How does damage tier affect armor durability loss

[RedShifter Csongor]

Hi, this is a question I had in mind, but couldn't find an answer on the internet.
I hovever, found a very detailed explanation on the wiki on "how does damage tier affect damage recieved by the player based on the tier of their armor". 
So if that is what you are looking for, go to the wiki. The reason I wanted to know this is because most of the time my armor died before I did, or to be more precise I died because my armor broke sooner than expected. (like my wood helmet droping drom 200 to 0 durability from a single nightmare drifter strike)

Allright so I did some testing, and it seems rather simple:

– Using armor of the same tier as the attack makes armor lose as much durability as the damage the creature was trying to deal.

– Using armor of higher tier divides durability damage recieved according to the difference in tiers: so it only loses half as much durability from attacks 1 tier bellow, third as much from attacks 2 tiers bellow, and so on. (durability lost = attack power / difference in tiers + 1)

– Using armor of lower tier than the attack. (the thing everybody has been waiting for) The armor takes (3 x difference in tiers x damage) durability loss. So a wolf with an attack power of 8 and damage tier of 2 will deal 48 durability loss to wood lamellar and improvised armor, both of which have a protection tier of 0. (Because 3x2x8=48)

2 more things to add:

– First the damage recieved by the armor when attack tier was higher than armor tier, was often 1 more than expected. But not always. I don't think that single +1 is part of the equation, but rather it must be result of internal rounding and some imprecision, probably with floating point numbers. But I might be wrong.

– Second if your armor is realy low on durability and you get hit by an attack that would cause the armor to lose far more durability than it could, it loses all of its durability (obviously) but also protects you from the whole swing, not just the part for which it had enough durability.

[Byrnorthil]

Nice work! I knew durability damage was very dependent on tier diff but I didn't know exactly by how much. I'll do some independent testing and see if I can't get the wiki page updated in a few days.

[Byrnorthil]

I've done some testing and come to more conclusions:

First, the durability loss is completely unaffected by the high-tier resistance provided by plate and by the universal-tier resistance provided by "flexible" armors (bear, leather, gambesson). This may or may not be an oversight.

Second, the durability loss from a same-tier armor is not equal to incoming damage, it is half incoming damage, exactly the same as if the armor were one tier higher. This is almost certainly a bug.

EDIT: Bug report has been filed: https://github.com/anegostudios/VintageStory-Issues/issues/9457

Edited May 13 by Byrnorthil
I filed the report

[RedShifter Csongor]

On 5/13/2026 at 12:29 PM, Byrnorthil said:

Second, the durability loss from a same-tier armor is not equal to incoming damage

Thank you! When I did my testing, it was not in the most recent version, but I might have also made a mistake and did not test extensively enough. (Maybe I only did tier 0 armor with surface drifters, and 2.5 got halved then rounded up, while I thought that it just got rounded down, either way it would have ended being 2)

I did not even know about leather and bear armor having a unique trait. I did know that plate protects better against higher tier damage, but I assumed it only protects the player better, not itself.