Not sure when this started happening, as I mostly avoid NPC’s in my playthroughs, but if you engage a really weak NPC in combat right now - at all - you’re going to have all your clothing shredded out of existence in about 3 seconds.
This hapless and unarmed NPC I like to call ‘Slappy’ attacked 7 times in retaliation for a single Estoc blow - my character acting at normal speeds with no significant penalties.
This results in a guaranteed clothing damaging hit, even against battle-tough and reinforced gear, and as you can see instantly annihilated a fully reinforced survivor backpack in 1 second. Multiple reloads and tests of this encounter generate pretty much the same result every time. It’s like throwing my gear into a woodchipper.
The NPC was in every other respect a trivial opponent, easily dispatched.
Also a little weird that NPCs don’t generate any actual attack messages. Did they ever? I honestly forget.
This is just reminder #93 of why I never interact with NPC’s in CDDA. Not once has it ever been a useful or reasonable interaction in terms of game mechanics or logic.
Perhaps you should post your game version as if this were a bug report. “Now” can be relative to the Stable or Experimental release you’re playing.
Maybe you’re onto something new with the latest Experimental release that the devs are not aware of, or you’re using an outdated version where this was already fixed.
NPCs followers are great. They build for you and assist with crafting. Plus you can probably learn from them faster than from books (if we consider total time spent learning).
What a wonderful bug! What version are you running? I wonder if this is related to them throwing underwear at you, which I think we fixed this recently.
Experimental. Looks like this game is currently on 2021-07-10-1214, a good bit older than I realized. Man my work schedule has been messing with my sense of time lately.
Wait what? How in the world does a bug like that happen? Sounds a heck of a lot like someone just snuck that in, given the baffling humor that might produce.
