I wasnt a fan of farming, but finally played on a server as a farmer and its a great skill. I was producing thousands of wheat, beets, and huckleberry. Plow and steam tractor were lot of fun and def made it easier. However, I did not take gathering and that hurt, but made up for it in size and production.
Wow, thank you! Nice to hear!! I'm playing with through in some different styles of videos like this one or a "Let's Play" kind of thing, but I think the highly produced and polished ones will still be my mainstay. Got to experiment though! :D
i would make some ajustment to this list, but overall great work: -Carpentry is 2:great ealry housing/lumber are not as great as brick, but they feed into composite which would be enaugh to put them at 3 or 4, but there's also Lumber stockpile -oil drilling is 2: feed into industry, electronics, tailoring, composite and glassworking, the fuel part is nice and will always be usefull,but plastic and epoxy are so important for so many thing -mining is 1 without doubt:litterally the only skill worth taking it twice in the same team and it feeds into smelting, advanced smelting, masonry, glassworking and basic engineering and the mining rock part can feed into pottery and advanced masonry which is like 80% of all the other best skill, mining is 0, but there's the tailling, so i'm fine with 1, but still first place... -Glassworking is 2: gain 1 more place because it feed into fiberglass -logging is 3: mainly because of how much it feed into carpentry, but also the very strong early game
Just got into this game and having a lot of fun with it. Thank you for the information you provide with this series. Hopefully I will be able to join your server once I familiarize myself more with the mechanics.
On my current low collab server I've had lots of success going down the logging > carpentry > composites route and I've picked up mining, smelting, advanced smelting and mechanics to have as a secondary income and to support the woodworking. Planning to do electronics as well
You definitely bring up a great point @Ani! Mentally, I am usually thinking very high collab, and how a single skill operates independently from any other skill. If chaining skills, it's probably a different picture. Thanks for brining that up!
It didn’t cover every tidbit of every skill, but that would of been a lot!! Glad you enjoyed - a very differently styled video than my usual high production!
You lost me when you put mining at 3. Every thing depends on a miner. If you want iron, copper, or gold you have to have a miner. They have to make the concentrate for the smelter. Why it's not number 1? Makes me wonder about the rest of the list.
I talked about all that and touted it's may great qualities as an awesome skill! :) It was purely because of the discussion of toxic tailings which are a nuisance to deal with that made it fall from grace.
I like your videos talking about the server progress more. However, this was a very good informative video for a new player like myself. This video will change what I decide to do on my next playthrough.
Glad you enjoyed Tyler! :) It's a bit different than my usual, and I'm going to experiment with some more casual "Let's Play" style videos, but I'll have to see how those go.
Hello! awesome work i love ur videos, but i had a question. do you think you could make a video on what each skill should sell or what each combination of skills should sell, as well as how to know how much money something should be worth?
I actually drafted a pricing guide video, but felt it got to complicated, but I think I will resurrect that and provide some fundamentals that can guide any player/server in establishing pricing - I've just been putting it off! :)
Glad you enjoyed, and got something out of it! It was harder than I thought it would be and couldn't really cover all the nuances, but it's some info at least! :)
i would have ranked the cooking skills a bit higher, maybe not baking but that's personal preference... the reason is everyone will always need calories to do ALL the work, i also would rank logging a bit higher, but then i tend to use logs for most of my fuel even in devices meant for coal/charcoal... glass would get ranked a bit lower, but not much lower, and hunting a bit higher, i like hunting because it get super easy to have ALL the protein once you hit hunting lvl 6.. at that point you one shot most animals with head shots... finally mining would be higher, since after all that profession is gonna supply ALL of the masons, potters, engineers, and smelters with their base requirements... just my opinion, but there it is...
@@Oearth for sure! Found you thru your Star Citizen coverage. Your Eco coverage convinced me to pick it up. Thanks for demystifying these massive, often complex games.
