OK, I give up. What the heck is the usefulness of Survival? The tool tip says it affects the metabolizing of food and the ability to live in harsh climates. As for food, yeah, it may help a little bit but nothing worth wasting attribute points on. And regarding harsh climates, it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. To test that, I increased my survival to 4 perks and went into the volcano. It didn’t seem to have any effect on my heat resist.
Granted, the second perk is useful if you’re out gathering and the 4th perk is OK (if you want to put that many points into Survival), but it’s easier to carry Set potions to deal with poisons and put points into something that really is useful.
Being able to eat any raw meat without food poisoning turns pieces of dead guys into health regen.
Being able to carve up said dead guy in half the time/half the strokes while getting all his materials saves effort and durability.
As soon as I’m comfortably up in Vitality (among other things), I sink a bunch of levels into Survival. At this point I’m usually into steel/hardened steel tools, and the repair costs can become quite high. If I’m building, I’m gathering in preparation: every 5-hit tree becomes 3 hits, every 4-hit stone becomes 2 hits. You gather the same resources, and it costs half as much on your tools.
Finally, with Hard Worker perk, it’s possible to go for armor runs (thick hide) with much less exposure. Carving up a big beast like the King Elk is two strokes and done, and you’re back on the move. I have sniped people’s hide with this perk because you can run in, skin and jet while they’re distracted.
I only use survival for farming, usually just tier 2 to preserve my tools. I tried the tier 3 perk for harvesting animals, but it doesn’t seem worth it. Other than that, I think it’s a useless stat.
SirBowen has added an explanation of costs and a few notes to the wiki page - Any testing for usefulness of the attributes and when you might want to get them is welcome!
The stat itself is near useless, IMO. You get hungry and thirsty less quickly. Big deal.
Supposedly it will also help with temperature extremes, though as I understand it it is or was broken and/or disabled for a while. I don’t know if that was ever fixed or not.
Some of the perks however, are handy to have. But, naturally, you’ll have to balance whether or not those are worth it to you for the cost in attribute points.