Armours protect a player by reducing incoming damage. The system is built around tiered body armour, a separate shield slot, a clothing underlayer, and an explicit multiplicative formula that determines the final damage taken. Heavier armour gives more mitigation but locks the player out of certain weapon families, which makes the choice of armour a real loadout commitment rather than a dump-stat upgrade. The most recent pre-alpha build expanded the gear-slot list to include a dedicated leg armour slot and two clothing slots.
Equipment Slots
Each Avatar carries the following protection-related slots:
Helmet slot for the head piece.
Chest Armour slot for the body piece.
Leg Armour slot for the legs.
Clothing body slot for an underlayer or civilian garment.
Clothing leg slot for the matching leg underlayer.
Shield slot for shields, including faction-specific superior shields.
Armour Tiers
Body armour is divided into Helmet, Chest, and Leg pieces, each available across four progression tiers. Tiers improve mitigation but also weight; the heaviest tiers also carry the bow and spear restriction.

Tier | Helmet (sample %) | Chest (sample %) | Legs (sample %) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Crude | 4 | 11 | 1 | Improvised, low cost; baseline protection |
Light | 6 | 24 | 4 | Skirmisher tier; allows bows and spears |
Reinforced | 13 | 58 | 8 | Restricts bows and spears |
Heavy | 16 | 64 | 10 | Maximum mitigation; restricts bows and spears |
Sample mitigation percentages are taken from the current build and are subject to balance changes between tests. Quality variants modify a piece's base mitigation upward by ten, twenty, or thirty percent depending on the quality tier rolled at craft time.
Faction Armour Sets
The most recent build introduced complete armour sets per faction, framed in devblog notation as three classes per faction:
Light: Suited for ranged weapons like bows; lets skirmishers keep their bow drawn.
Medium: Frontline-appropriate balance between mitigation and weapon flexibility.
Heavy: Maximum melee protection at the cost of bow and spear access.
These class labels overlap with the older Crude/Light/Reinforced/Heavy ladder used in the in-game UI; both naming schemes refer to the same underlying gear. Auxiliary troops now spawn with dedicated low-effectiveness armour rather than appearing unarmoured.
Clothing
Clothing covers the body and leg slots underneath armour. Common Garments and Common Bottoms are the baseline civilian wear; faction-specific clothing pieces provide additional warmth during the winter and snow conditions on Calligo, which makes the clothing layer a practical climate buffer rather than a cosmetic option. Clothing alone provides minimal protection and is intended as the underlayer beneath other armour or for non-combat roles.
Shields
Shield | Tier | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Crude Shield | Improvised | Entry-tier; cheap to replace |
Light Targe | Light | Smaller and faster than a full kite |
Iron Shield | Mid | Standard infantry shield |
Superior Ancient Shield | Faction-specific superior | Top-tier shield aligned with the Ancients |
Superior Remnant Shield | Faction-specific superior | Top-tier shield aligned with the Remnants |
Superior shields require deep Underworld resources and faction-specific crafting; see the Trade and Economy article for trade-resource feedstocks.
Mitigation Formula
Armour mitigation is multiplicative across pieces, not additive. If three armour pieces have mitigation values A, B, and C, the total damage reduction is calculated as one minus the product of (one minus each individual mitigation).
Final mitigation = 1 - ((1 - A) × (1 - B) × (1 - C))
Stacking heavy pieces therefore has diminishing returns: each successive heavy piece adds less than the one before. A Crude set with sample mitigation values of four percent, eleven percent, and one percent gives approximately fifteen percent total damage reduction; a Heavy set with sixteen, sixty-four, and ten percent gives approximately seventy-three percent.
The Heavy Armour Trade-Off
The most important rule on this page is the weapon restriction. Heavy and Reinforced armour pieces prevent the wearer from arming bows or spears. A heavy-plated melee fighter cannot also be a long-range threat without first taking off armour pieces. This rule shapes army composition: a faction needs distinct heavy infantry, light skirmishers, and dedicated archers, because no single player can be both.
Announced Change: Arrow Deflection
The most recent development update previews a rework that will let Heavy Armour deflect arrows, making heavily plated infantry far more resistant to ordinary bow fire. To keep heavy armour from becoming an unanswerable wall, the same update introduces two new weapon families as counters: the two-handed longsword for melee and the bolt-firing crossbow for range. This change is in development and has not yet landed in a live test, so the mitigation values above still describe current build behaviour.
Related Pages
Weapons
Avatar System