Hey just realised this is a far better place to post. I think you may want to consider a different weighting system if you want these to be in line with the vanilla professions. Currently this patch has actually made it far less balanced imo. Which it totally cool if thats the idea! I just think that you should think about how useless this makes the vanilla professions and how much better they are. Imo the best idea for weapon skills as an example is to weight them at around 2 points for the first 2 levels than 3 for the next levels and so on. Also for fitness and strength they should be around 3 points for first point in each skill and 2 points for subsequent points with a cap of 3 points in one stat without traits meaning you would still need to take fit to get ten in a stat. Im using the traits baseball player(+1 long blunt) and fit/athletic/stout/strong to weight these by dividing their cost by 2. This is just a basic idea and the math probably isnt correct at all but the basis is imo. It makes it better by a good amount than using traits and keeps identity for profession intact while also being more balanced. IF you want it to be in line with vanilla the idea is to find a formula that works for transferring the current unemployed class the classes we have currently and applying that formula in creating new classes. Im sorry if this is unwanted criticism it just seems from the description you do want these to be balanced.

random choosing cause infinity lag

Thanks Chackaldane, I was just reading your post in the other thread - I played around a lot with the numbers while trying to best decypher the vanilla logic, which as far as I can tell, is just hard-set. I mainly had to adjust some things downwards because soldier had -33 cost and I don't think there are enough points in the game to balance it out!

I will continue adjusting the numbers today and see if I can get some better numbers! I see exactly what you're saying and I do want to remedy this! Thank you so much for the feedback, this kind of feedback is absolutely welcomed :)

@container7799 - can you a bit more specific on how you're creating this?

But so I get it right, you're saying:

Weapon skills, 1:1 cost, -1 for each level until level 3, then it's -2, -4 for level 4, -5 for level 6? Associated skills:
- Blunt
- Axe
- Spear
- SmallBlade
- LongBlade
- SmallBlunt

Originally posted by Dubpub:

Thanks Chackaldane, I was just reading your post in the other thread - I played around a lot with the numbers while trying to best decypher the vanilla logic, which as far as I can tell, is just hard-set. I mainly had to adjust some things downwards because soldier had -33 cost and I don't think there are enough points in the game to balance it out!

I will continue adjusting the numbers today and see if I can get some better numbers! I see exactly what you're saying and I do want to remedy this! Thank you so much for the feedback, this kind of feedback is absolutely welcomed :)

@container7799 - can you a bit more specific on how you're creating this?

i fix this bug/ its not your mod cause this error

Hey honestly im not entirely sure what would be the best idea for balancing for numbers. That was off the top of my head as a baseline. You could make the case for I could also see playing around with making the short weapons less expensive as they tend to get outperformed by large weapons especially if running multi hit. If you want I could try to do some work tonight and work out some good ideas. With things like soldier i think its actually a better idea to tone down the stats because right now thats insane or (if your coding skills allow) add in some form of aggressive special negative trait. Say soldier cant earn exp or can at like 10 percent rate in ALL other stats it isnt proficient in. There's definitely ideas to play around with. i think the best idea would be choosing a class we think in vanilla has a decent power level or a couple and basing our ideas off of what the classes abilities cost in comparison to unemployed and how much it costs for the traits in game find a basis for how much the points should be weighted. Honestly id say a few of the classes could use a rebalance in the current game tbh. The perfect world would be bringing up every class to a similar level to the current strongest vanilla class imo. another thing to consider is that my weapon system is not flawless as i have laid it out. I believe there is a perk in the game that gives +long blunt +axe and it only costs 6. this is because multi speccing into different MELEE weapons should have a cost reduction (you cant use more than one at a time.) There is a lost to consider here, as I said if you want I could try to put some work into this.

As an idea of how to accomplish what im saying lets look at burglar, fire officer and construction worker. This is because id say burglar and fire officer are both stellar picks and construction worker is pretty good and gives us data on multiple weapon skill levels. Fire officer starts at 0 points and +1 fitness makes him able to take athletic while taking underweight and spawning with pants are both incredibly strong. So this is probably one of the stronger classes in the current system. If we take unemployed and use perks to get to fire officer we would be spending 6/2(half of fit) and 6/2(half of stout) and 4(baseball player[imo this should be our standardfor weapon skills) for axe instead of bat. we have already spent 10 points however fire officer also recieves +1 sprinting which is another +4. 14 points total! We wont factor in the spawning with firefighter pants even though imo thats worth at least 2 points! Now if we used my earlier suggestion almost all of these would be halved due to our PROFESSION BONUS (trade mark pending) we would 7-8 points spent! so theoretically with the math I threw out earlier this one works

