AgrarianGameArchive/Docs/KnowledgeAndSkillFoundation.md

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.