I always appreciate noob posts on which ever game I'm familar with because it brings a sort of nostalgia to me.  So this post goes out to all you Fallen Earth vets.

I chose to go melee from various posts I read about ammunition costs / management so I wanted to avoid that money/timesink for my first character.  I was rtfm'ing and I saw a sweet axe that the CHOTA used, which had me sold on melee pretty much instantly too.  Without much trouble I was already running around in the world doing quests (and actually reading them for once!).  That's really what's drawing me so far, is the story line, and the simple fact that NPCs swear at you.  Everyone is kinda crazy (I guess you would get that way if you were cloned and couldn't actually ever die).  It's really easy to get sucked into the world and lore.  

Soon after I found myself farming wild dogs for rugged leather (which sells nicely to the vendor) and meat (to make grilled chicken.. because everything tastes like chicken right?). I was dual-weilding and frantically left/right clicking, eventually my character kinda got bugged into this insanity of constant swinging.  So I was able to just run my guy around to each mob and chew them up with great efficiency.  I got tons of loot/xp and stopped questing for a bit to do some good ol' fasion grinding (and if everything wasn't a clone... by grinding I mean mass genocide of wild dogs).

Then I went back in town and bought up as many 11 chip crafting manuals as I could, I spent a good portion of the time just making mental notes of valueable materials (which stuff to just vendor trash and which to bank).  Then I hit a brick wall.

I'm level 5 now and I realized that I've capped all of my basic gathering skills and have almost enough mats to cap some crafting skills too.  At that point I got kind of demotivated (I had been playing for a long number of hours though so it might just be a side-effect there too).  I realized that if I wanted to do crafting then I'd need to start investing AP into intelligence and perception.  But crafting really is pretty rewarding, in a very 'live off the land' kind of sense. 

Any of you vets out there regret investing in crafting (because end-game it's just cheaper to buy stuff, and now your character is kinda gimp?)  Or wish that your end game character had a bit of crafting cause it's a good way to be self-sufficient?

There are a few things to help you stick with your choice:

1. As far as I know, the endgame faction gear is up to par with the best crafted gear

2. Because of crafting being such a big part of this game (and because it is fun to make your own stuff) a lot of people are doing it; the supply of crafted gear is high. Join a nice clan and there will be plenty of people willing to help you out with stuff you can't make yourself later on.

3. There is no gear which can only be used if you have a certain crafting skill level: you could use the best crafted melee weaps out there with no investment in weapon crafting skill at all as long as your weapon skill is high enough (same with armor, etc)

You still would want to level your crafting skills even without investing points in int and perc, because even at lower skill levels there is a lot of useful stuff to be found there; horse taming, vehicle / armor / weapon repair kits, medicine, cooking, mutagenetics, etc. Crafting is always usefull.

Originally posted by eroxzor  I was dual-weilding and frantically left/right clicking, eventually my character kinda got bugged into this insanity of constant swinging.

Why, may I ask, were you 'frantically left/right clickin'? Just hold the mouse buttons down lol. Probably why it bugged on you.