Next we do burglar, they have a unique perk which is positive and we will circle back to it. They also spawn with +2 nimble +2 stealth +2 lightfooted. We can get nimble and lightfooted and since they are packaged together in both the profession and the trait it makes life easier. graceful(5)*2=10. Stealth is hard to find, we could use inconspicuous though i suppose, which means it should be weighted around 4. If we use it per stat this means it potentially is equal to 8 trait points. this means we have spent anywhere from 14-18 points so far(7-9 profession points if we use our/2 strat). With the burglar trait we add in the fact that this is equivalent to having a skill of 1 in electrical and 3 in mechanics but only for one specific action. this is really hard to guess the weighting of. However since this is the last one we need to find the weighting of we can do so by looking at how many points we need to get to -6. we start at 8-9=-1 so we need 5 more Profession points(again im just calling this for our balance value me make) so we reason the burglar trait is worth around +10(5 profession)? this will make our class balanced and let us use these same methods for other classes. I would also advise never allowing a stat to be increased by a profession by more than three potentially as another balancing solution, as that is the current cap for professions that are in the game.

Finally we do construction worker, this one is easy 1 carpentry, and 3 short blunt. However its important as it shows us how much the game is weighting weapon skills being stacked in one category. This also shows another point that i think skills should adhere to different rules. It should cost 2 profession points (half of most vanilla +1 skill traits with no other added benefit) and 1 profession point for each additional point added. I believe the game weights it this way but im writing way to much at this point lol. but if im right we would only take off 1 profession point for carpentry. That means we have to get to -2 from 6. If i was correct and the first 2 levels of weapons should cost 2 profession points, and the third 3 than that is -1 which isnt bad for a margin of error of one. I know i said 3 but carpenter can use these same numbers, 1 short blunt costs 2 and 3 carpentry would cost 2+2=4 this means its 6 points total and you end up with 2 points leftover with no traits on carpenter. I honestly may have gotten this right as a guess tbh. But i digress especially because this is where i realised that if im going to do this id probablyt have to cross reference all current classes. Id be more than willing to collaborate with you and do this work as i think i could make it all make sense given a bit of time. But i dont want to come across any way this is honestly jsut me spitballing and im not sure if it will make the most sense.

TLDR
Basically make a formula that works with current professions that uses unemployed as a template with a bonus (/2) to traits locked to the profession
Max a skill can be on a profession without a negative trait installed specifically is 3
Make it cost increasing amounts for weapon skills 2,2,3,
Make it cost less for non weapon non fit/str skills 2 points than less 1 point next 2 levels
Gun stats should be weighted higher than melee
the goal is to use traits and other professions to find a base for the skill amounts than plug those onto unemployed which is 8 points.

After I die and create a new character I can't choose any of your professions.

Dude, thanks so much for that breakdown @Chackaldane - I took your advise and did my absolute best to follow in your direction with the balancing. Here's what I got based on your suggestion of actually taking a few hours to go through each trait and identify some pattern of increase based on the given trait points (to make this harder, PZ actually does give some hidden bonuses to these classes behind the scenes, which you can see in if you launch the game in debug mode and create a character with the given class)

So by your suggestion, I did my best to identify the weighting of each skill - divided by in-game category. It seems the fitness and strength traits, the passives, are exponential in nature, the source code suggests the algorithm for it's increase is similar to a compounding equation where unless you have a natural booster, say from a profession, the rate at which the passives increase do in fact take longer with each level-up, of course but some other stats do not follow this pattern, at least by from what I'm reading in the Java code. By that logic and yours, I attempted to look into the professions that award additional fitness + strength and interpret their cost and apply PZ's own algorithm for scaling XP by level. If my math is right, here's what I got:

The first 5 levels of fitness are essentially "free-be", 0-5, with anything less than the default obviously awarding you points. And five being awarded very easily after level 4. However, the jump from 5-6 becomes almost a factor of double that of level 4. So here's what I got for the passive abilities:

Fitness and Strength
Level 0 : +10 cost
Level 1 : +8 cost
Level 2 : +5 cost
Level 3 : +4 cost
Level 4 : 0 cost
Level 5 : 0 cost
Level 6 : -4 cost
Level 7 : -5 cost
Level 8 : -8 cost
Level 9 : -10 cost
Level 10 : -16 cost

This is not the same for agility, as everyone starts off with a default fitness and strength of level 4 (not taking into consideration any traits) the agility traits work based on event-based worldy actions. Such as not being detected, leaping over fences and climbing into windows. This is where nimble, lightfoot and sneaking (not sprinting, sprinting actually is exponential similar to passives and effected by passives) come in, they are not exponentially increase but rather based on the actions of the player, meaning their weight balancing can probably be exactly interpreted by the professions themselves, looking at burglar and I arrived at a kinda similar result as you, I didn't take in consideration the trait graceful so I may be off for this one:

Lightfooted, Nimble, Sneaking:
Level 0 : 0
Level 1 : -1
Level 2 : -2
Level 3 : -4
Level 4 : -6
Level 5 : -8
Level 6 : -10
Level 7 : -12
Level 8 : -14
Level 9 : -16
Level 10 : -18

