Salem

Since I read in the tooltip belonging to Stocks & Cultivars that upgrading that skill will give you a plenty bonus when planting seeds, I've been raising it over the past couple of days. At the moment it's at 62, but the highest plenty bonus I've seen is 28. Now, I understand the bonus is random, but am I assuming correctly that the maximum bonus is your current S&C skill or is a different formula being used?

Yes & no. Random chance between 0 - your S&C level. Not really worry the time and effort for RNG but it's nice when you get 100+% plenty bonus from planting. Nothing that can't be achieved though with a little lime and time.

If you really want plenty though, plant more fields, getting more than 75 S&C isn't needed.

It's worth it if you have enough fields. If you're a hermit with 3-4 fields, not really. If you're the main farmer for a village of 10 people with 150 fields, then yes a million times over.

The bonus isn't 50% of your total S/C averaged out I don't think. It might be something smaller like an average of 1/3 your S/C skill. It really comes down to your circumstances.

Ok, thanks for your answers. I should consider the plenty bonus as just that, a bonus. I don't have a lot of fields I have to plant and harvest, so I'll just upgrade my S&C casually then.

Shame there's no real use to crank up S&C if you're not a village's farmer, though. After getting all the skills you want, there's hardly, if any, need to raise proficiencies, especially since most haven't been tied to a specific "perk", like reduced wear on fishing gear or indeed the plenty bonus.

Honestly I barely use any fertilizer and depend on the S/C bonus almost entirely for my plenty crop wise. I run 8 fields for each crop purity/type that I have. At 100 S/C, I'm seeing an average of +200 plenty across those 8 fields. It's pretty random, you'll get a string of 0's and then +100, or a bunch of +30s. But ultimately random always evens out if you have enough fields.

What that means though is I'm getting 10 fields worth of harvest for the work of 8 fields. It's not just a nice little bonus, it's crucial to farming to your full efficiency. But if you're a hermit with small crop demands it's just not that necessary that you have it. Once you're out of other things to do though, might as well work on it.

As for fishing: It's not required with cheap lures, but if you want to catch the best fish you need it to make the iron lures last longer.

No, I understand what the perks are good for thanks to you, it's just that I don't know which other proficiencies to raise, since I don't know which perks will be attached to those.

Depends what you want to do. Even if we don't know the exact benefits the skill names of some are pretty indicative of what they might be involved in.

We know for sure a hefty Perennial Phylo skill will be required for witching.
Sugar and Spice / Pots and Pans will likely be cooking related.
Hunting and Gathering might be linked to scent tracking.
Cloak and Dagger will probably make your own scents harder to see, or will be combat related.

Those are the easiest ones to guess. But honestly, permadeath and all. You've got a decent chance of having your character killed before any update for those skills comes out. I'm just letting my skills languish until they announce what will do what really.