Armor Expanded

Why this mod?

Night City is built on the assumption that if you matter enough to get shot at, you've already got chrome under your skin. Vanilla CP2077 gives subdermal armor only to Elite and Boss NPCs via a rarity gate that zeroes it on everyone else — leaving roughly 80% of all characters, including elite mercs and dangerous gang lieutenants, with zero armor. The result is that armor penetration becomes a meaningless stat and every fight collapses into a flat damage race. This mod removes that gate and replaces it with a three-factor formula that scales armor to each NPC's faction, rarity, and combat archetype.

How It Works

Armor is calculated as:

Armor = CubeRoot( faction × rarity × archetype ) × 200   →   clamp The geometric mean prevents any single weak factor from collapsing the result. A low-rarity gang grunt gets modest protection; an Arasaka Elite Heavy gets serious chrome. Every factor is independently tunable in the mod settings.

Faction reflects military capacity and supply chain — Arasaka and Militech field top-tier gear, gangs work with what they can afford, civilians and bystanders get minimal baseline protection.

Rarity is read from the TweakDB character record, not the unreliable NPCRarity stat, so minibosses are correctly rated.

Archetype captures combat role — a T3 Heavy takes hits for a reason; a T1 netrunner does not.

[]Removes the vanilla rarity gate — Normal, Weak, and Trash NPCs are no longer zeroed out; roughly 80% of characters that previously had no armor now have contextually appropriate protection[/]

[]Restores armor penetration as a meaningful stat — with NPCs actually carrying armor, armor pen builds, quickhacks, and weapon mods that strip it have real combat value again[/]

[]Three-factor weighted formula with geometric mean scaling — 8 rarities, 39 factions, and 30 combat archetypes individually researched and weighted against lore, each exposed as a tunable setting with design reasoning in the description[/]

[]20 armor tiers from Trace/Minimal/Low − to Military/Apex/Maximum — scanner shows a single, accurate ability entry per NPC[/]