but isn't quite the same as 25% more health, as your true bleedout health is now 75% of what it used to be, but still this has the power to save you in a lot of fights if you have a quickhand with meds.
Play Dead on the other hand is another talent that can be extremely strong in a good circumstance, this lets you effectively become immune to creatures as long as your finger can handle ragdolling, combine this with some passive healing options such as zealot robes, symbiosis or matriarch genes, and as long as you don't get too cocky you are practically invincible and able to recover from fights again and again.

Finally to solidfy not wanting to die, we have the What Doesn't Kill You talent, giving you a respectable 20% more health to work with similar to "Example of Health" from the medics tier 1 talents which on it's own is good but not very exciting as a final talent. So to give a bit more flare to this one, it also gives you that additional vigor on hit, almost identical to a low level Mollusc genes. This means the longer you stay in a fight, the tougher you become (Ignoring the giant gaping hole with blood pouring out), there is a cap on this similar to Mollusc genes though, that attacks that deal less than 5 damage don't trigger it (Yeah I bet you didn't know that either, I only found that out from making this mod).



Next up is the least changed talent tree, Apprenticeship, most of the talents on here seem pretty okay, focusing on buffing your crew/skills. The obvious red flag is one which my changes will likely be controversial for. Graduation Ceremony, currently as it stands, since the Mind Wipe item was added with little thought into how it would affect existing talents, it has made this talent undeniably over powered and by virtue the only choice you should be choosing instead of the other trees.
While I'd rather have the additional talents from it be resettable so players can change their mind, I have settled with making it a one time choice in this mod, otherwise every other tree and class loses a lot of value, why go down the other two trees if you can gain 6 talents from a Mind Wipe basically. (I know that now Mind Wipe does stack penalty in points, but it still takes many uses for this to be a problem, I think that was a bandaid fix to a poorly planned talent resetting system where talents were not previously designed with being reset in mind.)



Finally the fun one, the Clown tree. For the most part I've kept the general theme of the talents intact, most however did need some work: Water Prankster, unlocks a clown diving mask, well clowns aren't immune to pressure anymore so while this is funny, it's not very helpful, so I've created a frankly not that strong but stylish clown diving suit to unlock via this talent too.
Alongside this, previously there was no other choice aside from Water Prankster. We cant have that now can we, so I added Performance Artist, a talent focusing on a more buff style clown who can use different instruments to give long lasting buffs to nearby crewmates, giving a nice use for those instruments laying around.

Onto the talents below those two, starting with Chonky Honks, this sucks in vanilla, a 50% chance for a 1 second stun is so unreliabe and I wouldn't say fun either, so I've changed it to firstly be guaranteed but on a 10 second cooldown, but also to be 4 seconds and send creatures flying backwards, making it a useful thing to whip out ocassionally before returning to an actual weapon.
But that is a more defensive talent I'd say, the alternative is the more offensive Psycho Clown, which I only mildly changed, being constantly insane is a bit mind numbing, so all I have added to it, is the potential to slowly rise your psychosis by attacking things with melee, you can still instantly reach 150% attack speed by going insane prior to fights. But now you have this option too.

Finally True Potential, this one has now been split into two, no other class has 2 final choices, so I thought it would be fun to have the Clown be the one to break this tradition, with two differing types of clowns, The Naughty, and The Nice.
True Potential - Naughty was mainly designed as a bit of a trollish one, while still providing the ability to shut down enemies via non lethal stunlocking, this on it's own isn't a super appealing final talent option, so I thought in character with a devious type of clown, giving them resistance to stun on first hit would let them get away with pranks easier while providing utility in non annoying crewmate encounters too.
True Potential - Nice is a slightly reworked version of the vanilla true potential, giving a unique affliction instead of combat stimulant for two reasons. Numero 1: In vanilla while it says "revives" it was added before they made adrenaline rush, so it doesn't truly wake up unconscious players, instead it gives them absurd oxygen low removal. So this new affliction instead gives the AlwaysStayConscious tag for the duration allowing for some clutch plays. Numero 2, while uncommon, did you know vanilla true potential sets your combat stimulant value to 15? What that actually means is if someone already was under the effects of say, 75 combat stimulant from a fresh dose, you've just lost 60 combat stimulant. Oustanding right, so by making it its own affliction, this doesn't happen too. This is a straight upgrade to vanilla though so to balance it out, I made it so you cant spam this effect on crewmates, giving each person a 60 second cooldown, which should still return them to a more stable condition but wont heal them entirely on it's own by spamming toyhammer on them.
I also decided to reward players for picking the more team beneficial talent by giving the additional effect of giving yourself Encore! for a self revival at 50% bleedout. Letting you potentially clutch a very bad situation.
As for why I removed the Funbringer (Clown exosuit) recipe, I've always felt it detracts from the clown quest reward to have it not be unique.