# Knowledge And Skill Foundation Version `0.1.R` defines how Agrarian treats knowledge, practice, body condition, tools, and infrastructure before those systems become heavy gameplay code. ## MVP Separation Model Agrarian should not collapse every form of progress into one generic skill number. The MVP separates five related but distinct drivers. Knowledge: - Represents what a character understands. - Comes from observation, teaching, notes, mistakes, questions, and practice reflection. - Affects judgment, recognition, safety, sequencing, and when warnings appear. - Should help players understand why something worked or failed. Practical experience: - Represents practiced execution under real conditions. - Comes from repeated action, variation, failed attempts, recovery, and doing the work in different weather, light, terrain, and tool conditions. - Affects speed, consistency, yield, precision, and waste. - Should grow slowly from use and should not replace core understanding. Physical stats: - Represent the body in the moment: health, stamina, hunger, thirst, body temperature, exhaustion, injury, sickness, age, carry load, and care history. - Affect what a character can safely do right now. - Should create readable pressure without becoming a hidden knowledge system. Tools: - Represent external capability the player can hold, equip, place, or maintain. - Affect what actions are possible, how safe they are, how much effort they require, and how good the result can be. - Should still require knowledge and practice for best outcomes. Infrastructure: - Represents durable world improvements such as shelter, storage, paths, wells, fields, workshops, firebreaks, and community systems. - Affects baseline safety, efficiency, capacity, and resilience. - Should reduce routine survival pressure without removing consequences from poor choices. MVP rule: basic survival actions must remain possible with low knowledge and poor tools, but outcomes should be riskier, slower, lower quality, or more wasteful until knowledge, practice, tools, and infrastructure improve. ## First-Pass Skill Taxonomy The MVP skill taxonomy starts with practical survival domains the player uses in the first hours of play. Each skill can later contain knowledge topics, practice records, tool modifiers, environmental modifiers, and teaching hooks. Survival: - Core self-care, prioritization, risk recognition, rest, hydration, calories, warmth, and avoiding preventable injury. - Early effects: better warning timing, fewer panic mistakes, and more reliable recovery choices. Gathering: - Identifying useful resources, harvesting safely, avoiding waste, and knowing when weather, light, terrain, or tool condition makes gathering risky. - Early effects: better yield, lower injury risk, and less resource damage. Tool use: - Handling primitive tools safely, choosing the right tool, maintaining tools, and recognizing when improvised use is dangerous. - Early effects: less stamina cost, fewer injuries, and more consistent work. Crafting: - Following recipes, sequencing steps, judging material suitability, and recognizing weak or unsafe results. - Early effects: fewer failed crafts, less waste, and better item quality. Fire: - Ignition, fuel choice, containment, maintenance, extinguishing, smoke, warmth, wildfire risk, and using fire without burning structures or vegetation. - Early effects: safer campfires, lower spread risk, and better warmth/cooking reliability. Shelter: - Site choice, wind/rain exposure, drainage, structural basics, maintenance, insulation, and avoiding fire or flood hazards. - Early effects: better placement, more reliable protection, and fewer wasted materials. Navigation: - Reading terrain, weather, daylight, landmarks, slope, watercourses, and safe routes. - Early effects: fewer dangerous detours, better route choice, and safer return to shelter. First aid: - Recognizing injury, bleeding, sprains, sickness, cold exposure, dehydration, and when rest or treatment matters. - Early effects: earlier warnings, better treatment choices, and reduced recovery mistakes. Food safety: - Potable water, edible plant caution, spoilage awareness, cooking basics, contamination risk, and unsafe hunger-driven decisions. - Early effects: fewer sickness triggers and better food/water decisions. Weather awareness: - Reading temperature, wind, rain, exposure, nightfall, storms, and shelter/fire implications. - Early effects: earlier shelter/fire decisions and fewer exposure surprises. Taxonomy rule: skills are not unlock gates for basic MVP survival actions. They modify risk, quality, speed, yield, readability, and confidence. ## Knowledge Effects On Survival Actions Knowledge should change outcomes in ways the player can understand. It should not silently guarantee success or replace practical experience. Fewer mistakes: - Knowledge reduces obviously bad choices, such as placing fire near dry brush, drinking unsafe water without treatment, building shelter in a drainage path, ignoring nightfall, or using the wrong material for a recipe. - The MVP expression is warning text, safer default prompts, and clearer failed action reasons. Safer attempts: - Knowledge lowers the chance that an attempt creates injury, sickness, uncontrolled fire, wasted materials, or exposure. - The MVP expression is risk messaging and lower future failure modifiers once the player has learned the relevant concept. Better yields: - Knowledge helps a character identify the useful part of a resource and avoid damaging it during gathering, processing, or crafting. - The MVP expression is improved expected yield or reduced waste where a system already has yield/waste hooks. Lower injury risk: - Knowledge teaches safe handling, body mechanics, weather caution, fire distance, tool choice, first-aid urgency, and when to stop working. - The MVP expression is fewer avoidable injury checks and clearer warnings when hunger, thirst, darkness, fatigue, or bad weather make work unsafe. More reliable outcomes: - Knowledge improves sequencing and condition checks before the action begins. - The MVP expression is fewer failed crafts, safer shelter placement, better fire maintenance, better water decisions, and more useful feedback after poor results. Action-effect rule: knowledge should usually adjust probabilities, quality, warnings, and explanation. It should only hard-block actions when the action would be nonsensical without a