Skill books could explain game mechanics

[Gnavin]

I'm still a fairly new player with only a couple of moderately successful runs, and I'm realising there's a lot that I don't know that I don't know about various game mechanics. For example, I only figured out you can craft rain barrels by chance after seeing one of the survival TV shows. It's really obvious now, I just didn't check the menus well enough before, but I think this is a situation that many new players will come across - I still haven't explored much about mechanics or electronics, for example, and have very little idea how they might work, what I can do with them, and what tools or items I would need to use them.
I think it's important to have as many mechanics understandable and explainable in-game as possible, instead of players having to rely on an external resource like a wiki.

My suggestion would be that, when skill books are read, it opens up a book gui that the player can read while the character's reading task progresses. This could explain basic functions of the skill (using carpentry as an example, that you can disassemble other items for parts and more importantly, what kinds of tools you might need to do that) and also detail what kinds of items or structures you can build at the skill levels covered by the book and what items you need to collect to craft them.

I understand that coding a new gui to modify an existing task would likely take a fair bit of effort, but I think it would add a valuable way for new players to more easily and reliably learn about different game mechanics within the game itself.

[knightshousegames]

I mean, it could work like a TV, where the words appear over the characters head, have each level of a book have tips and tricks for using that particular level of the skill

 

Wouldn't be 100% immersive per se, but definitely helpful for learning the game

 

I actually really like that idea.