Revision 9

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.

Each piece carries two mitigation values. Damage Mitigation reduces incoming health damage, while Stability Mitigation reduces how much a hit chips at the wearer's stability bar, which matters most against crushing weapons. Crude and Light pieces are leather and need no attribute; Reinforced pieces are iron and require Melee Combat 3, and Heavy iron pieces require Melee Combat 5. The figures 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.

Clothing pieces are the layer that handles cold. A Common Garment provides Temperature Mitigation 50 plus a small amount of damage and stability mitigation (4 and 2), and Common Bottoms provide Temperature Mitigation 25 (with 2 damage and 1 stability). The temperature value is what keeps a player warm in winter and snow; the protective values are minor, which is why clothing is worn under armour rather than instead of it.

Shields

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.

Arrow Deflection and Light-Projectile Resistance

The most recent build shipped the arrow-deflection rework that earlier updates had previewed. Heavy body armour now carries a Can Deflect Light Projectiles property: arrows and javelins have a chance to be deflected, with the chance highest when the hit lands from the front and lowest from behind. Both Reinforced and Heavy body armour also gain Not Staggered By Light Projectiles, so arrow and javelin hits no longer stagger a plated fighter. The trade-off is a new Vulnerable to Piercing property on Heavy armour, which is why the two-handed Longsword, the Spear line, and other Piercing weapon families are the intended melee answer to heavy infantry. The mitigation values above still describe current build behaviour. The bolt-firing Crossbow that was lined up as the ranged counter is still previewed and not yet in a live test.

MS 67 Cost and Supply Changes

The MS 67 build cut the leather bill on the two mid sets. Every piece of the Light set costs one less Thin Leather, and every piece of the Reinforced set costs one less Thick Leather. Across a full set that is a noticeable saving on the tanning chain, and it lowers the cost of putting a skirmisher line in the field.

Auxiliary equipment stopped appearing on its own in the same build. Auxiliary kits are now crafted by players at the Town Workshop using Public Silver, in three flavours covering swordsmen, spearmen and bowmen, each supplying the gear for its role. Kitting out auxiliaries is therefore a deliberate spend from the town's shared purse rather than something the settlement does automatically. See Avatar System for how auxiliaries themselves are recruited and fed.

Related Pages

• Weapons

• Combat

• Sieges

• Crafting and Resources

• Avatar System