Abiotic Factor is what happens when you conceptualize the original Half-Life within the context of Project Zomboid, and it’s awesome to behold. Choosing your traits and skills isn’t the most straightforward of things, though, so which ones should you be gunning for, to begin with?
Being a full-featured survival game, Abiotic Factor tasks you with building out your own character as you join a given server or start a solo playthrough. Following a surprisingly neat visual customization step, you’ll be presented with a slew of jobs to choose from, each featuring its own default traits and skills. These are, for the most part, customizable after choosing a baseline job, and that’s where knowing what to go for comes into the picture.
What are the best traits in Abiotic Factor?
Abiotic Factor‘s character traits are permanent pros or cons that your character will be affected by on a given server/GATE facility. These are the things you pick out when joining an Abiotic Factor server for the first time, and you will essentially be locked into using them until you create a wholly different character. Here are our picks for the most useful traits in the game:
- Lead Belly: lets you drink tainted/irradiated water.
- Inconspicuous: substantially improves your sneaking skill.
- Weathered: reduces the effect of extreme temperatures on your character.
- Thick-Skinned: 50% less likely to receive a bleeding injury in melee combat.
- Wrinkly Brainmeat: gain 20% more experience points than the baseline.
- Buff Brainiac: adds 15% more carry weight than the baseline.
- Self Defense: substantially improved melee combat potency.
You’ll be hard-pressed to go wrong with any of these traits, though obviously things such as Buff Brainiac and Wrinky Brainmeat will be extremely useful across the board, while Lead Belly won’t be too handy if you find ready access to a solid water source.
Note that you get a bunch of traits simply by choosing the right job during the character creation screen, however you can still add more traits in the subsequent step of the creation process. The trick lies in the point system, wherein you always have a fairly limited amount of points to allocate to your traits, and the best ones cost a fair bit.
If you’re really keen on loading up on Self Defense, Buff Brainiac, and Wrinkly Brainmeat at the same time – and I can’t blame you – then you may wish to try to equip some negative traits alongside them. Negative traits give you back a set amount of points to spent on positive traits, but maintaining a balance between them is tricky business, especially early on.
What are the best skills in Abiotic Factor?
There are three different skill types in Abiotic Factor: Fitness, Combat, and Crafting. Whereas traits are permanent and unchangeable fixtures to your character build on a given playthrough, skills change and improve over time. If your GATE scientist runs a lot, they’ll become naturally more proficient at Sprinting, for example.
With that in mind, it’s hard to decide what the “best” skills are in Abiotic Factor, simply because you’ll level up the stuff you use the most organically. Here’s the full list of skills present in Abiotic Factor at this time:
Fitness Skills
- Sprinting
- Strength (carry capacity)
- Throwing
- Sneaking
Combat Skills
- Blunt Melee
- Sharp Melee
- Accuracy
- Reloading
- Fortitude
Crafting Skills
- Crafting (item crafting speed)
- Construction (overworld assembly speed)
- First Aid
- Cooking
- Agriculture
Depending on what character build you want to play, you may wish to focus more on building up your combat skills or crafting skills, of course, but even then, Abiotic Factor lets you specialize to your heart’s content. From a loot runner to the base camp chef, the GATE facility is your oyster.
So, with all of the above in mind, my advice is to carefully choose which traits you start with, and then, based on what skills make the most sense to focus on, simply do as much of them as possible. If you’re a cook, cook. If you’re a medic, heal yourself and your pals up! Melee combat, carry capacity, and first aid are generally useful, but if you’re playing with friends, it may make sense to spread your skillset apart and have each scientist do something different to better cover your respective weaknesses.