It is used more, and it will be used throughout. The problem comes down to the supply and demand. By late game, developed farms will be flooding the market, efficient butchers are sitting on large stocks of meat products ( hunting ends up being a good way for a new players to make some starting pocket change so the butchers get flooded ). So even in the new system the demand never comes close to being in a balance with supply. Things like iron bars and steel tend to bottomless pits for demand during most of the game, maybe only slowing down after 100+ days of what appears to be infinite demand.
the thing with food is that once you have all the skill you want max level, you dont need good food anymore, i thought of a solution for this: instead of accumulating xp and taking skill that will last forever, skill could also have an upkeep cost, so if on average skill had an upkeep of 30 and you have 100 from housing/food you could sustain 3 skill at the same time and accumulate 10, but if you neglect your food and drop below 90, you would start losing your accumulated xp and if you drop below 0, you lose your lowest priority skill and have to charge your xp bar again to regain it
or maybe they should add breeding mecanics to hunting, since butchery is already a fine skill; or merge it with tailoring since tailoring need a little more love than butchery; or maybe you buff considerably tailloring, but remove the stuffed animal and give them to the hunter which would feed on tailloring
Really great video. I do think farming and gathering is too high on the list. They need to be more generally needed to be relevant enough. Removing the sand mortar recipe would be a start, but I think it is not important enough. Especially since on most servers it is close to impossible to coordinate between farmers that only one takes farming to make seeds for the others. That way wanting to be a farmer makes you spend 2 skill points to be less relevant than most specialisations based off mining. Also logging feels a bit neglected as I know many carpenters and composite makers chop their own trees and miners supply coal. I would love to see an update that took the whole farming aspect of the game, be it crops or trees, to a level where it feels as relevant as the more industrious professions.
I agree. The farming aspect overall needs a little love! We did the thing you mention on sand mortar by taxing it heavily to incentive wheat mortar, and so far, thousands or wheat get sold a day...so that part at least is working. Liked reading the feedback Daniel!!! :D
the lack of collaboration always has been a probleme in this game, if a carpenter cut his own wood, that's fine, but why would he hewn it himself, a logger could do it for half the price + let's say 30% fee for the labour and your hewn cost 1.3 instead of 2, at this point, the player is the problem, not the game...
I'd put butchery at 2 or even 1. Meat scraps and you get the sausages/roast food tsunami! Even more profits if you spec into hunting and cut out the middle man so to speak. :)
Very good explanations and it is a good base for deciding what to take. The only thing you need to take into consideration is the condition of the server. How many active players, what is the aim of the server (just destroying the meteor as fast as possible....) but these are all thing no one can take away from someones own decision making. But there is still one thing really bothering me as I just don't understand how it works or what it really means ( the reason could be that I'm not a native English speaker). What I mean are the TALENTS. I now some of these talent aren't even defined, but those that have a definition I do not really understand. What does it mean same table of its kind or the other things named. I am really confused and as you're not being able to reset those and select new it can bring a hard time thinking all the way along to have made the wrong decision for the own playstyle. So is there any chance of a tutorial / explanation of these?
I think you might be talking ab out picking skills that feed into the next level of skills, so you create a chain of skills that provide most of what you need from the very basic al the way through to the advanced. (I'm and purely assuming) That kind of skill selection is what you would do in most games; but, because ECO is supposed to be so collaborative, it works out best to select skill that require you to rely on other players for material. It is strange, but it does support the healthiest server, and the most fun gameplay. I could of also completely misunderstood your question!
@@Oearth I don't mean your skills, these are no problem at all, just which you combine can be a little tricky (we are playing only with a few people). When you open you skill tree, at level 3 and 6 of every skill tree you can choose a talent, that supports this skill. For example if you got Mining, at level three you can choose the talent, that you need less calories while doing manual mining and at level 6 either Lucky Break or Sweeping Hands. Every skill hast those two talent, some are still WiP and selecting them wouldn't change anything. In many skills there is a talent that provides either 100% better building time or 50% better building time with multiple tables, but the explanation lacks a real explanation as the conditions aren't really clear for me. You find them in the Wiki under "Talents". The description in game vary a little bit of those in the Wiki and in game most of them aren't marked as WiP anymore (iot is marked directly in the skill description in game, when you pause the mouse cursor over it),
I knwo what you mean now. :) I definitely have preferences. I ALWAYS take the lavish workspace to get better production with the single table in a room. In fact, I only every have 1 of any given table - production and keeping up with demand has never been a problem for me. Also, Lucky Break is my preferred choice by far!! I worked with others in a collaborative mining effort for one person to have Lucky Break and the other picking things up with Sweeping Hands, but I still like Lucky Break better.
