VoxelMaster

@LadyWYT thank you for the detailed answer! That said, I'm already aware about the difference in tiers, and I know how hard nightmare creatures hit. In the same chain of combats I've faced off against a couple other nightmare-class creatures, I think two nightmare drifters and another nightmare shiver. None of them dealt as much damage as that last shiver to me though (maybe 5HP or so) - if my armor hadn't broken down, I don't think I would have died when I did. This is really just a question about durability, not about which armors allow me to tank damage the best. PS: I guess I do have one question about armors ^^ Would you say steel chainmail is better than bronze plate against nightmare creatures? It's certainly not cheap either, but much more affordable than full plate armor.

I've just finished crafting my first proper armor (i.e. not leather or bear armor), namely a set of bismuth bronze plate armor. Thinking I was finally ready to do some spelunking without getting one- or two-shot by any nightmare-level creatures I come across, I went underground to do some exploring (though it ended up more like fighting with a side of exploring). Unfortunately, however, that endeavour was suddenly cut short by at least 40% of my HP bar evaporating when getting hit from a nightmare shiver in the middle of a brawl with some drifters. To my surprise, it turns out that was because my armor breast piece had already dropped from 900 to zero durability, which seems very odd. Sure, I'd been fighting for a while, but given the amount of time it takes to craft the darn thing, I would expect a bit more lifetime. For reference how long I spent underground, I used up around 250 durability of my steel flax and ended up with around 30 flax fiber (having looted nearly everything I killed). I think the number of enemies was a bit more than double that. Either way, now I'm curious how armor durability actually works. Clearly it's not 1 hit = 1 durability, because I'm certain I didn't get hit over 9000, uh, 900 times (plus whatever durability is missing from head & leg armor). Is it 1 durability per damage blocked? Does it depend on the damage tier? Kind of bummed out about this. If it's gonna be more or less the same for steel plate, I don't know if I really want to invest the insane amount of time it takes to acquire and refine the amount of iron required (especially the long carburization process), plus the crafting time for the chain and plates themselves. Also, according to the wiki, the chances for each piece to be selected upon getting hit are head = 20%, body = 50%, and legs = 30%. However, while my chest piece is broken (0/900), my helmet is still at 732/900 and my leg armor at at 759/900. That the helmet has lost more durability than the legs despite a supposedly lower chance is probably just coincidence, but it seems very strange to me that the chest piece is completely obliterated, while the rest of the armor (which, combined, should have the same chance of being hit as the chest) has only lost 309 durability, 3x less than what the chest lost. And that's not even counting any hits I took while the chest was already busted, nor that I used a shield for several of the hits I took (though not the majority). Even if hits from nightmare creatures take ff more durability than other hits, it seems unlikely that the distribution is this uneven. (Note: I do have mods installed, but none that should mess with armor)