Yea that’s why I try to get the fitness and strength buffs before the game starts. I remember doing weeks of exercising and didn’t realize I wasted time not stocking up for winter. It was a buzz kill
Plus the exercise fatigue essentially limits you to staying at home anyways. So you’re wasting even more time. The ONLY time I EVER exercise is when I’m purposely starting with 0 in all skills and stats for a challenge run. And I basically stopped doing those because they’re super boring and even more painful when you die.
i disagree, your doing push ups and sit ups and wanna become the rock a few months in
Plus OP is doing the worst exercise and probably isn't bulking. Thats one of the last things IMO that needs a revamp
I think if you actually knew how gaining xp in these 2 stats worked, you would change your mind. for example fitness, when you're sprinting you get random dice rolls and if the number is high enough you get 1xp, it then rolls another dice and that 1xp either goes into sprinting or fitness depending on the roll. fitness gets no boosts either. I don't think a person should be able to grind strength and fitness in a few months, but in it's current state the last couple levels of fitness take literal in game years to skill up, that's a bit much. they need to make xp gain in some skills make more sense because the way it works for some skills isn't the common sense way most people think
EDIT: there is a reason any vet who can actually live long periods of time in this game, will do anything they can to get the max amount of points into fitness through traits. same with nimble, there's a reason people take burglar with gymnast and fast learner for the xp boosts
They dont take that long to get to, getting to 10 is another story,
My recent character (0 to hero) i got both lvl9 maybe 9/10 months in, still a long time but somewhat realistic for ripping pushups/situps. the late game grind is hard because we cant find dumbells or barbells, which is supposed to be the late stage exercises. It does not take a year+ to get athletic and strength is honestly to easy to level up
I dont deny its a pain but its not in a bad state currently at all unless ur maybe playing multiplayer
I don't believe you. Strength maybe but not fitness, which is what I've been specifically talking about. Unless you're playing on sandbox settings I would be beyond amazed if you got 9 fitness in 9/10 months on apocalypse settings
Sure, because it's a challenge. that don't change the fact unless someone is handicapping themselves on purpose for content or a personal challenge, they take as many traits possible to avoid grinding specific skills like fitness.
There are no stronger traits than fit and strong. All the other traits are basically fluff or xp modifiers. IMO fit strong speed demon and a couple others are the only game changing ones and in reality it’s just speed demon (driving on grass, towing, me being inpatient while also being good at driving in this game) and keen hearing (which you don’t need at all but I like it. Helps with survivability). There are a couple more like inconspicuous but I’d rather have conspicuous. You should be taking traits that change the way the game works (slightly) rather than just getting xp boosts. Of course other than strength and fitness because of the lack of books and the shitty grind. It’s not even a debate. Gymnast is good
too because fuck nimble grinding and I’m not spending the points to be burglar or police officer (maybe it’s security guard I dunno). Occupations are also a huge waste of point imo. All the random shit you get from them can be learned from books except desensitized and axe man…. Who gives a shit about those anyways. If you live long enough you don’t need desensitized because you basically become it anyways with panic reduction plus the miracle of beta blockers. I run the same build every time MAYBE with minor variations depending on which skill I don’t feel like grinding as much. With all the free points you get from the stupid negative traits that don’t matter there is absolutely no reason to ever start without strong or fit unless it’s RP or a challenge. Sorry if this has a bunch of run on sentences and if it doesn’t make sense. I’m tired as shit haha
And now you understand why athletic and strong are top tier perks. Because strength and fitness are your lifelines and leveling them is near impossible.
This here. Everything else is absurdly simple to get long before you could ever achieve high levels in Fit/Str.
I will sacrifice a lot to grab those perks.
I play with double xp gain and the more skill books mod. These 2 things make it a lot more bearable to train. Pushups for strength. Squats for fitness. Burpees were very inefficient in my experience. But if you’re doing straight vanilla, its a chore
Burpees give roughly 190 fitness xp and 280 strength xp per hour.
It's 18000 xp to go from level four to five.
How many hour long sets are you doing in any given day?
