Reinforcing Clothing: Padding vs Armoring

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Something came to me while I was repairing and reinforcing my clothing on a new character: there’s really not much point in ‘reinforcing’ clothing. It just adds to the durability, but regular clothes are just going to get shredded anyway. beyond the durability there isn’t much point, because nothing else changes.

Wouldn’t thicker clothing be warmer, though? And wouldn’t it provide maybe only marginally more protection than normal?

And then I thought about how if you’re sufficient enough with tailoring that you should be able to determine what you reinforce your clothing with. Say you start in winter and you’ve got enough felt material on hand to make a little yarn with, but no actual clothes, and you’re short on time anyway and don’t want to slowly freeze while you make mittens or something. So instead of that you decide that, because you’re talented enough with cloth, that you are going to use that felt to warm up your clothes: you reinforce, which takes a rag, and then get another option that determines if you want to armor or pad this clothing.

Let’s say you decided to reinforce your cloak, because that covers a lot. Because it’s cold and oyu want to be warmer, you sew felt cloth into your cloak, and while the stats don’t change (besides maybe a sliver of extra blunt damage reduction), the warmth goes up by, say, 10. Or 15. Fur would be ideal, but all you had was felt and you made the best of it. Now your torso and a bunch of other things are warm enough to get out of the blue and you can take a little less damage from getting clubbed in the whatever.

Alternatively, you’re well off and decide you’re going to reinforce your kelvar vest. High enough mechanics or whatever and you can sew in some scrap metal for some makeshift armor plate, which doesn’t do anything except increase the stats (and the weight by some degree), using maybe a little more Kelvar than normally enforcing. And if you’ve got the tailoring skill, you could sew some fur in there too, because having to wear like 6 things to be both safe and warm can be quite cumbersome.

It’s something I could definitely see happening. A resourceful survivor would take what’s lying around and perhaps it’s not enough to make a full article in itself; so they just patch it onto whatever they do have and use that. Probably looks a bit ridiculous and a little awkward but it works as intended.

Not sure how this would work in code. On display it’d be something along the lines of ‘T-shirt padded with [padding material]’ or ‘reinforced with [reinforcing material]’. Otherwise it would simply be a generic “reinforced” clothing item and wouldn’t provide much more than current reinforcing does.

Is this a feasible idea? Cuz I think it’d be great to have those kinds of possibilities.

2

Closest I’ve heard is weapon-mods-for-clothing, and that code’s bassackwards enough that we’d really rather not expand it.

So no, not a good idea w/o an overhaul. And we’re currently in the sort-out from one now.

3
And wouldn't it provide maybe only marginally more protection than normal?

Not sure if I get you here, but reinforcing a piece of clothing gives it one extra “hp” and also increases all protectional values by 50% (roughly). That’s not that much for your pair of armwarmers, but it adds up.

4

Whilst your ideas are reasonable, there is a huge point in reinforcing clothing. As previously stated, it will increase the overall protection of the clothing (unless it’s something worthless like a tanktop or a bra), and it also increases your tailoring skill whilst doing it at pretty much all levels I think.

It saves a lot of hassle too. If your sleeveless trenchcoat for example gets bashed up when it isn’t reinforced, it’ll most likely rip and tear. If it is reinforced, the chances of it not getting damaged is higher (I think), and even if it does get damaged, it’ll be easier to repair it.

5

The kind of thing you’re describing is currently represented by modified tailoring recipes, i.e. the survivor suits.
doing it in a freeform way like you’re describing would be a nightmare to balance, because at some point that additional bulk should increase encumbrance, also we need some way of determining which clothes can accept which additions.
when you get into the details it becomes rather complicated.

6

Setting aside what it would be used for, a generic mod system could be a very neat idea. I can easily imagine few places in which the recipe count could easily grow into huge amounts. Say, adding attachment rails or other parts from existing guns to handmade guns, reinforcing clothing, food(there’s already a tad too many of those tbh), and the architecture could probably be adapted to support stuff like batteries or magazines. Not a small idea, but definitely something to consider for when items will be getting some overhauling done.

7

To reiterate, the gun mod system is terrible and we do not want to use it anywhere else.
“setting aside what it’s used for” isn’t a good idea, because there’s very likely a much simpler way to achieve the same goal.

8

That’s not what I am suggesting. I am aware of horribleness of the gun mod system, what I am suggesting is a more generic one, that can be defined with JSON, with just some basic properties, and otherwise flags for the game’s code.

9

It is worth noting that all clothing with at least 1 protection can be improved by reinforcing. Arm warmers literally get their protection stats tripled when reinforced, from 1/1 bash/cut to 3/3. While this does wear off when it is damaged, that is where layering becomes useful.
If all clothing parts are fitted, and only taking into account torso:
One long underwear top
One kevlar vest
A pair of arm warmers
Longsleeve shirt
Hoodie
Trenchcoat
Fanny pack
Messenger bag
Elbow pads

All of that can be worn simoultaneously with 0 encumrbance. Reinforcing each gives a huge boost to general protection against bites and such, as your clothes last longer and are harder to get damaged in their highest level of repair.

10

Those were two separate comments. Oone was, “please don’t consider the gunmod system as a model for anything” and was not directed at you.
The second was directed at you, and points out that “setting aside” what it’s used for and trying to implement a system that supports"anything" is a terrible idea. You should match the solution to a problem, not speculatively implement things that you might be able to use for things.
That having been said, we already have a system for adding flags to items at runtime.