Oxygen Not Included Attributes Guide
Currently, there are 9 attributes in the game, the most important is probably “Learning“. This attribute determines how fast your dupe completes a research and gains skill level (increase attribute). As it said, smarter dupes will gain more attributes faster. The downside of this is your dupe will be raising their decor & food expectations faster too. Each time they gain a level, their expectation will also be rising, that’s why it’s important to pick dupes with the lowest expectation possible. To counter the side effect, you need to catch up with their necessity, or they will be constantly in stress.
Digging & construction are also good attributes to start with. Dig & construct faster means you can build your colony faster. Athletics might seem good because it makes your dupes run faster, but this can be trained quite easily and at first, your colony will be quite cramped anyway, so it’s kind of more important in the mid-late game. (extra note: Athletics don’t make dupe generate more power in the hamster wheel).
Other attributes to consider are Creativity & Strength.
Creativity plays an important role in handling stress via decor rating (art building). But this attribute won’t be straight needed at first 10-20 cycles, so you don’t have to take high Creativity dupe from the start. It’s your choice. Creativity can be trained but hard even for high learning dupes.
Strength is unique because you can’t train this now. Like in other games, this determines how much a dupe can carry. This is important for your courier or cart-dupe, since they can carry more, and they are quite efficient for sweep & delivery jobs.
Cooking can be useful if you depend a lot on the Micromusher (for food), but seriously you shouldn’t depend on it all that much.
Medicine and tinkering are not important now, you can pretty much ignore them.