How difficult would it be to add mod specific traits? For example, I use the Adrenaline mod and it adds the traits "Adrenaline Junkie" and "Cool-Headed". The reason I ask is because, during my time in the military, I LOVED wearing all my gear (a.k.a. Full Battle Rattle). Maybe even tie it into existing traits like tough/wimp. Just a thought!

@Don't Farm Me Thanks
Thanks! It is very easy to add new traits, depending on what they do. AIU does actually have four new traits (technically, four versions of one trait) that modify how tolerant a colonist is of wearing armor. Nudists also have a large penalty to wearing armor.
I thought about adding armor tolerance modifiers to tough/wimp, but ultimately didn't include it for various reasons. I'm not against it, though, and might include it if I update the mod.

what if there was an option for weapons to also contribute to discomfort? with smaller guns incurring less penalty, etc
most people dont walk around their house with a rifle slung over their shoulder all hours of the day, haha

@Keychain
That isn't a bad idea. It would definitely incentivize sidearms, give people a reason to use handguns instead of rocket launchers. I think there is a relatively easy way to do it. It would need to be optional, of course. I'll investigate this.

happy to hear it!!! :D

Hey, I just came back to RW after a break. I still dig your mod for forcing me to not be lazy and let my pawns constantly look like Fallout fugitives in power armor all the time! I don't know if you're still active w this mod.

I frequently play with a few mods that have tactical vest alternatives, some stuffable. Also, stuffable flak vests and marine armor. I noticed that, with e.g. hyperweave/thrumbofur flak vests, the protection value skyrockets, which also massively scales up the armor discomfort.

That's mostly a personal choice problem b/c I'm the one playing with modded pawn gear. This should still apply for normally stuffable leather/textile armor anyway though.

I also noticed that in common use I tend to indefinitely leave on helmets b/c their discomfort is negligible, while leaving torso (and limb) armor off as much as possible. I don't think my gameplay choices reflect historical or modern preferences IRL, though.

In historical and modern wartime photos and personal bios or accounts, I've noticed that soldiers often value keeping their faces and heads free the most. They tend to not like having their faces stiflingly enclosed first (using centuries of low-mid end open face helmets as an example, plus accounts of how fully-armored men-at-arms in plate would often tip their visors up in the middle of battle to see better and breathe). Modern solders and police wear a vest all day; they may not like it, and it's harder to put on/off than popping a helmet.

So I thought the above factors might combine as (brainstorming here; I need to playtest these values. I'll need to take a little time to learn how to do some probably simple formula/value edits in a local copy. I'm sure I'm rehashing/relearning a lot of what you've already had to think through when you initially wrote the mod!):

Reweight body parts not by proportional size, but a fudged amount based on our interpretation of how much a helmet "feels" compared to a vest. e.g. maybe

30% Head (major area for trapping/venting heat, claustrophobia, field of view)
10% Neck (major area for trapping/venting heat, perceived mobility; tends to be included with more protective vests along with torso)
20% Torso (only 2x discomfort of something on the legs/arms separately; not enjoyable but tolerable all day in high risk work)
10% Groin/genitals (athletic cups/boxes are uncomfortable)
2.5% Shoulders
7.5% Arms
7.5% Hands (major impact on dexterity, clumsiness, thus comfort?)
10% Legs
2.5% Feet (wear boots all day)

Overall, a base cloth/steel level of protection for 30% of the body (torso, hands, feet) could be tolerable for 60% of a day. 60-70% coverage tolerable for 30% of a day. 100% coverage for 10% of a day. Armor tolerance increases this by x1.33 to x1.67 (which I think is what you currently have, at least for high armor tolerance?). Thus a "trained soldier" with high tolerance could keep a basic flak vest, boots, and gloves all day. Maybe scale this baseline to only 90-95% comfort, so that after something like 10-20 days even that much gear still should really come off, like going on R&R; or scaled for 5 days for more gameplay impact while still permitting short caravan runs. Longer caravan runs for quest/event sites would require packing the gear, resting/camping 1 tile away from the destination to armor up, then spending 1-2 days on site in full gear, then removing the armor again after an exhausting and increasingly uncomfortable battle. 5 days would be enough, such that more protective gear (up to x2 sharp protection) would still give perhaps 2.5 days of operating time, and full marine armor would give maybe .5 day -- all at the low initial level of discomfort mood hit. Max out discomfort bar impact after x2 or x3 these times, letting lightly armored pawns operate for 15 days (a full RW season), and heavily armored pawns only 1.5 days max before they hate life. Some of these thoughts overlap with what AIU2 already is doing, of course; just trying to wrap my brain around how extreme 200% sharp protection should fit in with the more normal 40-90% sharp protection, if heavily rebalanced.

