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Animal Apparel: Framework

This mod serves as a framework to allow animals to wear all kinds of apparel. By itself, this mod only enables animals to be equipped with shield belts and jump packs.

For a selection of plate, flak and cataphract armor for your animals, check out Animal Apparel: Basic Armor.


Designed to be as intuitive and vanilla-friendly as possible: Equip and manage your animals like they were normal colonists. Use 1.6s new "Force equip on"-feature to equip your pets! They're not smart enough to do it on their own.


In order to make animal apparel using this framework, here's a short primer. For examples, check out Animal Apparel: Basic Armor:

1. Add the "AnimalApparel" tag to your apparel. This will make it equipable by both colonists and tame animals. You're technically done at this point!

2. (Optional, but highly recommended for armor with visuals):
Add def-specific sprites. By default, the framework will look at the wornGraphicPath path of the apparel and append the name of the ThingDef that has it equipped. If your path, for example, is "Things/Pawn/Animal/Apparel/Body/Power" and a Thrumbo equips your armor, it will first look if there is a sprite available at "Things/Pawn/Animal/Apparel/Body/Power/Thrumbo/Thrumbo_[north/east/south].png". If not, it'll default to the actual path you used.

3. (Optional):
Add a "defName{def}" tag to limit which creatures can equip an item, i.e. "defNameElephant" to make it only equippable by elephants. If multiple "defName" requirements are added this way, any of those creatures can use the apparel

4. (Optional):
Add a mod extension like so to your ThingDef
<modExtensions>
<li Class="AnimalGear.AnimalApparelDefExtension">
<showCoverageForBodyType>QuadrupedAnimalWithPaws</showCoverageForBodyType>
</li>
</modExtensions>
This will make it so the info of the apparel will show which bodyparts it covers using the BodyDef you defined there. For example, this will make armor say that it covers back legs, paws and such, rather than referring to normal human body parts. Ideally use a BodyDef that roughly fits for all animals the apparel is intended for.

In order to make animals that are compatible with the framework:

In short, each part of an animal's BodyDef needs to have one of AnimalHead, AnimalBody or AnimalLeg as its group defined. For vanilla bodies, this is done via the patch in Patches/Bodies.xml, so if your animals use a vanilla BodyDef, should be all good. If not, check the "Compatibility" section.

Make sure that the RenderTree for your animal contains the "AnimalApparel" node. If you are using the default "Animal" PawnRenderTreeDef, nothing needs to be done. For anything else, add/patch it in, see Patches/PawnRenderTreeDef.xml


I am expecting this mod to be pretty compatible with almost every mod. If any incompatibilities are found, do let me know!

Modded animals with custom bodies
MOST custom bodies should get patched automatically, no separate patch mods required. Long story short, if the body has a head part with a def that contains "Head" (i.e. "Head" or "InsectHead" or "SnakeHead") and leg parts with a def that contains "Leg", the automatic patching should work!

If you do need to manually patch a body, you should first REMOVE any present "AnimalHead", "AnimalBody" and "AnimalLeg" parts to undo the automatic patching, then re-add them back to where they are supposed to be.

Specific Compatibility
- Big and Small Sapient Animals: Sapient animals can equip all armor designed for their feral counterparts. Sapient Thrumbos in cataphract armor, wielding Miniguns, is highly recommended.
- RPG Style Inventory: Compatible.

Almost definitely NOT compatible
- Packs Are Not Belts


While I couldn't contact the original creator of "Animal Gear", Dylan, much thanks for the specific mention that he doesn't mind someone trying to continue his mod. This mod uses an entirely different, from-scratch implementation of everything, but has the same purpose!

Owlchemist, for letting me use the sprites for his Animal Gear submod, Animal Equipment. They're implemented in Animal Apparel: Basic Armor


Combat Extended compatible?

I'll be honest, I have never even touched CE. There is a high chance this mod is compatible out of the box, but please tell me if not. I haven't explicitly tested it, since I have no idea how CE works at all.


1.5 compatibility?

Sorry, no shot there. 1.6 releases very, very soon and this mod uses features explicitly introduced by 1.6, such as the "Force equip to"-functionality


How about adding invisible armor that fits all animals, like the old Animal Gear had?

Maybe as a submod. This mod is not intended to add actual content to the game, other than letting animals equip shield belts, which, honestly, just makes sense.