oh my god, I am ABSOLUTELY the wrong person to ask about nitty gritty build stuff because I stopped playing the game once I was hired as an artist on it. It's been... so long. You probably want @dbaum, who from what I recall did most of the skills in the game.
Since I can't answer your question I will instead include an anecdote: at one point there was a proposal to let you make grilled cheese sandwiches by throwing the requisite items on the grill props that spawn on some of the floors. This was discarded because: feature creep. But it was a very Dredmor idea.