well, i dont know if this should be in general of spoilers, so if its in the wrong place a mod can move it.

basically, ive had high repair crafting (reloading bench, rather usless) and had high science crafting (crafting bench, extremly useful) and i have yet to focus on survival mainly because i think its useless. can anyone tell me otherwise, or a good way to use it?

im also thinking of making a character that mainly resides in the wasteland and doesnt use much other things than melee and unarmed and an asorted ammount of poison. any help with this?

Well, with 70 survival you can get Rad Child. At max radiation, Rad Child gives you +8 hp regeneration constantly.

That works pretty well with unarmed and melee.

Some of the food items are pretty great in themselves. Also, you'll reap more benefits the higher your Survival is. It's kinda like the Medicine skill except that its usage is a bit... broader I suppose. But it also involves more effort on the player.

I think you really must be the type of player who enjoys going out there to collect stuff for the recipes though. If you're not, it's just gonna be a pain in the butt.

Yeah, Rad Child + Bleak Venom poison are both strong assets to a melee/unarmed character. Busting out a few of the better crafted food items during tough fights is a noticeable help too. The more +HP/sec food buffs you can stack, the better.

For non-unarmed/melee characters I'd avoid Survival like the plague though.

Its easy to get alot of hp per second regen for an entire fight using high survival and crafted food. Eat some gecko steak some brahmin steak some bighorner steal drink sass and soda and water and eat some kaboobs and whatnot and it all adds up to a rather heavy hp regen rate.

I like having a high survival skill because I have fun making the recipes. If you're not wanting to do this, it's fairly useless, in my (not so) humble opinion

I was a self proclaimed survival hater.

For the most part, I still am.

But I think it is worth bring up to 50. i think you get big horner steak for a nice hp and STR boost.

Really I just dropped some points into so I'd have something to do with all my food items. Pretty easy to batch produce stuff with a magazine boost as well.

Sometimes you have to forgot the stupidity of putting skill points into fairly useless skills (or overlapping skills), and just build the character you want.

I mean why else would you use explosives? :laugh:

One thing I will add though:

Travel light + high agility is actually pretty cool if you want to be a wasteland scout type. Easily out run cazadores, rad scorps. But there's still no getting away from a death claw or night stalker

I think the survival skill is very useful. It's been helping me alot.
Making recipes is pretty fun so i'm glad they added it it's very underrated.

I am using survival on my current character and it has been very helpful. The crafted food items give really big hp gains. And the healing is really useful on hardcoe, since sleep no longer fixes you up.

Survival is useful for Animal Friend and Entomologist (Survival 45 required for both). Really, survival is only useful for the perks it'll let you choose. Otherwise, the only time I ever use it is when I make Healing Powder for Sunny Smiles.

It's pretty fun for roleplay.

I love the idea of making really good food after eating that nasty 200 year old stuff in D.C..
There's even some NPC who comments "can you believe some people actually still eat that stuff?"

A lot of the perks available are very nice, and really do add a good level of "survival" to running around the desert. I'm using Travel Light, and find it helpful in fistfights. Early on I took Hunter, which is a whopping +75% damage to animals @ low levels... Kind of makes Animal Friend a waste, but still it's fun to just walk up to crowds of Geckos. Makes me feel like the desert is my turf...

Gecko kebabs. Such wonderful things and you can mass produce them.

So you keep yourself radiated once you have that perk? Doesn't the max radiation negatively affect other attributes?

I think other than the related perks it's fun to RP with. The rugged/shabby outdoorsy type character who prefers normal leather armour to the reinforced one just because it looks tattier. I would have liked the survival trait to enable you to make varying clothing and armour out of animal hides.

No one's mentioned hardcoe Mode. Seems obvious, but playing in hardcoe Mode makes Survival slightly more useful. Slightly. In normal mode, not really.

Now that I'm level 21 and have put skill points into everything I care about, I'll be boosting my survival skill pretty heavily and for just one reason: I want more Action Points! I use VATS a lot, every chance I get and there are just never enough AP for the really good weapons. Nuka-Cola Victory, Jet, Ultra Jet, Rocket, most or all of those get a big boost from Survival and they all stack. I want lots of AP available to me for the end game this time around.

