I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is all about traversing your young player character through their adolescence and blossoming into a helpful cog within their colony. Relevant to how you can customise them and what their end goal becomes across the span of a decade as you start out at the age of 10 up until you reach 20 years of age, your prioritisation in 15 skills as you grow and develop are the main playing field of the game, literally and metaphorically.
Here’s the breakdown for them all in which can always be displayed on the left side of the screen underneath the player character’s everchanging portrait illustration (always a nice attention to detail there).
All 15 Skills and What They Mean in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
- Social skills: Empathy, Persuasion, Creativity, Bravery
- Mental skills: Reasoning, Organising, Engineering, Biology
- Physical skills: Toughness, Perception, Combat, Animals
While other skills are hidden stats related to certain story paths and character parameters related to their own growth and arcs, the other parameters of Kudos, Stress and Rebellion are also important to keep an eye on.
How do I increase and influence these stats?
Each location and activity always highlights which skills they increase and they vary in what they cover and influence. For example, Command centre tends to increase organising and persuasion, Engineering sector increases reasoning and engineering, the Garrison can increase bravery and toughness, Geoponics can increase biology and animals, Living Quarters increases empathy and creativity and Expeditions increase combat and perception.
These also include some activities that can become unlocked when levelling up each sector for more activities to take up that can increase other stats outside of the sector’s norms. Alongside this factor is how increasing skill levels unlock perks for more ease in playing the game. An example of this is unlocking more spaces in your gear section with only one being available at first with three other slots being locked initially. There is also always a possibility in increases your bond with others that share the same skill sets or who you work alongside during these activities. As specific examples, interacting with Tangent always tends to increase mental skills whilst Anemone influences physical skills.
Taking a month off in whichever way is the only activity selection that does not award points in skills. It instead gives you a month off to relieve stress which will be a necessity at times when your stress level both physically and mentally are exhausted, preventing you from picking up any other form of activity that is not relaxing your tense muscles and overworked brain.
Your rebellion level will be the most narrative defining level of them all, greatly influencing your player character’s mentality and the direction that the colony goes into in its latter stages and years which is always worth keeping an eye on to outweigh how its ending plays out. With Kudos, you can spend them in the supply depot in the Command sector to purchase cakes to gift characters to increase relationship points with and gear items to aid in card battles.
Which should I prioritize?
Prioritising certain skills, or more specifically one particular skill and those relevant to it in one playthrough is the most effective way to play I Was a Teenage Exocologist. This means that you will be succeeding in every single action and reaction that requires the particular skill and set you are focusing on to be completed without fault, knocking out most consequences that come with building your player character up in this particular way.
This means for streamlining your actions to be as natural as possible, with your player character shaping up to be a particular kind of person where the epilogue will always indicate a new future and illustration to showcase the player character working in a different field of expertise each and every time. Since there’s 29 endings, playing around with what skills you prioritise in each run is a necessary task at hand in exploring what the game has to offer in its entirety.
Playing through the game so many times is a given to experience it fully, so streamlining it in such a way to tailor your player character into a specific skill set and role will make it much easier in deciphering where exactly you should be changing it up in your later playthroughs. You will be shaping them in different ways each time to experience new events, and therefor, unlocking even more new memories.
To sum up
Skill points are rewarded across the entire game, from all the card challenges, friendship building, and narrative choices. At the same time, many options can and will be locked behind skill point parameters, so it is best to hone in on particular skills to ace these ones and remember to explore the other skills to experience these unobtainable ones in past lives. Remember that no amount of attempting to juggle all these potential skill pools can result in experiencing the entire game in one playthrough. Experience every single new opportunity whenever and wherever you can – it’s the aim of the game and the skills are one part of its formula to influence exactly that!