@@Oearth So it just means 1 table like the lumber mill, and so on. Ok, if you need something doubled, you can still just place a wall and divide the room. Do you know if a water filter will clean water from a water source? I mean you pump the water out of the water source through the filter back into the water source again, without any machinery in between. I will try it, but perhaps you know it.
I don't know that answer. I suspect pumping water from something like a polluted river through the filter would not extract or slowly pull out pollutants from the river. I just haven't heard of any mechanics from the game devs that would support that theory. Proof is always in the testing and trying it out though!
Buggs Bunny loves Mozart. The wabbit's got cwass! Bull fight. Wabbit made a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Tchaikovsky. Nice. Shhh. I'm hunting wabbits. Don't like carpentry!!?? Hmm. Somebody pretty famous really liked carpentry. Dropping down farming from seed!!?? Say it ain't so! Talk about a change up on the music! Where's my disco ball? Obviously, I'm just playing with you. Great vid, and absolutely loved the music!! You pretty much have a "Monopoly" on that!
I learned a LOT from this whole series! Thanks for sharing. How do you get Talo without hunting? Eating is something that everyone has to do all the time. How is mining higher than cooking?
Tallow is a by-product of cooking meat. Cooks can have a little bit of a hard time, at least in the game right now. Everyone has the ability to make or eat basic charred foods on their campfire (or "burnt" food as I call it! LOL). So I person could just forever pick papaya fruit from the trees (which regen fruit on them), cook it on their campfire, and sustain themselves indefinitely. True, it's very low "skill points" being generated by doing that, but it is essentially free. Unless a server government or just the culture of the citizens incentivizes eating food produced by cooks, they can have a hard go of it, and not all servers do that. Now I am talking about long running servers. Cooks on 30-day or less servers with the meteor, or even more so on the Competition Servers, tend to do OK as people are scrambling for those cooked food skill points in a race against the clock, so my ranking is probably more for the longer style of playthrough.
You forget logger also make the early very important basic upgrade 1s logger is supper useful early on and mid to late game problem with logger is that it's abilities are broken atm
Carpentry makes the basic upgrade 1, but i agree that logging is very important, maily for hewn that will feed ->Lumber/carpentry housing->Lumber stockpile/composite, charcoal is just a bonus
Unfortunately yes. Unless it restricted by law on a given server, any one can hunt and kill animals for meat; in fact, the predator animals like wolves and leopards will often down and kill animals, and folks often see them fighting, wait for the other animal to be killed, then run over and grab the carcass - or even just find caresses killed that same way laying the road as they drive or walk around. So really, it's pretty easy to get meat for recipes. The devs probably need to do something that makes that skill more necessary.
You need to see the bigger picture. Yes, anyone can hunt, but can anyone hunt constantly and have perks that help them? Hunters get calories reductions when they level up also they have the hidden talents for hunting. A lvl 7 hunter can 2 shot a bison, maybe one shot while a normal player puts in 10 shots. I'm not saying is not possible, I'm saying it's not profitable.
If some skills, such as industry, make you rich at one point in the game... then it should be possible to maintain that wealth through the power of capitalism xD Invest that money into startup businesses, lend it to people with an interest rate, become a banker, buy real estate for rent... or run for president xD
I stopped listening when you said "before long you're going to have skid steers and excavators". We must play on vastly different servers. I have yet to find a use for those. By the time you're able to make them, everyone left playing on the server is ready to build the laser and be done with the server. Building those things just takes away resources from upgrades, machines to build the lasers, and the lasers themselves.