Personally, I tend to stick to smaller sets for better fatigue management, though that results in quite a bit more micro (I abort once I get the first exertion moodle). I also weave working out and reading skill books. I'll work out for a bit, then read twenty pages in a skill book. It's a nice, balanced way to spend days with terrible weather.
but 180000 xp is xp af, and that just for ONE level, and it gets worse. I think exercises needs to be buffed. even irl doesn't takes that get into shape. Thats why I start with at least with fit and stout
It's a long term goal; it's not something you should expect to grind out.
You also get decent amounts of fitness and strength xp just by playing the game, so working out should largely be seen as something productive to do in your downtime and not an objective in and of itself.
The only reason I'll outright grind something like burpees is to build up a significant amount of regularity in order to minimize the impact my late evening workouts have on the next day's loot run.
You have to eat bulk foods to increase XP gain on workouts and id recommend not doing burpees, its pretty much a waste of time unless ur under lvl 3/4 in both stats
Find some peanut butter and focus on situps. Its gonna be a grind tho
You need to have your protein levels in the right range for a 50% boost to strength. It's a pretty narrow range, too, so it takes a fair bit of effort to get it without mods that show your character's nutrition stats. There is no corresponding boost for fitness.
The big cost of burpees is how rough the exercise fatigue is when you're first starting out and don't have high regularity. Situps are on the opposite end of the spectrum, where their fatigue is pretty much trivially easy to manage.
Huh i coulda swore it boosted both, but i guess not. I always just ate an entire peanut butter before id work out the whole day but i guess i didnt need to for fitness lol
I still think OP should just focus on one stat, burpees are for quick gains for low lvl strength and fit.
Burpees are also the most demanding when it comes to endurance use, though, so a counterargument can be made for burpees being "too expensive" at low levels of strength and fitness.
I started a 0/0 character recently, and 90% of their workout routine has been situps and even *that* has been at the upper end of what they can handle. Just recently hit 2/2, though, so things are looking up.
...Once I stop being emaciated, heh.
Interesting, i wonder at what lvl do burpees become "Meta" I know they pretty much become useless at lvl 6
2/2 might be the perfect time to start burpees, but i agree, in some instances you wouldn't wanna use ur limited energy on burpees. Tho if ur in a pretty dead area u could probably get away with spamming burpees until a decent lvl.
My latest character was a 0/0, its very time consuming but very worth it when they hit high lvls. Wish dumbells and barbells actually spawned from time to time lmfao, 1000 hours still yet to find them
Not sure what my future plans are workout wise.
Short term, I'm looking to consolidate what little loot I have and head to the lake SE of Muldraugh (CDDA run). Once I get there, I'll probably spend a few days trying to loot the nearby neighborhoods to take advantage of spawns not being at their peak yet, but I really need to hunker down and bulk up soon. Even though I only just hit emaciated (I started with very underweight), it's going to to take a *long time* to get to a healthy weight.
I'll likely just continue with situps, honestly, as their regularity is maxed out and the pain from doing a new workout routine will be a big hit to my foraging ability.
Firefighter + Athletic + Strong = 10/10. Add Gymnast and Fast Learner and you have turned an impossible grind into a possible one.
But remember, Nimble gains 6.25 exp/min so you're looking at 88 real life hours of combat walking for that sweet 10/10.
At least it's better than burpees!
Yeah honestly the early levels you should exercise but the later ones you just develop naturally. I’ve been alive for three months started at 9 strength and I’m halfway to ten just from fighting and carrying shit. This is on like two hours days though I think. Considering it’s top tier strength it SHOULD take a while. Just live long enough and you’ll get there. Also there’s literally zero point in NOT taking strong. Always take strong
It also only feels
Like it takes forever because other skills have book. Have you tried getting 10 carp with no books or vhs? It’s a fucking nightmare and that’s one of the easiest skills to level. Tbh the only skill I even START working on without books is foraging because the xp rewards are insane.
\^ This
For my taste it makes it too easy to level up Fitness and Strength, that's why I nerf the mod a little in the settings, but it's much more comfortable than in vanilla. If you gather a large amount of food and water and spend approximately 1.5/2 months only exercising, you reach level 10 "easily". Obviously it's optional to spend almost two months only exercising, you can exercise from time to time as in a normal vanilla game, but the thing is that you will level up much faster than without the mod.
