Trash Divining

Trash Divining

	Customs and Folklore
	150 sp
	21 Intelligence
	Customs_TrashDivining

Whenever you rifle through trash, there's a 5% chance you piece together clues and learn a random secret.

Trash Divining adds a small chance that the player character discovers a random secret when they rifle through trash. Creatures can use the Rifle through Trash ability after they learn the Scavenger skill in the Tinkering skill tree.

Important: Learn Scavenger first. Trash Divining is useless without Scavenger.

Advantages and disadvantages

This section is opinion-based. Your mileage may vary.

Advantages

• Normally the player must spend reputation, use hard-to-find cooking ingredients, or just get lucky to find secrets. Trash Divining significantly increases the player's opportunities to find secrets with minimal effort.
• Trash Divining can find Historic Sites, the snapjaw who wields Stopsvalinn, or the location of The Ruin of House Isner. These secrets are high-value secrets that are difficult to find otherwise.
• Balance the relatively low percentage chance by rifling in bulk. Discover a lot of secrets (and scrap) at places with a lot of trash, like rust bogs or The Cloaca.

Disadvantages

• Trash Divining is a very expensive skill to learn and use. To use Trash Divining, the player character must first have Tinkering, Scavenger, and Customs and Folklore. Assuming that the player character has none of these skills to start, the total skill point cost for Trash Divining is 500 skill points: 100 for Tinkering, 100 for Scavenger, 150 for Customs and Folklore, and 150 for Trash Divining.
• The Intelligence requirement (21) is relatively high, so only some builds will have access to it in the early to midgame.
• The majority of secrets in the game are of dubious use to the player. Trash Divining is just as likely to reveal the location of a Historic Site as it is to reveal random gossip.

Factions that can teach Trash Divining

• pariahs