The fact of the existence/character of a piece of gear should matter more than what it's made of. i.e. smaller range percentage variations caused by weight or stuff of a flak vest. All of the same flak vest items should mostly feel close to each other. A hyperweave flak vest shouldn't be more uncomfortable than steel full body medieval plate armor.

Constrained by the previous idea, increase the % importance of weight. A plasteel flak vest is 50% the weight of a steel vest, and so should be worth about a 5-10% reduction in discomfort? 2-5% might make sense, but would diminish gameplay impact. I need to play around with this. The low ranges might actually work OK.

Reduce the % importance for sharp protection. A thrumbofur or hyperweave flak vest is vastly more protective, than cloth. A vest with 2x or protection of base steel or cloth flak vest should only cause 10-20% increase in discomfort, for gameplay sake? ditto 5-10% making more sense, but has less gameplay impact.

Thrumbofur might actually INCREASE comfort IRL if it existed, and maybe you could offset the discomfort formula with optionally using e.g. JPT Soft Warm Beds softness rating for materials (steel doesn't have softness, thrumbofur is super awesome, thus making thrumbofur vests significantly more coveted than cloth or steel vests (intuitively making sense for such a valued fur resource). To avoid mod dependency, this might be approximated by giving a discomfort reduction/discount based on vanilla leather/textile cold AND hot insulation. Or alternately, weight heat insulation at twice the value of cold insulation, for "comfort". IRL, cold insulation tends to be, well, warm. But trapped heat is a big issue for wearing lots of heavy personal protection gear. Historically, knights in full plate suffered heat stroke in the middle of winter and falling snow, at the English battle of Towton!

Devilstrand is pretty darn good protection, but typically ditched in favor of thrumbofur and hyperweave. However, its high heat insulation ought to be worth a LOT more than other fur's cold insulation for reducing discomfort, thus making it still a competitive choice esp in hot desert climates. I bet soldiers IRL would love to wear devilstrand gear in the heat.

@condotierre
You've given me a lot to think about, and I don't think I can go over everything you just said, though I'll go over the major points.

It has been a while since I worked on the mod, so it took me a minute to remember why I didn't provide specific values for head- and face-coverings, and I realized it was because I planned on a future update to better support non-human anatomies. I didn't want to make too many hard-coded anatomical assumptions. I certainly think discomfort penalties to wearing helmets is very sensible otherwise.

I had noticed that with some mods, the values tended toward the absurd. That was especially true with Combat Extended which completely overhauls armor values, where the raw numbers are simply much higher. The global discomfort multiplier in the options was intended to adjust for such mods.

Right now, my assumption is that every added piece of clothing increases discomfort, even things that you might think were comfortable. Yes, a thrumbofur vest might be very comfortable, but you won't get more comfortable with every added thrumbofur vest. It may seem strange that something like an evening gown contributes to discomfort (albeit in a negligible way), but it works for game balance. For instance, imagine you could offset the discomfort of power armor by wearing really nice shoes. That just doesn't make any sense, and it's very possible to exploit.

The cold insulation factor was due to a request to make things like parkas uncomfortable - I don't play with it on myself, and I believe that heat insulation makes no difference to discomfort at all, because it is a bit ambiguous (it could mean you are wearing less to trap less heat, or you are wearing more to prevent that heat buildup in the first place. It all depends on the interpretation of the mod author).

Some materials already have discomfort factors applied to them. For example, thrumbofur should have a 20% reduction in discomfort. However, I have occasionally noticed issues when it came to stuffpower not applying to discomfort. I thought I had fixed these issues, or maybe the values just aren't high enough to make a significant difference. I have never been very satisfied with how materials influenced discomfort and maybe that is something that needs to be changed.

But yes, I generally agree that it's not perfect. I think the mod generally works as is, and I think the best way to resolve these side issues is to provide more functions so that players can resolve balance issues as they see fit.

I just wanted to reiterate the above comment's ideas that: Helmets should count for more discomfort, by about 2x or more what they currently are. And things like footwear and handwear a lot less- in fact they make us MORE comfortable quite often- wearing gloves and shoes is sometimes verrrrry important. But a helmet? it's just not a thing people ever wear comfortably all the time. Strains the neck, heat, misting, etc. I mean come on people and masks are struggling in Covid day and age.

Maybe expose those ratios a bit in the options and let us all jsut fudge the way we please?

Great mod so far!

@Nationality: I totally appreciate your design assumption, and I'm okay with how it stands, b/c your modifiers (quality, coverage, etc) balance out mostly pretty well already. Given the different intent of mod creators, it has been a pretty good one-size-fits all for modded apparel. The only items that really break the system are armor that's OP and doesn't fit the game in other ways (massively high sharp protection over 200, usually) -- but the extreme discomfort kind of balances it out.

I created a local copy and poked through your XML, but didn't find the % weighting for each body part, so I guess you had to hard code it in?