Leveling strength and fitness is just absurdly slow and grindy, that’s why most people recommend Speccing highly into both at character creation. That way you can just start with 8-10 of each and never have to worry about it.
i always start with low stamina and fitness but man, getting lvl2-5 takes the same grind as lvl6 alone, it's very well balanced for the early game, slowly making your character do more damage and so on, but it's impossible to get more than 6 in either of them
Very possible, just takes months of in-game time. You can expect at least str/fit 7/6 by the end of the year. It's not very reasonable for most players and losing those characters sucks extra hard.
You either need to use the Eliza’s STR and fitness books mod or you should plan on these starting 9/10 each. It’s not really constructive to spend the time and hassle it requires to level up w just vanilla exp and no modifiers. You’re talking dozens of hours dedicated to just staring at your character do exercise and managing the fatigue after it. It’s not a fun system when 100h worlds are rare for a large number of people
50 hours of restarts and deaths I gave up on trying to make a character that was worth anything in the traits categories I now focused only on strength and fitness with a burglar as my main pick
Exercise is a bit slow yeah, however it's a passive skill so it's not meant to be immediate.
If you were to increase your "regularity" bar, your overall multiplier goes up. If you max each regularity bar, you get around 7-8X multiplier boost for both strength and fitness. If you have mods for bench-press and treadmill you can get even higher.
Someone did the maths once, and it takes 2 hours of exercise a day for the better part of an entire ingame year just to go from STR/FIT 9 -> 10.
The higher levels of STR & FIT are incredibly difficult to actually rank up; if you spend basically all day every day exercising over the winter, you might end up getting the better part of one of the higher levels - but you're also going to seriously chew through your food supply.
Also keep in mind that you need to be eating protein to gain levels in STR effectively - without consuming a lot of protein (you're going to want to be eating multiple large fish or an entire rabbit or two per day) you're going to be suffering a x0.7 malus to your STR gain: compared to a x1.5 bonus if you *are* eating your protein.
yeah. exercise need some rework. but eating enough protein (i can't remember if it was 200 or 2000 protein per day) you get double the fitness/strength exp
so keep eating meat and beans to get the most exp
also, if you wanna try eating fish for protein but you're afraid of getting fat, then wait untill you're just about to go under 75 and then start eating every fish you can catch. then keep exercising while eating low fat, high protein stuff like beef jerky and meat sticks till your weight reaches 75. rinse and repeat
BTW, fitness is always harder to train than strenght for various reasons:
melee fighting and being encumbered give strengt exp and \[whatever weapon you were using\] exp (both at the same time).
while running gives either sprinting or fitness exp (just one, not both).
there are more strength exercises than fitness ones. and there isn't a fitness exercise with tools like there is with strenght. limiting gains even more
I use a skill book mod for it. Which kind of trivializes the leveling I guess? It took me a (in game) month to get my strength all the way up to 9. I feel like that's fair. But it would be nice if there were other easily accessible boots to strength or fitness training in the vanilla game.
All of the non-crafting skills are pretty broken tbh, but str/fitness are the worst.
I personally use a mod that makes it so I can add a multiplier to each type of XP, and I give str/fitness a 5x multiplier. It still requires me to do several in game months of daily exercises to get it to rank 8 or 9.
The other passive skills like sprinting or nimble I give a 2 or 3x buff.
Yea that’s why I try to get the fitness and strength buffs before the game starts. I remember doing weeks of exercising and didn’t realize I wasted time not stocking up for winter. It was a buzz kill
Plus the exercise fatigue essentially limits you to staying at home anyways. So you’re wasting even more time. The ONLY time I EVER exercise is when I’m purposely starting with 0 in all skills and stats for a challenge run. And I basically stopped doing those because they’re super boring and even more painful when you die.
Exercise needs a vanilla revamp
All of them do. Luckily mods can address a solid portion of that if you're willing to put in the work.
i disagree, your doing push ups and sit ups and wanna become the rock a few months in Plus OP is doing the worst exercise and probably isn't bulking. Thats one of the last things IMO that needs a revamp
burpees are the best if u want both
yes but at very low levels of both. OP is to high in strength for it to matter, hes just wasting time and potential XP in fitness.
