This game is a whole lot of fun. It's impressive for a game, in the sense of how a bunch of interactive texts can make my skin crawl, and how the click of the watch button always makes me nervous. Great times!!

Anyway, I had a question. I've been, like probably everyone around here, playing around with getting my friends and I into the game (even my dog! :P) and have been making all sorts of professions for us. I understand the stats for each are somewhat randomized, but I was wondering about the 12 points the game gives you to distribute among the attributes (Strength, Smarts, Perception, Resilience). I've been going for 6 points to distribute, but I noticed you can just max everything out. By doing this I've noticed that the professions already included in the game make survivors way more useful in general than anything I've made. For example, I put one of my friends as a surgeon and he had all these aptitudes that my other custom-profession characters didn't; I later did the same with another character (this time as an athlete) and had pretty much the same results. The question is this: are the default professions max'd out? If I want to make my professions as good as the default ones / the default ones as regular as my own (I have a surgeon friend and I know he wouldn't have a clue about building barricades, hehe) how should I approach this points system?

Thanks in advance, and to the dev posting around this forum, kudos for such a great idea and implementation - looking forward to all kinds of expansions and mods!

A number of the default professions include a special Knowledge trait that boosts their efficiency in certain tasks, beyond what is determined by the RIASEC and attribute scores. So while using the right combination of RIASEC and attributes can get you close to these professions, it's not possible to make a custom profession as good as the built-in ones.

Obviously, this isn't ideal -- if you want to make a great occupation, you should be able to -- so we've made some changes to the occupation editor for the next patch that will allow you to directly set the efficiencies for every active task in the game. The RIASEC and attribute scores will still be used for other game systems (such as combat), but it will be much easier to make your custom engineer good at making traps or building barricades.

I've attached a screenshot of what the new occupation editor currently looks like.

I managed to create a constant group while testing out the custom features that consisted of movie characters. Basically it was just experimenting with what abilities boost what skills, and of course cheaply entertaining myself. The game is much more challenging and exciting/frustrating depending if you don't create a bunch of super professions. It goes against the nature of the game I believe.


My lame super party consisted of every character having max out attributes with a mix of different traits.

Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill (Silence Of The Lambs): Transsexual
Jack Torrance (The Shining): Writer
Angela Baker (Sleepaway Camp): Camper (and a boy)
Wendy O. (The Plasmatics): C*nt
Captain Beefheart (Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band): The Captain

It was amusing for a while, and while it made the game easier I still have yet to beat it due to having patience the size of an ant's pecker. I've since gone back to the game default of randomly generated characters and trying different strategies.