We probably do play on different styles of servers. I generally stopped playing the 30-day meteor servers and play the no-meteor, long-term playstyle servers (just fits what I like better), because you 100% correct. More often than not, I saw mass abandonment on 30-day meteor servers after a couple weeks, big separations between the "haves and have nots" economically, and a feeling of being left behind - not always, but most often. So yeah...this skill rating was probably more in relation to long term servers with slow progression, more collaboration, etc. I have another video that describes different types of servers, including very curious "competition servers" which generally only run about 3-4 days in a frenzy of no-life activity. Lots of play styles out there! :D
Hey buddy. I'm going to go ahead and give you a tip. You have no system for rating skills other than your own personal opinion. You need to take the time to do some data analytics, even if it's very low budget, in order to really give anything a rank. You can easily try to rate any skill off of who has the biggest house in a high collaboration server, but that opens up the question of what if someone was just lazy with that skill? You could wing it be trying to correlate instead, the size of their house for the amount of time they put into the server based on their skill, though some players would be less intelligent than others at using those skills. Instead what you're doing is more so trying to rate skills based on their importance. This is an extremely ignorant decision because you overestimate humans in thinking that they're going to do what's important. Humans will always indulge themselves above all else. The more effort a player puts into a skill to get the same amount of indulgence, the lower a class that individual is.
I wasnt a fan of farming, but finally played on a server as a farmer and its a great skill. I was producing thousands of wheat, beets, and huckleberry. Plow and steam tractor were lot of fun and def made it easier. However, I did not take gathering and that hurt, but made up for it in size and production.
That's actually pretty cool. With the Farming skill alone for seed production it's a sustainable occupation!
The BEST Eco videos in YT. Thank you Oearth!
Wow, thank you! Nice to hear!! I'm playing with through in some different styles of videos like this one or a "Let's Play" kind of thing, but I think the highly produced and polished ones will still be my mainstay. Got to experiment though! :D
I like the hunting skill, it turns the basic bow in to a one shot sniper rifle 😊
Forgot about the 1-shot feel-good! :D
Oh yeah, hunter is my favorite
As of the newest update, you probably just plain aren't going to be able to kill animals without a lot of effort if you don't take hunting too.
i would make some ajustment to this list, but overall great work:
-Carpentry is 2:great ealry housing/lumber are not as great as brick, but they feed into composite which would be enaugh to put them at 3 or 4, but there's also Lumber stockpile
-oil drilling is 2: feed into industry, electronics, tailoring, composite and glassworking, the fuel part is nice and will always be usefull,but plastic and epoxy are so important for so many thing
-mining is 1 without doubt:litterally the only skill worth taking it twice in the same team and it feeds into smelting, advanced smelting, masonry, glassworking and basic engineering and the mining rock part can feed into pottery and advanced masonry which is like 80% of all the other best skill, mining is 0, but there's the tailling, so i'm fine with 1, but still first place...
-Glassworking is 2: gain 1 more place because it feed into fiberglass
-logging is 3: mainly because of how much it feed into carpentry, but also the very strong early game
Just got into this game and having a lot of fun with it. Thank you for the information you provide with this series. Hopefully I will be able to join your server once I familiarize myself more with the mechanics.
Glad you're enjoying the game - you're welcome to join DadSpeed any time!
On my current low collab server I've had lots of success going down the logging > carpentry > composites route and I've picked up mining, smelting, advanced smelting and mechanics to have as a secondary income and to support the woodworking. Planning to do electronics as well
You definitely bring up a great point @Ani! Mentally, I am usually thinking very high collab, and how a single skill operates independently from any other skill. If chaining skills, it's probably a different picture. Thanks for brining that up!
Great informative video as usual bud, keep up the good work!
It didn’t cover every tidbit of every skill, but that would of been a lot!! Glad you enjoyed - a very differently styled video than my usual high production!
You lost me when you put mining at 3. Every thing depends on a miner. If you want iron, copper, or gold you have to have a miner. They have to make the concentrate for the smelter. Why it's not number 1? Makes me wonder about the rest of the list.
I talked about all that and touted it's may great qualities as an awesome skill! :) It was purely because of the discussion of toxic tailings which are a nuisance to deal with that made it fall from grace.