@Dizzy Ioeuy: Ha ha re: masks for COVID -- I personally think that kind of mental inability to adjust is exactly what also drives the "ate without table" mood.

Nationality already accounted for hands and feet, mostly, in his current discomfort body part weightings (if you mouse over the discomfort rating to see how coverage matters):

.02 head
.01 neck
.11 torso
.12 shoulders
.04 arms
.20 legs
.00 hands
.02 feet
(.52 total)

Based on my gameplay, my personal suggestion case A (which can be freely ignored) would be to reweight body part coverage:

.10 head
.03 neck
.10 torso
.03 shoulders
.10 arms
.10 legs
.03 hands
.03 feet

This goes a bit against Dizzy's request about hands, since I'm assigning SOME discomfort coverage weighting to hands.

I kept/increased hand/foot/neck weights. My thought was that IRL, when I wear reproduction steel plate armor or a maille standard collar or coif, I notice the constraint around my neck WAY earlier than my gauntlets, so the neck should at least equal hands/feet. Never had a chance to wear well-fitted sabatons, but I assume they can't be worse than cheap steel toed work boots, which def get uncomfortable. And gauntlets DO eventually get tiresome -- mostly in the 1-2 lbs of weight dragging on the arms.

Most game torso armor tends to roll in neck and shoulders as well (flak vest, etc.), so the neck coverage doesn't really matter for most larger apparel. On its own, affects mostly things like VAE scarf and a few modded accessories that use the neck area only.

Current AIU2 total of .24 discomfort coverage for flak vest, .28 for flak jacket, .48 for marine armor. My suggestion would make discomfort coverage for flak vest .16, flak jacket .26, .36 for marine armor. The missing discomfort is mostly transferred to the head/helmet (.02 to .10 coverage) and marine gloves/boots (I forget if these are Vanilla Apparel Expanded or pure vanilla).

Proportionally, this makes flak vests about 33% less discomfort, flak pants 50% less, marine armor 25% less discomfort, flak jackets 7% less, helmets 400% more, feet 50% more, and hands infinitely more. A helmet would matter 62.5% as much as a flak vest. Compare to current AIU2 helmet that matters 8.3% as much as a flak vest.

It also rationalizes the coverage values to two easy numbers -- either .10 for important areas, or .03 for lesser areas.

An alternate coverage weighting suggestion case B would be:

.14 head
.02 neck
.10 torso
.02 shoulders
.10 arms
.10 legs
.02 hands
.02 feet

This actively over-weights the head, brings neck and hands in line with current feet value, evens out arms and legs. Now the helmet coverage weighting is exactly equal to a flak vest, making it a coin toss whether you want to drop the helmet or the vest.

In both my suggestion cases, I kept the same total body coverage .52 sum. Jackets get penalized, while pants get the biggest proportional benefit. We'd see a lot more flak pants worn around base for no mood penalty, while upper body/head coverage should be more comparably disincentivized. Most torso (plus neck/shoulders) armor would still eventually get uncomfortable b/c with typical discomfort values, they're all over 1.00, but would take significantly longer, giving greater endurance (while keeping other AIU2 parameters the same). Same for full body armor suits like marine armor.

Most helmets would then have net final discomfort of about .15 to .25, I think, which is a lot more than the current roughly .05 values I see.

I think an argument could be made for either of my suggestions, and I tried to keep the numbers simple in relation to each other. I did heavily distort Nationality's original intent with the shoulders being so heavily weighted in the current AIU2 scheme.

As a P.S. to this long wall of text, I know you wanted to keep future compatibility open to alien humanoid races. My suggestion B could affect face coverage by optionally making the head 0.10 and adding 0.02 to the eyes (.01 per eye), 0.02 to the jaw. This would make the head alone seem less overweighted, while making eyes and jaw actually matter (per Dizzy's point: "But muh COVID mask!"). This would possibly mess with your plans for alien race support.

None of this is a complaint, since I definitely enjoy the challenge of this mod, and rotating QRF teams on call in shifts.

@condotierre

I created a local copy and poked through your XML, but didn't find the % weighting for each body part, so I guess you had to hard code it in?

To answer your question - the values are not hardcoded, they're generated by a formula and depend mostly on the size of the body part group in question. That's why helmets have a small penalty, because the size of a head is not big. Likewise, shoulders and arms are quite large. I didn't pick any of the values.
Though, there's really no reason to not expose these values in the XML. I'll look into that in the coming days.

Liking it a lot.

Suggestion: Mood penalty caps for different armors, maybe based on mass to retain mod compatibility.

Wearing for example leather armor day and night, while uncomfortable, wouldn't be the same as being encased in plate mail.

a great option would be to have a uncomfortableness slider in the outfit editor so pawns arent autoequipping devilstrand parkas and things like that which instantly decimate comfort, without having to ban parkas or devilstrand apparel or fiddle with forbidding things