A Balanced Diet

[kobnach]

I get the impression that the thing to do is to try to gain stats evenly. The problem is, all newbs can do is catch fish and the occasional rabbit - int and maybe agility. When we get a bit established we have flour, a quern and an oven - bread (con). Soon we can kill cows and sheep, and maybe can find someone to let us use their sausage maker - more con, and a bit of cha (not that I ever have enough roast mutton at the same time to get me a definite cha point).

Where am I going with this - I can't get str or per, and my access to agi and cha is rather limited. Best results require being given other meats (e.g. fox, and sometimes boar), and I won't be getting enough of them to matter. Even when I become capable of killing deer, fox, and boar, they seem to be in short supply, rather like the sheep. Carrots and grapes/raisins have similar issues, though for different reasons.

Moreover, every newbie is in basically the same boat. Newbs seem very likely to be pure int, then a mix of int and con. So, as a newb, how far out of parity should I expect to get, and when should I be worried? I'm str 10, per 10, with int in the 20s. Is this inevitable, or is it bad? How hard should I try to avoid living on bread and fish?

Thanks for any insight.

[Trafalgar]

Funny, I had distinctly the opposite experience. I didn't try fishing as I went off to the west initially to join a group of friends, who had a mine. I got a few things to start with and made some others, and quickly began hunting foxes with a bow as well as farming wheat and carrots (and tea, but I had no cauldron). I also got a meat grinder and had a metal saw made.

Currently I have base:
31 str (from killing and eating bears as bear salami, mostly)
14 agility (I need to make more running rabbit sausages - I can't kill deer, they heal too fast)
11 int (fishing is too damn boring, maybe I should make some fox wursts, but I'm using the foxes to boost my agility)
24 con (I was trying NOT to raise this, but now my str has shot way past it due to eating bear salami, so I can eat cow chorizos again)
19 perception (pretty much entirely from carrot cake)
12 charisma (bear salami, but I'm planning to make raisin butter-cake in the future once I've expanded my grape fields)

As you can see, my diet isn't really balanced either. I had been avoiding con foods, but I ate a lot of them in the beginning, which slowed my stat gain in general. I boosted my perception next, and then worked on my agility a bit, and then my str, which shot past all my other stats. Currently I eat apples most of the time. I just donated some bread, fox meat, and intestines to Clayshire. Foxes in this game are like dinner that comes to you (once you go out far enough that they attack on sight).

I'm specialized almost all the way +nature, so I get extra production from my farms, at the cost of being unable to make wrought iron myself and having a lower chance of being able to smelt ore into cast iron. So I trade for those, basically.

I would suggest learning marksmanship, leather working, making a quiver, making yourself 40 arrows, learning to trap foxes on obstacles, and shooting them. My advice for shooting animals is "If your shots are all missing, your marksmanship skill isn't high enough yet!" Also, bone arrows do more damage than stone and if/when you can get (or make) a ranger's bow, that's better than a regular bow. And bears take a lot of arrows to kill. You will probably need more than one full quiver, if you can even hit them, at least at first. Others may be able to give you tips on fighting without bows - From what I've heard, I wouldn't suggest trying to attack bears without a bow, though.

You could also go join one of the cities out there rather than live by yourself, that would give you a leg up.

[KoE]

My diet consisted, indeed, largely of fish very early on. And more than a few rabbits.

When I got to Bottleneck, I used a healthy mix of prepared food stores and harvesting the fields to get PER up (carrot cakes), CHA (raisin cakes, at someone's suggestion), and of course CON up. AGI and STR are the kickers, here - mostly because I have horrible luck with finding foxes, I can't kill bears, and boar... Well, suck. (And I can't seem to find many).

I have, however, managed a spread of 20/20/20/21/21/21. The secret is lots of apples.

I am indeed that anal about it. Using apples takes a while, but I've got the process down to the point where I can read the forums while I fill up so it all works out.

[Blaze]

Attributes are extremely difficult to balance, especially AFTER your CON is almost twice all your other attributes.

My base attributes are:
Strength 40, This is my highest, and a few days ago, it was my lowest. It skyrocketed after a few trades and since we started actively hunting bears.
Agility 33, Most of this is from deer, which spawned often near my old hunting lodge.
Intelligence 28, Some of this is from fish I ate as a newbie, now it's mostly from fox wursts.
Constitution 35, Cow chorizos and apple pies.
Perception 36, Lamb sausages and Carrot cake with the occasional leftover deer meat.
Charisma 30, Most of this is from roasted sheep meat, but some came from raisin cakes.

My advice is either join a community, or trade for the food.

[sami1337]

It's fine to have super high con (around 50). It won't hurt you. sooner or later you will need it anyway.

[kobnach]

I am in a community actually, but it's a small one, and we don't have sufficient grapes or carrot for much other than replanting. They are my source of boar and foxes, and almost all my starting seed. (I set up next door, rather than sharing the space, since it was getting overcrowded.)

Anyway, it sounds like it's reasonable to bring my con up to my int, and train archery in the meanwhile. I've got a bow and several quivers of arrows, but the advice I'd been getting was to train melee. It's at 9, with archery at 1, and raising it is getting expensive.

[Blaze]

They're saying to train melee because marksmanship will get a MAJOR nerf once pathfinding is put in.
By all means, if you have can raise a stat that's below your highest DO IT.

[StarChaser]

Wait. Why would marksman get nerfed when path finding is implimented? I would have thought they nerfed it now because it is easy to abuse, not when it is hard to abuse.

[Rift]

there saying the fact the pathfinding wont exist is the nerf itself.
Which makes sence, unlike melee, marksmenship doesnt scale, and doesnt have any instance attacks.. so it really needs a buff. Only the lack of pathfinding makes archery useful.
Against full armor, archery is very very low damage [23 with ranger bow -20 full armor deflect/abosrb = 3 damage per bone arrow]

[Trafalgar]

I should think a group of marksmen should still be able to take out a bear even with pathfinding. Whoever he's trying to attack can kite him - in a circle if running is fast enough to stay away from him while moving that way (which I doubt), if not then there are other ways (see below) - with tea (without firing) while everyone else fills him full of arrows. Provided that you can outrun a bear on the highest run speed and have enough tea to keep running long enough... The chief problem would be for the kiter, drinking the tea on the run. The ideal situation would be if he brought a plethora of filled teacups, and used a macro to find the teacups in his inventory, right click one, click drink, and move the mouse back to where it was. This could be done without a macro instead but would take longer, and be at the risk of accidentally misclicking, or getting mauled by the bear due, etc.

Alternately bears could be taken out by leading them to ambushes. Consider two cabins a screen or two apart, two groups of archers (one at each cabin), and a kiter. The kiter trains a bear past the archers at the first cabin, and then to the archers at the second cabin, who shoot at it. If it locks onto one of them instead of the original kiter, that one becomes the kiter instead and the original kiter joins those archers. The kiter runs back and forth between the two cabins training the bear between them, and whichever archers are in range shoot at the bear. If the bear gets too closed, the kiter can duck inside a cabin to end combat. Everyone should probably have several filled teacups on them in case the bear aggros on them.

I successfully kited a fox (WHILE firing) to death without tea - in a straight line, not a circle, but took a couple hits in the process (due to not being able to maintain the top run speed because I didn't bring tea, and stopping to fire), when I tested kiting.