I like your videos talking about the server progress more. However, this was a very good informative video for a new player like myself. This video will change what I decide to do on my next playthrough.
Glad you enjoyed Tyler! :) It's a bit different than my usual, and I'm going to experiment with some more casual "Let's Play" style videos, but I'll have to see how those go.
Hello! awesome work i love ur videos, but i had a question. do you think you could make a video on what each skill should sell or what each combination of skills should sell, as well as how to know how much money something should be worth?
I actually drafted a pricing guide video, but felt it got to complicated, but I think I will resurrect that and provide some fundamentals that can guide any player/server in establishing pricing - I've just been putting it off! :)
@@Oearth awesome i’ll have to check it out, i just got into eco and it is already a really fun game thanks 🙏
Very useful for me who is new to the game! Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed, and got something out of it! It was harder than I thought it would be and couldn't really cover all the nuances, but it's some info at least! :)
i would have ranked the cooking skills a bit higher, maybe not baking but that's personal preference... the reason is everyone will always need calories to do ALL the work, i also would rank logging a bit higher, but then i tend to use logs for most of my fuel even in devices meant for coal/charcoal... glass would get ranked a bit lower, but not much lower, and hunting a bit higher, i like hunting because it get super easy to have ALL the protein once you hit hunting lvl 6.. at that point you one shot most animals with head shots... finally mining would be higher, since after all that profession is gonna supply ALL of the masons, potters, engineers, and smelters with their base requirements... just my opinion, but there it is...
You're opinion is as valid as mine! I definitely could of moved some things around and still felt good about it. =) Appreciate your feedback Mike!!
Came for the Eco content, stayed for Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
Nice!! :D Hope you're enjoying the channel Gluty!
@@Oearth for sure! Found you thru your Star Citizen coverage. Your Eco coverage convinced me to pick it up. Thanks for demystifying these massive, often complex games.
Do an updated vid on this bro!
That's interesting. I would think that cooking would be higher, since it is something that is in constant need in the newer updates.
It is used more, and it will be used throughout. The problem comes down to the supply and demand. By late game, developed farms will be flooding the market, efficient butchers are sitting on large stocks of meat products ( hunting ends up being a good way for a new players to make some starting pocket change so the butchers get flooded ). So even in the new system the demand never comes close to being in a balance with supply. Things like iron bars and steel tend to bottomless pits for demand during most of the game, maybe only slowing down after 100+ days of what appears to be infinite demand.
the thing with food is that once you have all the skill you want max level, you dont need good food anymore, i thought of a solution for this:
instead of accumulating xp and taking skill that will last forever, skill could also have an upkeep cost, so if on average skill had an upkeep of 30 and you have 100 from housing/food you could sustain 3 skill at the same time and accumulate 10, but if you neglect your food and drop below 90, you would start losing your accumulated xp and if you drop below 0, you lose your lowest priority skill and have to charge your xp bar again to regain it
Didn't they get rid of butchery and merge it with hunting yet? I thought I saw some changelog to that effect...
It still a thing 9.2.4. Who knows for the future though - I could see those two being merged.
or maybe they should add breeding mecanics to hunting, since butchery is already a fine skill;
or merge it with tailoring since tailoring need a little more love than butchery;
or maybe you buff considerably tailloring, but remove the stuffed animal and give them to the hunter which would feed on tailloring
Really great video. I do think farming and gathering is too high on the list. They need to be more generally needed to be relevant enough. Removing the sand mortar recipe would be a start, but I think it is not important enough. Especially since on most servers it is close to impossible to coordinate between farmers that only one takes farming to make seeds for the others. That way wanting to be a farmer makes you spend 2 skill points to be less relevant than most specialisations based off mining. Also logging feels a bit neglected as I know many carpenters and composite makers chop their own trees and miners supply coal. I would love to see an update that took the whole farming aspect of the game, be it crops or trees, to a level where it feels as relevant as the more industrious professions.