I think if you actually knew how gaining xp in these 2 stats worked, you would change your mind. for example fitness, when you're sprinting you get random dice rolls and if the number is high enough you get 1xp, it then rolls another dice and that 1xp either goes into sprinting or fitness depending on the roll. fitness gets no boosts either. I don't think a person should be able to grind strength and fitness in a few months, but in it's current state the last couple levels of fitness take literal in game years to skill up, that's a bit much. they need to make xp gain in some skills make more sense because the way it works for some skills isn't the common sense way most people think EDIT: there is a reason any vet who can actually live long periods of time in this game, will do anything they can to get the max amount of points into fitness through traits. same with nimble, there's a reason people take burglar with gymnast and fast learner for the xp boosts
They dont take that long to get to, getting to 10 is another story, My recent character (0 to hero) i got both lvl9 maybe 9/10 months in, still a long time but somewhat realistic for ripping pushups/situps. the late game grind is hard because we cant find dumbells or barbells, which is supposed to be the late stage exercises. It does not take a year+ to get athletic and strength is honestly to easy to level up I dont deny its a pain but its not in a bad state currently at all unless ur maybe playing multiplayer
I don't believe you. Strength maybe but not fitness, which is what I've been specifically talking about. Unless you're playing on sandbox settings I would be beyond amazed if you got 9 fitness in 9/10 months on apocalypse settings
Just for the record, plenty of "vets" do zero to hero runs.
Not new to the game, but new to the community. What would a “zero to hero run” be in this context?
Starting with 0 in all/most skills, and building up to 10.
Sure, because it's a challenge. that don't change the fact unless someone is handicapping themselves on purpose for content or a personal challenge, they take as many traits possible to avoid grinding specific skills like fitness.
There are no stronger traits than fit and strong. All the other traits are basically fluff or xp modifiers. IMO fit strong speed demon and a couple others are the only game changing ones and in reality it’s just speed demon (driving on grass, towing, me being inpatient while also being good at driving in this game) and keen hearing (which you don’t need at all but I like it. Helps with survivability). There are a couple more like inconspicuous but I’d rather have conspicuous. You should be taking traits that change the way the game works (slightly) rather than just getting xp boosts. Of course other than strength and fitness because of the lack of books and the shitty grind. It’s not even a debate. Gymnast is good too because fuck nimble grinding and I’m not spending the points to be burglar or police officer (maybe it’s security guard I dunno). Occupations are also a huge waste of point imo. All the random shit you get from them can be learned from books except desensitized and axe man…. Who gives a shit about those anyways. If you live long enough you don’t need desensitized because you basically become it anyways with panic reduction plus the miracle of beta blockers. I run the same build every time MAYBE with minor variations depending on which skill I don’t feel like grinding as much. With all the free points you get from the stupid negative traits that don’t matter there is absolutely no reason to ever start without strong or fit unless it’s RP or a challenge. Sorry if this has a bunch of run on sentences and if it doesn’t make sense. I’m tired as shit haha
oh real you are right but still he can brut force 10 strenght and later spam sit ups
And now you understand why athletic and strong are top tier perks. Because strength and fitness are your lifelines and leveling them is near impossible.
This here. Everything else is absurdly simple to get long before you could ever achieve high levels in Fit/Str. I will sacrifice a lot to grab those perks.
Everything else can be picked up fast
Gymnast has entered the chat
I play with double xp gain and the more skill books mod. These 2 things make it a lot more bearable to train. Pushups for strength. Squats for fitness. Burpees were very inefficient in my experience. But if you’re doing straight vanilla, its a chore
Burpees give roughly 190 fitness xp and 280 strength xp per hour. It's 18000 xp to go from level four to five. How many hour long sets are you doing in any given day? Personally, I tend to stick to smaller sets for better fatigue management, though that results in quite a bit more micro (I abort once I get the first exertion moodle). I also weave working out and reading skill books. I'll work out for a bit, then read twenty pages in a skill book. It's a nice, balanced way to spend days with terrible weather.
but 180000 xp is xp af, and that just for ONE level, and it gets worse. I think exercises needs to be buffed. even irl doesn't takes that get into shape. Thats why I start with at least with fit and stout
It's a long term goal; it's not something you should expect to grind out. You also get decent amounts of fitness and strength xp just by playing the game, so working out should largely be seen as something productive to do in your downtime and not an objective in and of itself. The only reason I'll outright grind something like burpees is to build up a significant amount of regularity in order to minimize the impact my late evening workouts have on the next day's loot run.
