How does clothing encumbrance work?

poweridler · 2013-08-04T13:23:32.000Z

So I was playing around with my clothing selection today and was getting strange results, and I can’t quite figure out why. When I wear 2 fitted cargo shorts (-1 encumbrance each) I come out at 0 encumbrance to legs, and the formula displays as

(2) -2+2=0

But when I wear a fitted cargo shorts and a fitted long underwear, I come out at -2 encumbrance to legs, and the formula displays as

(1) -2+0=-2

I get weird results on the torso and on the hands as well. I just don’t get what’s going on here. It takes 5 items on the torso to get the number on the right to 2, but I can get a 2 on the hands with just leather gloves and fingerless gloves- but NOT with glove liners and leather gloves.

Most confusing of all, glove liners + leather gloves gives me

(1) 0+0=0

but glove liners + fingerless gloves gives me

(1) -1+1=0

I just don’t get it. There’s no consistency. Can someone who knows what’s going on here explain it to me?

Mrnocamera · 2013-08-04T13:32:30.000Z

Numbers in brackets are number of items on that bodypart, the + and - number is the encumbrance, and the second number is the… No clue. I thought it was warmth, then I realized that long underwear is warm, as well as cargo shorts. And the last number is the total encumbrance.

Sheb · 2013-08-04T14:12:18.000Z

Normally, the first number is the sum of the clothes’ encumbrance, the second is the encumbrance due to the number of clothing (0.5 per clothing, rounded down). Not sure why your results are weird like that, may be a bug.

youtoo · 2013-08-04T17:21:20.000Z

I dont know absolute specific but the following is essential

press ‘@’ and then tab. highlight the different encumbrances and see what it says. by wearing 2 backpacks you can quickly get to -6 or more dodge and melee. Arm encumbrance really hurts archery (And probably guns now). leg encumbrance makes you slower.

they dont have absolute specific details on the wiki nor do they have specific details about movement points. however, the above part is really critical to combat. it generally best to take off backpacks and if you are then overburdened drop stuff before going into melee.

poweridler · 2013-08-04T19:26:16.000Z

So is there anyone who understands the strange behavior of the second number? I understand that it’s affected by the number of items you are wearing covering that slot, but again, not in a consistent way. A few things are clear, a single item can be equipped for “free” with regards to the second number, and which slot is in question has a big effect (most items past the first one on the torso seem to only contribute 0.5, but on the legs everything that I’ve tried other than long underwear contributes 2). However I still don’t understand what the rules are for different body parts, what’s going on with items like glove liners and long underwear, or why fingerless gloves + glove liners displays a different formula than leather gloves + glove liners.

There are clearly some pretty big effects at play here (4 times as much encumbrance for an item on the legs as opposed to on the torso), but I haven’t seen an explanation that makes sense…

Sheb · 2013-08-05T07:28:43.000Z

The wiki gives the following formula:

T=E + ((N-1)*(1/2))

With T the total encumbrance of a slot, N the total number of item in a slot and E the some of item’s encumbrance.

Now, for the gloves case, fingerless got Enc. 0, Leather got 1. So this explain the first number’s difference. As for the second number… I don’t know.

youtoo · 2013-08-05T15:34:24.000Z

@sheb in ‘@’ he is referring to the 2 green numbers. That calculation gives the final number. I dont know what those numbers mean or how they work. We probably need to look at the code. Id be interested in understanding movement points and quick better in general.

eternalflame · 2013-08-05T15:53:15.000Z

The formula presented by Sheb is for torso encumbrance only, as far as I can see. Other bodyparts suffer far greater penalties for multiple pieces of clothing. Now it might be a bug but I assume it is a game balance issue.

kevin.granade · 2013-08-05T16:22:39.000Z

We accumulated some cruft in encumbrance that ended up making things even more confusing, the good news is I just simplified them a bit.

The overall idea is that each article of clothing adds its encumber stat to each body part it covers, and also a “layer”. The number of layers also contributes to encumbrance, depending on the body part.
For the torso, it’s (layers - 1) / 2. Basically one more point of encumber for every other layer, and the first layer doesn’t count.
For all other body parts, it’s two points of encumber per layer not counting the first.

This arguably needs rebalancing, but I’m just being informative here, so I won’t get into that.

We added a “fitted” property a while back that decreases the encumbrance of an article of clothing by one, which ended up with some clothes giving negative encumbrance, which leads to wacky things like people wearing multiple negative-enc articles of clothing to offset the other things they wear.

A change I JUST made (over the weekend) was to rework this such that the fitted property will decrease the encumbrance of an item by one, unless it’s already 0, at which point it cancells the layering for that item instead. So now it (should) work as intended, in that very low-enc items will not contribute to encumbrance at all, but they won’t offset encumbrance from other items.