I agree. The farming aspect overall needs a little love! We did the thing you mention on sand mortar by taxing it heavily to incentive wheat mortar, and so far, thousands or wheat get sold a day...so that part at least is working. Liked reading the feedback Daniel!!! :D
the lack of collaboration always has been a probleme in this game, if a carpenter cut his own wood, that's fine, but why would he hewn it himself, a logger could do it for half the price + let's say 30% fee for the labour and your hewn cost 1.3 instead of 2, at this point, the player is the problem, not the game...
I'd put butchery at 2 or even 1.
Meat scraps and you get the sausages/roast food tsunami!
Even more profits if you spec into hunting and cut out the middle man so to speak. :)
Very good explanations and it is a good base for deciding what to take. The only thing you need to take into consideration is the condition of the server. How many active players, what is the aim of the server (just destroying the meteor as fast as possible....) but these are all thing no one can take away from someones own decision making.
But there is still one thing really bothering me as I just don't understand how it works or what it really means ( the reason could be that I'm not a native English speaker). What I mean are the TALENTS. I now some of these talent aren't even defined, but those that have a definition I do not really understand.
What does it mean same table of its kind or the other things named. I am really confused and as you're not being able to reset those and select new it can bring a hard time thinking all the way along to have made the wrong decision for the own playstyle. So is there any chance of a tutorial / explanation of these?
I think you might be talking ab out picking skills that feed into the next level of skills, so you create a chain of skills that provide most of what you need from the very basic al the way through to the advanced. (I'm and purely assuming) That kind of skill selection is what you would do in most games; but, because ECO is supposed to be so collaborative, it works out best to select skill that require you to rely on other players for material. It is strange, but it does support the healthiest server, and the most fun gameplay. I could of also completely misunderstood your question!
@@Oearth I don't mean your skills, these are no problem at all, just which you combine can be a little tricky (we are playing only with a few people).
When you open you skill tree, at level 3 and 6 of every skill tree you can choose a talent, that supports this skill.
For example if you got Mining, at level three you can choose the talent, that you need less calories while doing manual mining and at level 6 either Lucky Break or Sweeping Hands.
Every skill hast those two talent, some are still WiP and selecting them wouldn't change anything.
In many skills there is a talent that provides either 100% better building time or 50% better building time with multiple tables, but the explanation lacks a real explanation as the conditions aren't really clear for me.
You find them in the Wiki under "Talents".
The description in game vary a little bit of those in the Wiki and in game most of them aren't marked as WiP anymore (iot is marked directly in the skill description in game, when you pause the mouse cursor over it),
I knwo what you mean now. :) I definitely have preferences. I ALWAYS take the lavish workspace to get better production with the single table in a room. In fact, I only every have 1 of any given table - production and keeping up with demand has never been a problem for me. Also, Lucky Break is my preferred choice by far!! I worked with others in a collaborative mining effort for one person to have Lucky Break and the other picking things up with Sweeping Hands, but I still like Lucky Break better.
@@Oearth So it just means 1 table like the lumber mill, and so on. Ok, if you need something doubled, you can still just place a wall and divide the room.
Do you know if a water filter will clean water from a water source? I mean you pump the water out of the water source through the filter back into the water source again, without any machinery in between. I will try it, but perhaps you know it.
I don't know that answer. I suspect pumping water from something like a polluted river through the filter would not extract or slowly pull out pollutants from the river. I just haven't heard of any mechanics from the game devs that would support that theory. Proof is always in the testing and trying it out though!
Buggs Bunny loves Mozart. The wabbit's got cwass!
Bull fight. Wabbit made a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
Tchaikovsky. Nice.
Shhh. I'm hunting wabbits.
Don't like carpentry!!?? Hmm. Somebody pretty famous really liked carpentry.
Dropping down farming from seed!!?? Say it ain't so!
Talk about a change up on the music! Where's my disco ball?
Obviously, I'm just playing with you.
Great vid, and absolutely loved the music!!
You pretty much have a "Monopoly" on that!
Video seemed to call for some classical! 😃
I learned a LOT from this whole series! Thanks for sharing.
How do you get Talo without hunting?
