I disagree for the simple fact that I'm getting good utility out of the ability to have a pawn have a thing in their inventory without actually wearing it.

Here's just three examples -
Let's picture a "rifleman" type setup with whatever general day to day gear you want him to have. On top of that daily wear, let's say you want them to have a gas mask, just in case, but you don't want them to wear it *all the time*. Why? That -30% breathing and -50% eating really slows your pawn down and that would be a big penalty to take for something you don't need 99% of the time. The solution is to assign the gas mask via the loadout instead of the outfit. Since they have it in their inventory, you can just order them to drop it and force equip only when they will need it.

Let's imagine a power armor wearing melee pawn. Generally, these guys want to have shield belts but there are big situational advantages to having a jump pack instead and you can't wear both at the same time. Again, the solution is to just have the pawn pick up both via their loadout and you can then just freely switch between whichever item you want as the situation dictates because they're carrying both.

Imagine you have your guy that's responsible for negotiating. You want him to generally wear a +social impact hat for his daily business of talking to prisoners/trading/whatever but you also want him to have a helmet in his inventory for when ♥♥♥♥ goes down. The solution is to assign the social hat to him via apparel and assign the helmet via the loadout. This way, you can order him to put on his helmet at a moment's notice.


I'm sure you can think of more uses for this if you put your mind to it.

ok, well i say i agree. I made this when i thought that if you have a piece of gear in their loadout, that means they should equip that. I realize now that it just adds the item to their inventory, which i agree, has a big use. I had a problem where my prisoners would escape and then get shot by passing colonists, and because bullets are much more lethal now, they would generally just die. So i needed some kind of non-lethal pawn that is generally not far from the prison, and i had the perfect candidate. A high social, high farming character, so i made her the police officer. Gave her a stun baton, a bean bag shotgun, and a glock 18 (just in case). And it worked super well. But i could do better. Updated the loadout to carry a tear gas launcher, and to carry a gas mask, and now i dont have a problem with prison breaks, because she just tear gasses them and beats em down . I do think there should be an option when setting items in a loadout that allows you to choose between "carry" and "force equip" just to make things easier when assigning many pawns to one loadout (ie all of my riflemen) but im learning more about this mod and things are making more sense now.