I LOVE Survival. I can make meals with HP regen that repeatedly kicks Stims in the nuts

yeah, I think that's the point, that's why I started enjoying it. Plus my high survival skill (92) is on my Melee/unarmed character and she's a savvy mojave wanderer who can live off the land, fire a gun (100) or kill you with her bare hands and blunt objects. (melee 100, unarmed 100) Not to mention she's a smoooth talker (black widow, speech 100). Like any lady she gets taken advantage of at the auto mechanic (barter 24) and she's not too good at math (science 30), but she works hard and had some lucky breaks getting banned from every casino on the strip and walks around with 50 grand in her pocket. She's a bit of a drinker, but I think it adds to her cultural appeal.

The regen rate is sweet, to me it devalued the Rad Absorption perk, tossing a desert salad and you're looking at 15HP a second, the steaks are good, the bleak venom, and even things like Cass' whiskey rose increase with it. The whiskey perk went from +3 DT to eventually +5, not sure when it happened though I just noticed it. I don't normally enjoy tinkering, like the hand loading/ammo crafting, but even after level 30 I like wandering around and spotting herbs and ingredients to build food stuffs. It adds another element to the game and for some reason it clicked. On my energy weapons char with a science of 90ish I avoided survival completely and it seem to make sense.

For melee, like above posters said, it rocks. The other good advice was create the character you want. Obsidian's fallout is cool in the way your character does feel so focused by the time you're done with it. You can role play a bit more and I feel like my 2nd build really turned into the person I meant to craft at the outset.

Well For the Melee build you mentioned and poisons, the Survival Skill will help with the ability to craft the poisons. Plus some of the foodstuffs you can create have at least reasonably good effects.

My first couple of characters ran Survival up early to take advantage of the recipes, but I quickly discovered that there was really no need to do so and that the points were better spent in things like Barter and Speech due to how I usually play. This is despite the fact I always play in hardcoe mode, since there are enough findable supplies to keep my meters low without making any special stuff for quite some time.

That said, I do still increase Survival but seldom max it out as there isn't much need. I have found that about 65 or so is sufficient; mostly because some of the recipes that need higher skill levels tend to contain parts that are difficult to come by, but also because I generally do not need massive amounts of healing or sustenance in any one instance as I tend to limit my combat to opponents I can actually kill with a reasonable expenditure of resources and/or HP.

The use by some recipes of scarce/rare components is sometimes annoying, particularly in the case of Atomic Cocktails; these require 2 bottles of Nuka-Cola Victory, an item that cannot be purchased (at least, I have never seen them offered for sale), is very rarely found as loot, and can only be made if one takes the Nuka Chemist perk, which is not available until L22 and requires a high Science skill. By contrast, one can have a high enough Survival skill to make the recipe from the start of the game without even tagging the skill, since it has a skill level of 25.

Food and poison.

Yeah, I think Science is a more natural fit than Survival and it comes with a broader range of uses. I just took on Survival for the "joy" of tinkering with ingredients and the fun of constantly scavenging for groceries. It's definitely a low priority and doesn't really make or break a created character, but it has its useful benefits. Most of the other skills outweigh it completely and I probably won't ever put as much into it for any other character than this melee build I did. Some things are just fun.

While science technically includes cooking Survival is a closer match since I know a few Scientists that can't biol and egg without a polarized molecule vibrator.

Unarmed/ Melee and Rad Child. ( hardcoe only )

Enough said.

Rad Child with appropriate food and chems will restore health 6X faster then super stims. And hardcoe healing is way different then normal difficulty of halting the game and popping stims....very different.

I soloed the quarry with a lvl 26 unarmed character.

Super Slam
Piercing Strike
Paralyzing Palm
Toughness / Implant
Pushy....etc

And of course Rad Child..

I didn't just run in..I stealth killed a few..but I was able to hold my own against multiple DCs when necessary.

The Legendary fight was a close thing though....but on 2nd VAT attempt I got Paralyzing Palm.

I just beat him to death after that.

But I would have died without Rad Child

Cannibal and sunset sasprillia will take you through most encounters if you play smart, but gets boring lugging around 20+ bottles of the stuff then finding a stash of 4, 4's in one building.
Cannibal is also more about role vs practicality as you can take it on any character, but some dislike using it unless as a character trait.

Survival offers many bonuses and its items can heal vast amounts of HP, more so than meds think in HC, 50 is a good number for most of the game but 75 is best for the recipies.
The other factor is ingredients, some like the lunch box are rarer, others require facing foes that are most likely what you need the items for.
Then the shear number of items to make some food stuff and finding a close campfire to mass produce the items is quite time consuming.

Imo it's a very good skill, but not one that is required, but I can say that about all skills in NV tbh.