After the Collapse: All Stats and Skills

Your survivors’ abilities are separated in two categories: Statistics (stats) and Skills.

Stats are (mostly) physical attributes set when the survivor is generated, they might be influenced by their profession. Their individual value is set between 0 and 100, 50 being average. A generic survivor with no particular medical condition, or meaningful profession will have all stats at roughly 50.

Skills are tied to the work they can do in (or outside of) your base. The value for each individual Skill is between 0 and 1,000. It’s initially determined by a combination of 2 stats and the profession of the newly created survivor.

Each survivor has 8 statistics, each between 0 and 100 initially. While those values can never go below 0, they can occasionally go over 100 when consuming special drugs, using specific equipment or benefiting from a positive trait.

Note that the following list doesn’t take into account specific skill tests during expeditions/quests or other very “niche” uses. I’m just explaining the day to day usefulness of each stat here.

Strength, as the name implies, determines the brute strength of a survivor. In practice, it determines how durable is a survivor and its initial manual labor skills.

It influences the following mechanics:

• Carry weight capacity
• Total Hit Points
• Weapon damage with melee weapons

It influences the following skills:

• Hauling (major)
• Construction
• Forging (major)
• Crafting (minor)
• Military
• Prison Guard (major)
• Metalsmith (major)
• Farming (major)
• Brewing (minor)
• Husbandry (minor)

It’s a lot less useful than strength, but it will have a very high influence on melee combat accuracy and influences a few technical skills.

It influences the following mechanics:

• Ability to dodge some traps
• Hit Chance with melee weapons

It influences the following skills:

• Tinkering
• Construction
• Crafting (major)
• Medical (minor)
• Repairs (major)

The close cousin of Strength. It touches to similar things, but in different ways.

It influences the following mechanics:

• Total Hit Points
• Ability to resist most illnesses

It influences the following skills:

• Hauling (minor)
• Forging (minor)
• Military
• Scavenging (minor)
• Mining (major)
• Farming (major)
• Husbandry (major)

A critical skill for ranged combatants as it both influence view distance & accuracy. It’s also an important stat for mid to late game skills.

It influences the following mechanics:

• View distance (when looking for hostiles)
• Dodge chance with some traps
• Accuracy with ranged weapons

It influences the following skills:

• Tinkering
• Construction
• Medical
• Military
• Scavenging (major)
• Disassembling (major)
• Farming (minor)
• Brewing (major)
• Cooking (major)

This one is particular as it has no direct in-game effect, but it is a critical component when determining the skill for some of the most useful jobs.

It influences the following skills:

• Tinkering
• Medical
• Scavenging (minor)
• Science (major) <- that’ the big one
• Repairs
• Metalsmith

It mostly determines how well this survivor is going to interact with their mates. A survivor with a high social stat will generally have positive interaction with most people, increasing the mood of whoever they talked to, building friendships. In practice, high social skill people will help make the base happy while low social one will make it unhappy.

It influences the following mechanics:

• Result of social / chat interactions
• Ability to convince and calm prisoners

It influences the following skills:

• Medical (minor)
• Prison Guard

This is probably both the least understood and most important stat when it comes to base building proper. It’s basically how lazy a survivor is. The higher the work ethic, the less they are likely to take a break, stop working in the middle of a job and so on.

It influences the following mechanics:

• How often a survivor is going to take a break AND for how long
• Likelihood of stopping the current job when they want to eat/drink/rest

It influences the following skills:

• Cooking
• Science

Self explanatory. Do not underestimate how moving speed will influence the productivity of a survivor, though. For many jobs, moving from A to B is the most time consuming part, as such very slow survivors are generally not worth it.

Skills are generally tied to specific activities your survivors can do in the base (or outside). The initial value for a skill is determined by relevant stats (as shown in the previous chapter) and the survivor’s profession. Experience can be gained by doing jobs related with this skill.

Also note that this article is for non-modded games. Some of the following skills might be used way more extensively in some mods.

Skills for individual survivors can be toggled on/off in various menus (population screen, faction screen, individual survivor menu).

It’s a relatively niche activity. People with this skill will tend to jobs related to making booze. Generally it means bringing ingredients to the still to make vodka or beer. Due to the nature of said job, there’s no way to gain experience in that skill and its value is meaningless, it’s just an activity you can toggle on/off. Some mods made the process a lot more involved, though.

Every time you place something to be built on the map, be it a wall, a door, a crafting station, it’s people with the construction skill enabled who’ll do it. The value influences at which pace they’ll build it. Each time something is constructed, the builder will see their construction skill increase slightly.

Making food at the kitchen. Here again, the higher the cooking skill, the faster the food will be made. Making food will increase the cooking skill.

Generic skill for building items at a crafting station that’s not covered by any other skill. It is generally for low tier items. Again, the higher the skill the faster the item gets built, and you get more points by crafting items.

This one is used when razing structures, removing tiles or cutting trees. It both determines at which pace the job gets done and how many resources you will recover from doing so. As usual, practice makes perfect.

Determines at which speed a farm gets built from the ground up and the initial health of planted seeds. Assigning people with the highest farming skill possible to farming jobs is quite important as the less healthy a plant is, the less resource it’ll give out and the more at risk it will be of dying when bad weather shows up. Again practice increases the skill.

In the base game this skill only determines who is allowed to bring resource to forges to convert basic materials into ingots, metal, charcoal and such. It’s just a toggle currently.

Determines who will go around and pickup stuff left on the ground. Also, since 0.8.6, people who are carrying too much stuff (over 75% cargo space) are slowed down by up to 25%, a high hauling skill can counterbalance this effect.

This skill is used to take care of animals. People with this skill enabled will feed and “farm” your cattle. For instance, it’ll determine at which pace someone will milk a cow or shear a sheep.

This one is two fold. It determines at which pace items will be built at a medical station. More importantly, it determines how good of a doctor is the survivor. Someone with a low medical skill might fail at applying simple bandages or other medical items to their patients, while someone with a higher skill will succeed more often and heal their patient’s HP faster. It is heavily recommended to only use at least semi competent doctors.

This skill is generally used when building new weapons (pipe guns) and armors from scratch. As usual, practice increases the skill and it determines at which pace the items get built.

This one is very different from the more generic ones. Military skill determines the likelihood of either shooting at the lesser piece of armor, or bypassing it completely when attacking someone or something. Hitting people increases this skill.

Additionally, people with this skill disabled will be considered “civilians” and will not be called into action when going into combat mode. Civilians can even be redirected to a “shelter” zone during such events. Without a shelter on the map, they’ll continue to work as normal.

It’s the same as “disassembling” but for rocks and caverns. Works exactly the same, just a different skill.

This skill is both used to repair damaged structures/walls and to repair damaged modern (late game) weapons and armors. Again it determines at which pace.

This skill is only used during expeditions. It determines the likelihood of finding loot during the exploration phase. To prevent someone from going on an expedition on accident (you sure don’t want to send your science guy), you can disable that skill on someone so it won’t show up on the expedition selection menu.

This skill determines at which pace someone assigned to the research station will work. Simply put, you want 2 science heavy survivors (so one can work while the other sleeps) and dedicate them to this job. Make sure that people with poor science skills can’t work on the research station.

This one is generally used to build electronic doodads and automated turrets at the tinkering station. It’s also used, in the very late game, to build robots. As usual, it determines at which pace those items get built.

Determines who will feed and take care of prisoners. Also people with a high prison guard skill will be better at pacifying and converting prisoners.