Endeavoring for Success: Art Innovations (Patreon)

The largest portion of variance in how a settlement develops is contained within the Innovation mechanic. Whilst the optimal process for gaining new innovations is something that is relatively well understood, the optimal usage of them is not. In truth it is far to easy to go after innovations for their "static" benefits such as survival limit, departing survival, survival actions, statistic bonuses or pre-requisites for gear/events etc. 

The actual endeavors printed on the cards often get overlooked, in part because of the marginal situations in which some of them become valid, but more often because just gaining additional population, gear and settlement locations dominates the required uses. This is another one of the reasons why Collective Toil is so essential to the game experience, you're using your 4 endeavors to "keep breathing" there's just no room for the other fun stuff early on. 

Before we start, there is an additional section in each of these entries when compared to the location entries. That is the "tier" section, this is an indicator of the minimum number of previous innovations required to unlock this card. In general the higher a tier number, the harder it is to get the card and therefore the more powerful it should be (however, as we'll see, that's not really the case in practice). As an example: Tier 0 would be language, Tier 1 would be Hovel, Tier 2 would be Family and Tier 3 would be Clan of Death.

Going ahead, I am hopeful that this portion of the series will allow us to see the potential and space that the various additional options we unlock through this process can provide.

So without further ado, lets get all creative and whimsical with the first section - art!

The Art Innovation Tree

This relatively small and tight innovation tree contains only a few options, however some of them are exceptionally powerful and the root element of the tree - Paint, unlocks one of the most vital survival actions in the game; Dash. Many monsters almost demand that you have Dash in order to be able to handle them without suffering severe losses. The L2 White Lion, Lion God, Phoenix, Dragon King and Sunstalker are all seriously difficult to challenge without having Dash to mitigate some of their more frustrating or lethal moves. It's actually very frustrating how important this innovation is - but fortunately a lot of what is unlocked behind Paint is worth innovating also.

Face Painting - Battle Paint

Tier: 1/2/3

Cost: 1x endeavor 

Type: Temporary, Random

Effect(s): 1-3: Nothing 4+: Gain +2 survival +1 insanity

This is an absolutely terrible survival action with only the most marginal of cases where it is useful. Spending an endeavor in order to gain +1 insanity and +2 survival 70% of the time is a really poor return on the investment and there are precious few situations where this becomes important. Normally you should have more than enough departing survival gains elsewhere that spending an endeavor here is just not worth it.

The main situation where you might want to involve yourself in this one is entirely surrounding sentient weapons. Because you need to have at least 3 insanity to wield a sentient weapon - a hunt party that leans on something such as the Twilight Sword, Butcher's Blade or similar may hedge their bets by pumping up the insanity of the wielder. It is still; however, woefully inefficient.

Rating: 1/5

Face Painting - Founder's Eye

Tier: 1

Cost: 1x endeavor

Type: Temporary, Random

Effect(s): 1-3: Nothing 4+: Gain +1 to any rolls in the Intimacy event this settlement phase

In comparison to the other half of the Face Painting card, Founder's Eye is an absolute beast. Just like Battle Paint; there is no punishment for the failure portion of the roll but unlike Battle Paint the success portion gives you a temporary bonus to all Intimacy undertaken this settlement phase. In addition this endeavor is not limited to once per lantern year (or even limited to a maximum bonus of +1). It is infinitely stackable and this fact leads to one of the most obscene and broken aspects of the settlement phase, the notorious (and tricky to achieve) Great City strategies which you can read about here.

Even if this was limited to just +1 for the entire lantern year that would be a hugely significant thing because it removes the 1 result from ALL dice involved in intimacy and allows for more rolls to reach the maximum result and generate special survivors/twins.

Every settlement wants this ability, but Survival of the Fittest ones thrive with it.

Rating: 6/5

Sculpture

Tier: 1

Cost: 1x endeavor, endeavoring survivor cannot depart when sculpting the statue

Type: Permanent, Fixed

Effect(s): "Sculpt" a fighting art: In the future any survivor may spend 1x endeavor to gain this fighting art.

All wobbly problems with this one aside, I absolutely adore this endeavor. More than anything else in the game this endeavor lets you hone and focus your settlement's hunt strategies around unusual combos or gear choices. Traditionally focusing a gear build around one survivor having a cool fighting art such as Last Man Standing or Timeless Eye has the problem that the survivor will eventually be gone and the gear may become useless.

However, Sculpture changed this, giving us access to one (just one sadly) fighting art that we can store and any future survivor (except for the one who sculpted this) can learn it and get going. There are numerous; incredible, fighting arts you can put on here and the opportunities feel endless. Some classics include; Abyssal Sadist, Backstabber, Shielderang, Infernal Rhythm, Last Man Standing, Unconscious Fighter

Rating: 5/5

Momento Mori

Tier: 3

Cost: 1x endeavor, needs a death in the previous showdown

Type: Permanent, Random

Effect(s): 2-3: Gain dead survivor's insanity, 4 - 8: Gain dead survivors Courage & Understanding. 9-10: Gain dead survivor's hunt xp.

I rate Momento Mori as one of the worst innovations in the game, and this endeavor is a huge portion of that (because the hunt bonuses for it are fine). Any ability which only triggers off the death of a hunting survivor needs to be good, like really good because hunting survivors are your premium survivors, they're the best of the bunch. 

The issue here is only the 4-8 result is at all desirable. The 9-10 result is a negative and a roll of 1 - 3 is basically irrelevant (unless you lost a super insane survivor on a 2-3). So you're randomly rolling for a 50% chance at a decent prize.

If this table included gaining Weapon Proficiency and/or Fighting Arts my rating would jump up dramatically, but honestly, unless you choose to suicide a max understanding survivor with the goal of making a pile of (hopefully) ageless survivors in the settlement phase, this one is not great. You're getting Momento Mori for the hunt event bonuses and a situational use of this endeavor.

Rating: 1/5

Pottery - Fermentation

Tier: 3

Cost: 1x endeavor

Type: Permanent, Fixed

Effect(s): Transform 1x organ basic resource into 1x love juice

Sure it costs 1x basic organ to do this, but this in essence turns 1x endeavor + 1x organ into an automatic Intimacy roll. That's a really powerful bonus, especially for mid to late game settlements that can often be swimming in endeavors (Collective Toil is BAE) and basic resources. The only real holdback here is the limitation that the organ has to be a basic one, but there are ways of generating basic organs such as the Harvest Ritual.

Rating: 4/5

Pottery - Ret. (Retting)

Tier: 3

Cost: 1x endeavor

Type: Permanent, Fixed

Effect(s): Turn 1x herb resource into 1x basic hide

Ret is the process of soaking something in water (or moisture) to remove fiber from a woody tissue. It's a surprising word to find here because it's a very archaic form of the word retting. Here it is literally turning herb resources into basic hide, which is a darn useful tool because it means you can go farm Acanthus from the Screaming Antelope if you're struggling to get hide. 

The limiting factor here is, unlike Ammonia, this is a 1x endeavor per conversion. So it's very resource intensive, but it is something you should absolutely bare in mind if you're living in a world where hide refuses to drop off the quarries.

Rating: 3/5

And that closes out the Art portion of this, I hope that it's at least brought some additional appreciation for Pottery, while also highlighting what's needed on random tables in order to balance them in a way that makes them enticing. I often write this, but I do hope that 1.6 brings a change to the game's innovations by making Momento Mori more interesting. That written, I'm not convinced it's going to happen - but we should at least be happy with how Pottery was updated in 1.5 to be very useful.

Overall this is a very good tech tree, but it's not the strongest.