Endeavoring for Success: She Blinded Me With Science (Patreon)

Science is one of my favourite subjects in the entire universe, while much of what I studied at university was astrophysics and psychology I have always had a great love for all forms of science (and mathematics). The way that we as a species are able to teach the following generations not just through action but through words and images is an amazing thing and science is my favourite expression of this.

For survivors, their knowledge may come from the monster dwelling at the heart of their settlement, but it can also come from outside inspiration and the Science field of the innovation deck demonstrates this far more strongly than any other part of the game. It's here where we most often see survivors creating technology from their own inspiration rather than by visiting the core location where the monster is located and drawing it from there.

There are a total of five innovations in the core game with the science keyword (excluding Ultimate Weapon) and the we're going to go through every single one of them, even if they don't have endeavors attached.

Ammonia

Type: Permanent

Effect(s): +1 survival when departing, unlocks many crafting recipes and the ability to make leather.

The use of ammonia in turning cured hide into leather is something based on (some) historical ways of making leather, the excretion product urea breaks down into ammonia over time and it is that which can be used to help soften and tan animal hides. It's also a very useful cleaner, able to neutralize greases, dirt and clean off flesh/hair from the skin. 

It's not the best substance, but you can do it yourself if you follow the traditional Inuit methods - it certainly is cheap and sustainable and that is why it is used as the tanning chemical. 

In fact, Leather making as a whole is fascinating, I learnt a fair bit when visiting the old tanning museum in Doberlug-Kirchhain (fantastic ice cream cafe open there in the summer, look for Leibnitz) as that was one of the places where really white leather was made due to how pure the river was.

Why am I writing all of this? Well because there's no endeavors on Ammonia, you want to get this from either White Lion or Gorm pee and never have to innovate it directly. It's also essential for all late game gear builds because they use leather. 

So get peeing sunshine.

Rating: 5/5 - Essential.

Lantern Oven

Cost: text

Type: Permanent

Effect(s): Heat keyword, Departing Survivors gain +1 survival

Just like ammonia above, this is another essential innovation due to its requirement of use in metallic objects. Without it

So instead of talking about that, because this is another must have innovation that is usually given out for "free" during the story events and instead lets talk briefly about a game that is centered at the start of our civilisation - Paleo.

Fair criticisms aside about the depiction of the people in Paleo (which have been well addressed by the people involved in the creation and publishing of the game) - Paleo is a fantastic cooperative or solo game which features survival elements, death, hunting, crafting of useful tools and even gaining a pet doggo. I can highly recommend Paleo for people who want to have a mini "settlement phase" experience of a game with friends or family who are not that interested in playing Kingdom Death: Monster. 

It has a lot of the primitive feel and similar philosophies to the mechanics behind Monster, but it is more accessible, plays in a shorter time and has a more "accurate" (ish) setting. It's absolutely wonderful and something any gamer who enjoys cooperative games should seek to own. Here's Shut up & Sit Down's video review of the game.

Rating: 5/5 for the Lantern Oven; 9/10 for Paleo

Bloodletting

Cost: 1x endeavor, 1x resource

Type: Permanent, Random

Effect(s): 30% +1 understanding, lose all survival, cannot gain survival this settlement phase, 40% +3 insanity, 30% +6 insanity and remove either 1x disorder, Warped Pelvis or Intestinal Prolapse.

Bloob for the bloob gob!

This is one of the main ways where you can remove problematic disorders that cripple hunting ability (Fear of the Dark, Apathy etc etc) and that alone makes this a very desirable innovation. But in addition to that, this innovation gives you resistance to the Plague settlement event and it is a 'terminus innovation' (one which doesn't add any new cards to the deck). That makes this card pretty amazing and I am always happy to have it around and use spare endeavors on it - everything it does is overall positive, though you do not want to be using bloodletting on a survivor who is planned to go out on a hunt this year because of the 1-3 result shutting off their survival and survival gains. 

Rating: 4/5

Cooking

Cost: 1x endeavor

Type: Permanent, Temporary

Effect(s): Passive +1 survival limit and gain +1 endeavor each lantern year. Spend 1x organ, 1x bone to ignore Starvation. Or activate cooking. 

Cooking is easily one of the best innovations out there, especially for settlements that have decided to go with Cannibalize as their death principle. This is because of how important endeavors are, and how there is no such thing as too many endeavors. 

Just the terminus innovation plus the passive gains of +1 endeavor and +1 survival limit alone would make this innovation one of the best in the game. But we also get two additional abilities. The stone noses soup / ignore starvation one is a really marginal ability, it's spending 3x resources to protect against the loss of potentially less resources than that  - yeah, it's bad insurance.

However, the cooking itself is amazing, there's access to repeatable stat gains during that story event and this is a great way to break your survivors and turn them into absolute beasts or even simply tune them to be better at the job they normally do. It depends how heavily you want to invest into generating extra bug patches.

Rating: 5/5

Scrap Smelting

Cost: 1x endeavor

Type: Permanent, Temporary, Random

Effect(s): 1x endeavor + 6x bone + 3x scrap = Blacksmith or 20% nothing, 70% turn 3x scrap into 1x Iron 10% do the previous option as many times as you want.

Gosh science is just full of must have innovations isn't it? Scrap Smelting can be made in the Weapon Crafter and that is where you should be getting it, innovating it is a waste of the opportunity (unless your other options are terrible). 

The endeavor itself is an essential one, not so much because of the purification endeavor (though that is nice, even it it's a lot worse than leather making). More so for the special endeavor of building the Blacksmith. Every settlement wants to use the Blacksmith, it's an amazing location and this is the only place where you're normally going to get it. 

So you want scrap smelting even if you're not going to smelt that much scrap (because most of the time we skip straight to Iron gathering).

Rating: 4/5

And that's the science portion done, we have Faith left to go for the core endeavors and after that we'll push through all of the expansion endeavors (apart from the Gorm which we have already done). Until then, have fun and seriously, play Paleo - it's got a version on Tabletopia and it's amazing.

*Also, if anyone is interested, I have a German language edition version of Paelo which I have no further need for. Message me with an offer (note that it would ship from Sweden, so you'll have to consider that in the costs also).