NPC Skills

Cross training NPC skills become available when a Training Station is added to the colony. It must be powered to work and assigned with both an instructor and a trainee. Training has to be queued up vial the Colony Menu. Skills mature at 3 / 5 / 8 minutes depending on mastery, meaning it may take 1 hour and 20 minutes to raise an NPC to master in all five skills. This usually takes longer as NPCs suffer delays as a result of illnesses, hunger, and conflicting sleeping scheduled. An NPC with five skills may be retrained with new skills that they currently do not possess. Retraining in less than 5 new skills at once will result in random existing skills being replaced. The RNG tends to favor the characters native skills, but it is wise to save prior to make any such attempt.

Many NPCs become tied up with story line quests even while they are dwellers in the colony. When this occurs they can not be assigned to any new job and they will fail to report for their current assignment. As such; desirable skills should be cross trained as soon a possible and the player should check repetitively to see if an NPC is no longer "Busy" so that their skills may be passed on to less occupied NPCs.

Gathering Skills
These skills only work on your followers and don't seem to affect colony life. A follower with such a skill will have a "Work" button on their Info panel, near the "Call" and "Dismiss" buttons. Upon pressing it, you send them off to collect resources for 1 in game hour. If the player sleep through the hour than the follower will return almost instantly, allowing the player to rapidly press the Work button for multiple item boxes. Any other follower command issued while they are working will cancel the job. A follower trained in multiple gathering skills will produce an item box containing resources from each trained skill.

Combat Skills
VIP can only die as a result of a story line trigger, and as such Defense & Health skills are quite pointless. VIPs will benefit more from [Attack Increase] over weapon skills as their inventory is locked and they are limited to basic gear. However; Medical skills are highly effective as VIPs will trigger on Normal Colonist who can die. Several players have reported lag issues as a result of roaming colonist with the [Defense Boost], but it is an effective skill that may be applied to stationary colonist such as Workers or Medics. Followers constantly move in and out of range of [Defense Boost] while engaging enemies, as such it is an unreliable skill while adventuring.

Colony Skills
(1) Farming - Planters need not be skilled, however skilled managers and harvesters can significantly increase productivity. A Colony will only need one planter and harvester, thus all addition skilled labor should be assigned as managers.

(2) Medic - At most a colony may utilize three doctors with Allen Carter and Pleiades Zheng being well suit for the rolls. (Suggestion) Train Pleiades in [Medical Laboratory Technician] and have her train someone else in [Nurse Training].

(3) Prospectors - [Explore Training] decreases prospecting time, however the effect is minor and the yields insignificant compared to player's gathering and mining potential. Prospectors are stationed away from the colony while at work, and as such the colony does not benefit from any AOE skills while they are on duty. At most 5 prospectors can be assigned at once. They may be applied to individual Ques or all on the same one.

(4) Workers - Due to the limited number of colonist the player will likely play musical chairs with the workers. As suck it is beatifically to train them in all production skills. The player will likely use [Replication Training] the most, followed by [Strengthen Training], and then [Repair Training]. When considering time as a commodity, it is often more beneficial to just sell outdated gear rather than to recycle it, however towards End Game it does become practical to purchase high end gear simply to recycle it for rare resources.