discovered concept or required tool. ## Practical Experience Growth Practical experience should grow from meaningful work, not from standing still or repeating a zero-risk input forever. It is the record of a character learning how a task feels in the world. Use: - Experience increases when a character performs a real survival action with cost, time, context, and outcome. - Good candidates include gathering, tool use, crafting, fire maintenance, shelter placement, navigation decisions, first aid, food preparation, and weather-response choices. Repetition: - Repetition improves consistency, but repeated identical low-stakes actions should give diminishing returns. - Variation should matter: different weather, darkness, tools, materials, terrain, injury state, and resource types teach more than the same easy action. Mistakes: - Mistakes can teach when they have a readable cause and the player receives feedback. - Failed crafts, wasted resources, unsafe fire placement, bad shelter sites, injury, sickness, and exposure should create learning opportunities if the player can understand what happened. Recovery from failure: - Recovering from a bad outcome should teach more than simply failing. - Examples include extinguishing a risky fire, treating bleeding, finding safer water, rebuilding a weak shelter, resting after exhaustion, and changing route after getting lost. Experience gain rule: award experience for meaningful action plus context, apply diminishing returns to rote repetition, and give recovery credit when a player responds well to a mistake. ## First Contextual Learning Prompts Contextual learning prompts should appear when the player is already interacting with the relevant risk. They should be short, actionable, and easy to ignore after the player understands the concept. Fire safety: - Trigger examples: placing or maintaining a campfire near dry brush, shelter, wood piles, high wind, or long burn duration. - Prompt intent: explain clearance, containment, maintenance, extinguishing, and wildfire/structure risk. - Example wording: "Clear space around open flame. Wind and dry fuel can spread fire." Potable water: - Trigger examples: interacting with unknown water, drinking while sick, or collecting water near contamination risk. - Prompt intent: distinguish water access from safe drinking water. - Example wording: "Water source found. Treating or boiling lowers sickness risk." Exposure: - Trigger examples: nightfall, rain, wind, low body temperature, soaked state, exhaustion, or leaving shelter/fire protection. - Prompt intent: explain warmth, shelter, wind, rain, rest, and body temperature. - Example wording: "Cold and wind drain warmth. Fire, shelter, dry clothes, and rest reduce exposure." Shelter placement: - Trigger examples: placing shelter in drainage, exposed wind, steep slope, too close to fire, or near unsafe terrain. - Prompt intent: explain drainage, wind, fire distance, stability, and weather-protection tradeoffs. - Example wording: "Shelter works best on stable, drained ground away from open flame." Injury care: - Trigger examples: bleeding, sprain, sickness, exhaustion, low health, or continuing heavy work while injured. - Prompt intent: explain stop-work decisions, rest, treatment, and worsening risk. - Example wording: "Treat bleeding and rest before heavy work. Exhaustion makes mistakes more likely." Resource identification: - Trigger examples: first focus on wood, stone, fiber, edible plants, hide, or water-related resources. - Prompt intent: teach why the resource matters and what basic actions it supports. - Example wording: "Fiber is useful for binding, panels, and early shelter parts." Prompt rule: contextual prompts should explain the immediate risk or opportunity without pausing the game or forcing a quiz. ## Optional Knowledge Checks Optional knowledge checks should appear when a question naturally belongs to the current action. They are not school-test popups and should not interrupt basic survival. Presentation rules: - Show checks as optional inline choices, short reflection prompts, or camp/journal review cards. - Let players continue basic survival without answering. - Do not pause combat, weather danger, fire spread, or other time-sensitive events. - Avoid repeated prompts after the player has recently answered, skipped, or demonstrated the concept through action. When checks appear: - Before a risky improvement path, such as safer fire setup, shelter siting, water treatment, advanced first aid, or higher-quality crafting. - After a readable mistake, when the game can ask what likely went wrong. - During calm moments near shelter, campfire, rest, journals, mentors, or teaching interactions. Outcome rules: - Correct answers can improve confidence, reduce future warnings, unlock clearer explanations, or slightly improve risk/quality modifiers. - Wrong answers should explain the correction and may leave the player at normal baseline risk instead of punishing them harshly. - Skipping should preserve basic action access. Knowledge-check rule: checks should deepen understanding and improve outcomes, not gate the first survival loop. ## Failed-Action And Poor-Result Feedback When an action fails or produces a poor result, the player should receive a plain explanation that points to the likely cause and next useful response. The message should be short enough to read during play. Feedback should identify: - missing or unsuitable materials; - unsafe weather, darkness, terrain, or exposure; - low stamina, hunger, thirst, injury, sickness, or exhaustion; - poor tool choice or damaged tools; - low knowledge, low practical experience, or missed prerequisite concept; - invalid placement, fire risk, drainage risk, blocked access, or instability; - normal uncertainty when the game intentionally does not reveal exact odds. Message style: - Say what happened. - Name one likely cause. - Offer one useful next step. - Avoid blaming the player. - Avoid revealing hidden formulas or exact random rolls. Example messages: - "The fire catches poorly. Damp fuel and wind are making ignition unreliable." - "The shelter frame feels unstable. Flatter, drained ground would help." - "You waste some fiber. More practice with binding would improve the result." - "Your hands shake from exhaustion. Rest or food would make this safer." Feedback rule: poor results should teach the player what to try next without turning every failure into a lecture.