I'll post the rest of my numbers in my excel sheet, I've recently finished going through all the other skills. Now, I didn't take in consideration (yet) what the free traits my be worth but I can add literally anything to the game that may help balance the classes out more. I would like for some professions to be "out there" in terms of abilities because I also think some of the vanilla professions are a bit under-powered based on real-life carry-overs. Such as Doctor, +3 first aid for being literally a doctor? That would seemingly imply that +10 would prolific level healing only achievable in a post-apocalypse world? Lol. That said, I won't be touching/improving the vanilla professions in this mod, the entire goal of this mod is to provide vanilla-like professions to give the game a bit more color, if you will!

Anyways, here is my document if you have excel:
https://github.com/tycrowe/dubs-profession-mod/raw/main/professions.xlsx

I will definitely be checking out your full breakdown soon! Im glad my breakdown i made was comprehensible. Yeah i actually did a very short scale breakdown of all the classes and there are for sure some discrepancies of how things are being weighted currently, like mechanics and electrical seemingly having a higher weight than other skills of the same calbier. I believe metalworking also falls into this but its hard when some classes have an added benefit that is kinda difficult to pin down in some cases like for burglar.

Another idea that I had was to weight things differently for a class would be to give them certain perks that take away other choices. For example forcing a class to start at overweight or obese would imo give more negatives than taking the trait on your own. I definitely think you have the basis worked out!

Originally posted by Official_KP:

After I die and create a new character I can't choose any of your professions.

This one is an annoying one, I'm trying to fix this today!

it seems that the "Entrepreneur" occupation doesn't do anything. after some testing for carpentry xp with a no trait, fast learner, and entrepreneur character it came out like this:

(1.0x sandbox xp multiplier, disassembling grey lazy chair)

no traits: 1.25 xp
fast learner: 1.63 xp
entrepreneur: 1.25 xp

for now the occupation is just a waste of 9 points (17, if you count the free points from unemployed)

edit:

it seems like none of the trait-giving occupations work correctly. ones that say they give brave or fast reader don't actually do this, those traits don't show up on the info panel in game and as far as i can tell from running around and testing their effects with the character, don't work invisibly 'behind the scenes' either.

you can even take Cowardly with the occupation's Brave trait if you're using the 'Lawyer' profession. Night Owl seems to be the only trait that works properly upon testing the Pilot profession.

right now it seems the only occupations that are worth taking are ones that only give you skill bonuses (such as Actor's nimble, fitness and lightfoot), since those work correctly. any trait related ones however need to be looked at.

i disabled all other mods to test this as well, just to make sure there wasn't any conflict. it functions the same whether or not it's the only mod enabled.

Originally posted by montoora 💜:

it seems that the "Entrepreneur" occupation doesn't do anything. after some testing for carpentry xp with a no trait, fast learner, and entrepreneur character it came out like this:

(1.0x sandbox xp multiplier, disassembling grey lazy chair)

no traits: 1.25 xp
fast learner: 1.63 xp
entrepreneur: 1.25 xp

for now the occupation is just a waste of 9 points (17, if you count the free points from unemployed)

edit:

it seems like none of the trait-giving occupations work correctly. ones that say they give brave or fast reader don't actually do this, those traits don't show up on the info panel in game and as far as i can tell from running around and testing their effects with the character, don't work invisibly 'behind the scenes' either.

you can even take Cowardly with the occupation's Brave trait if you're using the 'Lawyer' profession. Night Owl seems to be the only trait that works properly upon testing the Pilot profession.

right now it seems the only occupations that are worth taking are ones that only give you skill bonuses (such as Actor's nimble, fitness and lightfoot), since those work correctly. any trait related ones however need to be looked at.

i disabled all other mods to test this as well, just to make sure there wasn't any conflict. it functions the same whether or not it's the only mod enabled.

Thank you! I'll look into this today. Entrepreneur's free trait shouldn't give anything new in terms of traits, it should actually give you three random boosts in multipliers to a random set of three stats :) but if the others aren't applying correctly, that's a problem. Again, thank you!

I'll update the description for Entrepreneur to be more specific to what you're receiving :)

when selecting a profession with a positive trait the trait shows up red instead of green, if I then add the same trait from the main list and remove it it creates a dupe of the trait on the list.

example:
picked the Librarian, it gives Fast Reader, it shows red on the Chosen Traits column. From the Available Traits column I select Fast Reader, it shows green as normal. I then remove the green Fast Reader from Chosen Traits and it removes the red one given from the profession, I can then remove the Fast Reader trait left in the Chosen Trait column, I now have 2 (or more if I do this over and over) Fast Reader traits in the Available Traits list.

This happens when any profession that gives positive traits.

*edit*
doing this also generates points to spend