Eating is something that everyone has to do all the time. How is mining higher than cooking?
Tallow is a by-product of cooking meat.
Cooks can have a little bit of a hard time, at least in the game right now. Everyone has the ability to make or eat basic charred foods on their campfire (or "burnt" food as I call it! LOL). So I person could just forever pick papaya fruit from the trees (which regen fruit on them), cook it on their campfire, and sustain themselves indefinitely. True, it's very low "skill points" being generated by doing that, but it is essentially free. Unless a server government or just the culture of the citizens incentivizes eating food produced by cooks, they can have a hard go of it, and not all servers do that. Now I am talking about long running servers. Cooks on 30-day or less servers with the meteor, or even more so on the Competition Servers, tend to do OK as people are scrambling for those cooked food skill points in a race against the clock, so my ranking is probably more for the longer style of playthrough.
1.75 speed ;)
Love how hunting is low because anyone can do it not gathering is high on the list even tho everyone can do it 😂😂😂
You forget logger also make the early very important basic upgrade 1s logger is supper useful early on and mid to late game problem with logger is that it's abilities are broken atm
Carpentry makes the basic upgrade 1, but i agree that logging is very important, maily for hewn that will feed ->Lumber/carpentry housing->Lumber stockpile/composite, charcoal is just a bonus
So you telling me Hunting is useless? Who kills animals then for the Butcher? How do you get meat?
Unfortunately yes. Unless it restricted by law on a given server, any one can hunt and kill animals for meat; in fact, the predator animals like wolves and leopards will often down and kill animals, and folks often see them fighting, wait for the other animal to be killed, then run over and grab the carcass - or even just find caresses killed that same way laying the road as they drive or walk around. So really, it's pretty easy to get meat for recipes. The devs probably need to do something that makes that skill more necessary.
You need to see the bigger picture. Yes, anyone can hunt, but can anyone hunt constantly and have perks that help them? Hunters get calories reductions when they level up also they have the hidden talents for hunting. A lvl 7 hunter can 2 shot a bison, maybe one shot while a normal player puts in 10 shots. I'm not saying is not possible, I'm saying it's not profitable.
decided ill be miner then smelting
If some skills, such as industry, make you rich at one point in the game... then it should be possible to maintain that wealth through the power of capitalism xD
Invest that money into startup businesses, lend it to people with an interest rate, become a banker, buy real estate for rent... or run for president xD
Interestingly, those are all things you can kind of do in ECO! :D
I stopped listening when you said "before long you're going to have skid steers and excavators". We must play on vastly different servers. I have yet to find a use for those. By the time you're able to make them, everyone left playing on the server is ready to build the laser and be done with the server. Building those things just takes away resources from upgrades, machines to build the lasers, and the lasers themselves.
We probably do play on different styles of servers. I generally stopped playing the 30-day meteor servers and play the no-meteor, long-term playstyle servers (just fits what I like better), because you 100% correct. More often than not, I saw mass abandonment on 30-day meteor servers after a couple weeks, big separations between the "haves and have nots" economically, and a feeling of being left behind - not always, but most often. So yeah...this skill rating was probably more in relation to long term servers with slow progression, more collaboration, etc. I have another video that describes different types of servers, including very curious "competition servers" which generally only run about 3-4 days in a frenzy of no-life activity. Lots of play styles out there! :D
Yet
Hey buddy. I'm going to go ahead and give you a tip. You have no system for rating skills other than your own personal opinion. You need to take the time to do some data analytics, even if it's very low budget, in order to really give anything a rank. You can easily try to rate any skill off of who has the biggest house in a high collaboration server, but that opens up the question of what if someone was just lazy with that skill? You could wing it be trying to correlate instead, the size of their house for the amount of time they put into the server based on their skill, though some players would be less intelligent than others at using those skills.
Instead what you're doing is more so trying to rate skills based on their importance. This is an extremely ignorant decision because you overestimate humans in thinking that they're going to do what's important. Humans will always indulge themselves above all else. The more effort a player puts into a skill to get the same amount of indulgence, the lower a class that individual is.