Mechanics

Source and Cost

Mechanics is a multi-level skill, where all levels can be acquired at School of Thought:

Requires Automation Levels:

10 Washer, 10 Bolt, 2 Electrum Small Gear, 1 Aluminum Medium Gear
49 Sulfuric Acid
600 Malt (Raw), 600 Malt (Burnt)
400 Rope, 400 Slate
2000 Gold Wire
20 Cuttable Amethyst, 20 Cuttable Garnet, 20 Cuttable Lapis , 20 Cuttable Turquoise
4 Small Steam Engine, 4 Medium Steam Engine, 4 Large Steam Engine, 4 High Pressure Steam Engine

Use

Allows tuning of automated machinery, including a Flax Gin and a Brick Machine as well as all machines unlocked through Steam Mechanics, to make the machinery run faster - and at times, more efficiently. Note that two machines, the Steam Shovel and the Automatic Sawmill are considered to become *worse* when tuned - primarily the Steam Shovel. Exercise caution when tuning a Steam Shovel and be sure you are willing to make the trade-off involved.

Each level of mechanics skill increases the chance that you will be able to tune a machine to the next level. Here is a model that roughly describes how it seems to work:

There are 49 keys (just a guess, we do not know this). Each level of Mechanics gives you a different key out of those 49, up to 7 different keys at Mechanics 7. At any given tuning level, there are one or more keys that can tune the machine to the next level, at tuning level 0 there seems to be many keys that work, and then fewer and fewer keys can tune to the next level as the machine is successfully tuned higher. Everytime you try to tune a machine, one of your keys will randomly be chosen and tried. This means several things:

If you have Mechanics 1, you have exactly one key. If you fail to tune a machine, you will never be able to tune it in the future, unless you either get a new key (Mechanics 2 or more) or somebody else tunes it one level, when you can try once again. So having Mechanics 1 makes life simple, try a machine once per tuning level, either it works, or it doesn't, no need for retries.
Even if you have Mechanics 7, you will probably not be able to tune a particular machine at its current level, since you are still missing a lot of keys and only some work.
If you have Mechanics 2 or more, there is no guarantee that you will ever try all of your keys on a certain machine, you can be very unlucky and try all keys except the one that would work for many, many tries. This is called "bad luck" and seems to happen surprisingly often. Or at least that is how it feels. Keep trying, it's not unrealistic to try 20-30 times with Mechanics 7 and a machine with tuning level 3 to get it successfully tuned to 4.
Don't expect to be able to tune your machines by yourself, invite your friends to tune yours, and try to tune theirs. Spreading out attempts help a lot, even if you only have Mechanics 1.

Clarification of high rank mechanics

At higher levels of mechanics, you have a larger set of keys. As such this means that you should *eventually* be able to perform more tunings.

However, as only one key appears to be selected per attempt it can take many more attempts than at lower levels to tune a specific building.