Chrome Plating

- Introduction -

In vanilla armor is a flat stat for which you keep adding chrome and then the number grows. Yay. And the more you add to it, the more damage you mitigate. Kind of... Because in the background the game changes how your armor is actually calculated. As your level goes up there is a downwards stair which adjusts the armor effectiveness. On top of this there are hard coded limits for how much armor you can have. This is both confusing and bad design as it makes it a pointless number, which is confusing to use, and have no real game play value. Erk.

Chrome Plating takes a lot of inspiration from Armor Up, but in a way takes it a bit further. First: we disconnect the stupid armor effectiveness stair. Then we remove the limits. And finally we make it act like a pool: a resource which actually depletes over time as it is used.

Your armor is still calculated based on your chrome - if a piece of chrome adds 100 armor then that's what you'll get added to the pool. Other mods can change this number or they can add their own chrome and Chrome Plating will pick it up and use it. The armor bar in the Cyberware tab is taken over and now displays your max armor and the filler number is the current armor in raw numbers. The tooltip will give you more in-depth information. In-game on the HUD you will see a new percentage next to your health: that's your current armor integrity.

For damage absorption then. All chrome armor at full integrity mitigates 90% of incoming damage by default, but the armor takes full damage from incoming shots. If you've got an NPC shooting you with a round that makes 50 damage, and you've got 100 raw armor value, then your armor is now going to sit at ~50% integrity, and the mitigation of incoming damage falls with it. So you can be a tank, but it won't last forever.

To fix your armor integrity you have five options: 1) go to a Ripperdoc and pay, 2) go to a Ripperdoc and buy injectors that heal a certain amount over time, 3) buy a Tool Hand and repair it yourself at safehouses or in vehicles, 4) sleep and allow for nanobots to fix your armor in the background, 5) get a Nanomend Implant which works on its own as you stroll through the city doing... whatever you'll be doing that isn't being in combat.

All of this is of course adjustable in the Modsettings, what kind of DV release would this be if there weren't a ton of options!

But wait, there's... more. Yeah, there is.

Clothing items with armor now act like... you guessed it, armor! You can put on a vest and the tooltip will tell you what it's armor is. Clothing armor is capped to 30% mitigation, and also acts like a pool. The more armor pieces you put on, the larger your pool gets but the mitigation stays at max 30%.

Oh, and the regular clothes get shredded too now (yes, I went there). Optional, off by defa