Hmm. So at 2 seconds per shot thats 8500 seconds or 141 minutes. Thats doable.
Problem being that the abomination only has 800 health so will only eat about 200 arrows before dying on you.
So you will need about 21 abominations to pull this off.

Maybe you can get a bunch of shamans and harpoon them into a pit where they heal each other and you can plink away for hours.

Originally posted by CuriosityKillsTheMADCat:

"They patched that out but didn’t give us buildable objects we can train on? The current leveling thing just makes no sense"

It currently seems that there is no object intended for weapon training/practice in the game. IMHO, high skill levels are not that important for progressing in the game, nor are they necessary to have fun with the game. Also, please consider that the game is only about "half-finished" in the moment so really high skill levels may not be necessary in its current state in order to progress.

Any mob that has spawners works for weapons/block levelling, not really seeing a need for an additional buildable object to fill that role.
Start with Greydwarves/Skellies if you want to grind skills on a low tier character, move on to other mobs after if you want to be hitting things more than once before they die.

I also made a new character and attempted shooting multiple non creature items with the bow around my base, including the smelter, and received 0 xp.

Originally posted by M'Hael:

I also made a new character and attempted shooting multiple non creature items with the bow around my base, including the smelter, and received 0 xp.

As it should be.

what I do to level bow fast is the following:

1-make a ton of wooden arrows, arrow damage has no incidence on the xp you get for archery skill
2-build 3 fine wood poles side by side, these will be your targets
3-shoot at poles until you run out of arrows
4-craft new arrows and fix the poles
5-repeat and rince

best tactic I found so far. enjoy your new skillups :-)

Short version, he cheated.

If you had a training partner I believe you can still raise skills by beating on each other. Even with PVP disabled I think the hits still count.

If they dont, you can just use terrible weapons with decent armor values/health foods and raise skills that way.

Originally posted by joemama1512:

If you had a training partner I believe you can still raise skills by beating on each other. Even with PVP disabled I think the hits still count.

They don't, not since they patched out the cheap training tricks.

Hmm. Well I guess you can go find an abomination then raise ground and plink away at it for hours with a crud bow and wooden arrows. With its billion health plus .25 pierce multiplier you should get a LOT of target practice out of that. :-)

Originally posted by joemama1512:

Hmm. Well I guess you can go find an abomination then raise ground and plink away at it for hours with a crud bow and wooden arrows. With its billion health plus .25 pierce multiplier you should get a LOT of target practice out of that. :-)

You also get a lot more xp for an enemy than from an inanimate object.. or you should or it's seriously bugged then ha ha.

The bow skill gets 1.5exp per creature hit, so with the 50% rested bonus you are looking at 2.25exp per creature hit. If I am doing the math right, to legitimately level the bow skill from 40 to 80, you would have to fire and hit roughly 4,250 times. You can check out the skills page on the wiki for more details.

Maybe your friend found some kind of exploit to level his weapon skill(s) up by doing what you described but generally (at least i think so) IronGate patched the abilitiy to raise your combat skills by attacking inanimate objects (trees, rocks, etc.) out a long while ago.
Maybe it still works if you attack player-build objects that have hitpoints and that can be destroyed (i dont know that as i dont use such exploits).

I wouldn't call it a "cheat" if no code was changed or altered mechanics etc.
I would call it an "exploit" as it seems against what the devs want since they removed the ability to level up shooting rocks.

No one is going to care honestly. They are only cheating themselves out of the proper game experience. But that is up to them as much as using the console or mods.

Personally I don't do it and call it cheese. Although I am not above cheesing bosses, I don't want to do it for my skills. I like to analyse progression systems in games and that would ruin it for me.

Originally posted by CuriosityKillsTheMADCat:

Maybe your friend found some kind of exploit to level his weapon skill(s) up by doing what you described but generally (at least i think so) IronGate patched the abilitiy to raise your combat skills by attacking inanimate objects (trees, rocks, etc.) out a long while ago.
Maybe it still works if you attack player-build objects that have hitpoints and that can be destroyed (i dont know that as i dont use such exploits).

They patched that out but didn’t give us buildable objects we can train on? The current leveling thing just makes no sense

"They patched that out but didn’t give us buildable objects we can train on? The current leveling thing just makes no sense"

It currently seems that there is no object intended for weapon training/practice in the game. IMHO, high skill levels are not that important for progressing in the game, nor are they necessary to have fun with the game. Also, please consider that the game is only about "half-finished" in the moment so really high skill levels may not be necessary in its current state in order to progress.