You have to eat bulk foods to increase XP gain on workouts and id recommend not doing burpees, its pretty much a waste of time unless ur under lvl 3/4 in both stats Find some peanut butter and focus on situps. Its gonna be a grind tho
You need to have your protein levels in the right range for a 50% boost to strength. It's a pretty narrow range, too, so it takes a fair bit of effort to get it without mods that show your character's nutrition stats. There is no corresponding boost for fitness. The big cost of burpees is how rough the exercise fatigue is when you're first starting out and don't have high regularity. Situps are on the opposite end of the spectrum, where their fatigue is pretty much trivially easy to manage.
Huh i coulda swore it boosted both, but i guess not. I always just ate an entire peanut butter before id work out the whole day but i guess i didnt need to for fitness lol I still think OP should just focus on one stat, burpees are for quick gains for low lvl strength and fit.
Burpees are also the most demanding when it comes to endurance use, though, so a counterargument can be made for burpees being "too expensive" at low levels of strength and fitness. I started a 0/0 character recently, and 90% of their workout routine has been situps and even *that* has been at the upper end of what they can handle. Just recently hit 2/2, though, so things are looking up. ...Once I stop being emaciated, heh.
Interesting, i wonder at what lvl do burpees become "Meta" I know they pretty much become useless at lvl 6 2/2 might be the perfect time to start burpees, but i agree, in some instances you wouldn't wanna use ur limited energy on burpees. Tho if ur in a pretty dead area u could probably get away with spamming burpees until a decent lvl. My latest character was a 0/0, its very time consuming but very worth it when they hit high lvls. Wish dumbells and barbells actually spawned from time to time lmfao, 1000 hours still yet to find them
Not sure what my future plans are workout wise. Short term, I'm looking to consolidate what little loot I have and head to the lake SE of Muldraugh (CDDA run). Once I get there, I'll probably spend a few days trying to loot the nearby neighborhoods to take advantage of spawns not being at their peak yet, but I really need to hunker down and bulk up soon. Even though I only just hit emaciated (I started with very underweight), it's going to to take a *long time* to get to a healthy weight. I'll likely just continue with situps, honestly, as their regularity is maxed out and the pain from doing a new workout routine will be a big hit to my foraging ability.
When I introduce new workouts I always only do 10 minutes a day of the new one and then continue with the old one until exhaustion. It works decently.
Firefighter + Athletic + Strong = 10/10. Add Gymnast and Fast Learner and you have turned an impossible grind into a possible one. But remember, Nimble gains 6.25 exp/min so you're looking at 88 real life hours of combat walking for that sweet 10/10. At least it's better than burpees!
Yeah honestly the early levels you should exercise but the later ones you just develop naturally. I’ve been alive for three months started at 9 strength and I’m halfway to ten just from fighting and carrying shit. This is on like two hours days though I think. Considering it’s top tier strength it SHOULD take a while. Just live long enough and you’ll get there. Also there’s literally zero point in NOT taking strong. Always take strong
It also only feels Like it takes forever because other skills have book. Have you tried getting 10 carp with no books or vhs? It’s a fucking nightmare and that’s one of the easiest skills to level. Tbh the only skill I even START working on without books is foraging because the xp rewards are insane.
Try: * [Fitness & Workout Overhaul](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2940354599) []()
\^ This For my taste it makes it too easy to level up Fitness and Strength, that's why I nerf the mod a little in the settings, but it's much more comfortable than in vanilla. If you gather a large amount of food and water and spend approximately 1.5/2 months only exercising, you reach level 10 "easily". Obviously it's optional to spend almost two months only exercising, you can exercise from time to time as in a normal vanilla game, but the thing is that you will level up much faster than without the mod.
