ArmourReport

English：Armour　·　Items & Equipment

Kenshi's armour comes in four classes — clothing, light, medium and heavy. Coverage is the chance of being hit at all, not a damage reduction percentage, and every penalty stacks multiplicatively, so a full suit of heavy plate costs far more than the stat panel suggests.

Armour King! Armour King! Saving lives with armour! — Armour King

There are five or six numbers on a Kenshi armour panel, and at least three of them get misread by new players. Understanding coverage, cut resistance efficiency, and multiplicative penalties is worth more than wearing one extra Masterwork piece.

The four classes

Armour is divided into four categories by damage reduction and skill multipliers. This is a class property, not a material.

Each class has internal coefficients that set the resistance ceiling for the same piece under different classes:

Note that heavy armour's stealth floor is 0: low-quality heavy armour means giving up stealth entirely, and only high quality brings it back up to 0.4. Conversely, head equipment does not affect Athletics, Combat Speed or Stealth at all, and Athletics is only affected by leg and foot slots.

Material determines weight and resistance

Underneath the same class there are still material differences, and that is where weight comes from.

Taking plate as the 1× baseline, chain weighs 0.9×, leather 0.25× and cloth 0.1×; head gear weighs 1.5× and shirts only 0.5×, and shirt resistances are additionally multiplied by 0.8 across the board. Weight is calculated from coverage, with each 1% of chest coverage weighing 50% more than other body parts.

Coverage: the most misread number

Coverage is the chance that a given hit is intercepted by the armour, not the proportion of damage removed. 80% chest coverage means: an attack landing on the chest has a 20% chance of bypassing this armour entirely, and only the remaining 80% applies its resistances.

This explains why so many enemies in seemingly decent armour are easy to fight — there are big holes in their coverage. A character has seven hit locations: head, chest, stomach, both arms, both legs, and every piece has independent coverage for each.

Damage calculation: two layers of formula

Blunt

`` actual damage = raw damage × (1 − blunt resistance) × (1 − Toughness reduction) ``

Example: 100 blunt landing on the chest of a character in a Standard Plate Jacket (14% blunt resistance) with Toughness 70 (26% reduction) → 100 × 0.86 × 0.74 = 63.64 damage.

Cut: the damage that gets blocked does not vanish

Cut starts with the same formula, but the portion that is blocked is converted into blunt damage according to the "cut resistance efficiency" and goes straight into the body, ignoring every subsequent armour layer.

`` converted blunt damage = blocked cut damage × (1 − cut resistance efficiency) ``

Example: 75% cut resistance at 60% efficiency, taking 50 cut → the armour blocks 37.5 and 12.5 penetrates; of the 37.5 blocked, 40% converts to blunt (15 damage). Total taken: 12.5 cut + 15 blunt.

Layer order

When several pieces cover the same body part, they resolve layer by layer in a fixed order: head → body (torso) → legs → shirt → boots. Cut damage blocked by an earlier layer is not reduced again by the next one; only the penetrating remainder is passed along. Environmental resistances (sandstorm, acid rain, gas), by contrast, add up across pieces.

Harpoon resistance

This deals specifically with crossbow bolts and harpoons, and its unit is points, not percentages. Armour with 15 points of harpoon resistance hit by a 20-point bolt sends those 15 points through the cut resistance / efficiency pipeline, while the remaining 5 come in as unmitigated cut damage.

Armour penetration: tricks in both directions

A weapon's armour penetration multiplies directly against the target's resistance: 30% penetration against 66.5% blunt resistance leaves 46.55%.

Negative penetration (the Nodachi's −30%, for instance) nominally raises the target's resistance, but a single piece's cut resistance is hard-capped at 90%, so it is often ineffective against heavy armour. Perversely: against −30% penetration, Specialist Crab Armour (78%) takes less damage than Masterwork (90%) — penetration does not affect the "resistance → efficiency conversion", so the lower-resistance version converts less blunt.

The quality ladder

Armour, crossbows and robot limbs share one six-tier ladder, mapping to internal grade values:

Unlike weapons, armour smithing requires no research at all to reach top quality; it depends only on the Armour Smith skill (plus a little randomness), and is likewise dragged down by darkness and chest/stomach injuries. Material consumption is determined by coverage: (head + stomach + both arms + both legs) × 0.01 + chest × 0.015.

Representative gear by class

Light armour is mostly leather and mostly needs blueprints. Assassin's Rags have the most extravagant bonuses: Stealth, Crossbows and Combat Speed 1.1x, Dodge and Dexterity 1.2x, Assassination 1.3x, Melee Attack +8 and Martial Arts +6, at the cost of Melee Defence −4.

Medium armour is carried by chainmail and plate jackets. Chainmail's problem is stealth: standard Chainmail drops it straight to 0.33x. The Police Helmet has 100% coverage and 25% blunt resistance, but Perception −10 and Dodge 0.6x.

Heavy armour consists of only six helmets, seven torso pieces, three leg pieces and two pairs of boots. The Samurai Helmet (100% coverage, 52% cut resistance) and Crab Armour (Crab Raiders exclusive; 100% chest and stomach, 43% cut resistance, 90% efficiency) are the two benchmarks.

Crab Armour deserves its own mention, because its in-game description barely conceals the design motive: the goal the crab people had in making this suit was to "become more crab-like", and almost nothing else was taken into account^{[V1 0:06:15]}. The numbers do follow that line — it pushes cut and harpoon resistance to the top of the game in exchange for enormous reductions to Dexterity, Combat Speed and Stealth. Measured purely by tactical efficiency it is a bad deal; one commentator therefore argues that Crab Armour can only be understood through crab religion rather than through the armour panel^{[V1 0:06:15]}.

Penalties stack multiplicatively

A 0.9x listed on armour means the skill operates at 90% of its level (level 50 acts as 45). Penalties from multiple pieces multiply rather than adding: two 0.9x pieces come to 0.81x, a 19% loss rather than 20%. Higher quality gear mitigates part of the penalty.

Racial restrictions

Shek and Hivers cannot wear wool hats, caps or bowl helmets; Worker Drones and Princes additionally cannot wear most metal helmets or the Crab Helmet.

Faction uniforms and disguise

Some armour is flagged as a particular faction's uniform. A player character wearing it is treated as "in disguise", may be arrested for misappropriating a uniform, and will be treated as an enemy by hostile powers; only after allying with that faction may it be worn legally.

To scrub the flag: knock out a recruitable character, have him put the uniform on, and recruit him once he wakes; the flag disappears. Dyed armour can only be de-coloured by selling it and buying it back.

Further reading

• Weapons — the trade-offs between penetration, cut and blunt
• Items Overview — equipment slots and the quality ladder
• Robot Limbs — sharing the same quality ladder

Video citations

1. The Origins of the Crab RaidersHeroInHisHead