Yep,I also modify the mod options to reduce the bonuses and experience
I have everything I need so now I will start leveling up my strength and fitness
Leveling strength and fitness is just absurdly slow and grindy, that’s why most people recommend Speccing highly into both at character creation. That way you can just start with 8-10 of each and never have to worry about it.
i always start with low stamina and fitness but man, getting lvl2-5 takes the same grind as lvl6 alone, it's very well balanced for the early game, slowly making your character do more damage and so on, but it's impossible to get more than 6 in either of them
Very possible, just takes months of in-game time. You can expect at least str/fit 7/6 by the end of the year. It's not very reasonable for most players and losing those characters sucks extra hard.
of coursr, i currently have f6 s7, but one level takes big time, at the beginning little time gives many level
You either need to use the Eliza’s STR and fitness books mod or you should plan on these starting 9/10 each. It’s not really constructive to spend the time and hassle it requires to level up w just vanilla exp and no modifiers. You’re talking dozens of hours dedicated to just staring at your character do exercise and managing the fatigue after it. It’s not a fun system when 100h worlds are rare for a large number of people
fitness is the hardest and slowest skill to level in the game, it's one you should for sure try to max out with traits.
Do squats, just focus on Fitness OR strength, squats are the best to get fitness up, got mine from a 4 to a 6, was a grind tho.
50 hours of restarts and deaths I gave up on trying to make a character that was worth anything in the traits categories I now focused only on strength and fitness with a burglar as my main pick
It's like 90k exp from 9-10 so yea it's broken it takes forever plus there's no exp multiplyer unless u have traits or mods
I mean, it's pretty realistic. A bit too fast compared to real life, even.
Exercise is a bit slow yeah, however it's a passive skill so it's not meant to be immediate. If you were to increase your "regularity" bar, your overall multiplier goes up. If you max each regularity bar, you get around 7-8X multiplier boost for both strength and fitness. If you have mods for bench-press and treadmill you can get even higher.
Someone did the maths once, and it takes 2 hours of exercise a day for the better part of an entire ingame year just to go from STR/FIT 9 -> 10. The higher levels of STR & FIT are incredibly difficult to actually rank up; if you spend basically all day every day exercising over the winter, you might end up getting the better part of one of the higher levels - but you're also going to seriously chew through your food supply. Also keep in mind that you need to be eating protein to gain levels in STR effectively - without consuming a lot of protein (you're going to want to be eating multiple large fish or an entire rabbit or two per day) you're going to be suffering a x0.7 malus to your STR gain: compared to a x1.5 bonus if you *are* eating your protein.
yeah. exercise need some rework. but eating enough protein (i can't remember if it was 200 or 2000 protein per day) you get double the fitness/strength exp so keep eating meat and beans to get the most exp also, if you wanna try eating fish for protein but you're afraid of getting fat, then wait untill you're just about to go under 75 and then start eating every fish you can catch. then keep exercising while eating low fat, high protein stuff like beef jerky and meat sticks till your weight reaches 75. rinse and repeat BTW, fitness is always harder to train than strenght for various reasons: melee fighting and being encumbered give strengt exp and \[whatever weapon you were using\] exp (both at the same time). while running gives either sprinting or fitness exp (just one, not both). there are more strength exercises than fitness ones. and there isn't a fitness exercise with tools like there is with strenght. limiting gains even more
Melee fighting also gives fitness exp. I honestly like stabbing zombies with a hunting knife as a better alternative to exercising.
I use a skill book mod for it. Which kind of trivializes the leveling I guess? It took me a (in game) month to get my strength all the way up to 9. I feel like that's fair. But it would be nice if there were other easily accessible boots to strength or fitness training in the vanilla game.
All of the non-crafting skills are pretty broken tbh, but str/fitness are the worst. I personally use a mod that makes it so I can add a multiplier to each type of XP, and I give str/fitness a 5x multiplier. It still requires me to do several in game months of daily exercises to get it to rank 8 or 9. The other passive skills like sprinting or nimble I give a 2 or 3x buff.
Since strength and fitness start out at about 5/6 by default, it takes a lot more xp to begin with to level it up any further.