Clothing

Gear

Clothes are wearing gear that provide cover of nudity for those who feel shame, as well as protection from weather and climate. Tribalwear can be crafted at a crafting spot and every other piece at the tailor's workbench. These items can be assigned and managed on the Outfits screen from the Assign screen which provides a way to exclude colonists from wearing damaged apparel that causes mood debuffs. Armor, is another kind of item that offers protection from harm. Clothing can be sold to traders at 70% market price.

If you don't have enough warm clothing for every colonist, an alert letter will show up "Need warm clothes". Non-nudists that don't have sufficient coverage will result in an alert letter saying "Unhappy Nudity". Items left exposed with no roof will slowly deteriorate until it disintegrates without a trace. Once a piece reaches zero percent, it will wear away to nothing.

Damaged apparel

Clothing when worn suffers wear and tear and loses hit points over time. Apparel becomes damaged when the wearer is injured from violence, and takes the damage it absorbs as armor.

A colonist wearing badly damaged apparel will have one of the following thoughts. These debuffs do not stack, only one is given based on the apparel with the worst condition.

HP	Thought	Debuff
20% - 50%	"Wearing worn-out apparel"	-3
below 20%	"Wearing tattered apparel"	-5

Nudity

Colonists whose legs are not covered by clothing will be considered naked and will receive the appropriate mood penalties. Colonists not happy about nudity will cause an alert to trigger prompting the player to seek suitable clothing.

Clothing Values

Clothing can provide all kinds of armor. While not nearly as effective as proper armor in this regard, clothing can offer a modicum of protection for all body parts, without affecting movement or workspeed and often while adding to armor worn above/below. However some of them can work like a light form of armor, including providing armor associated penalties.

They can also provide Heat Resistance and Cold Resistance, wich is something armor does not generally provide in relevant amounts.

The formula of every value before Item Hitpoints is (ItemValue + Material Offset) * Material Multiplier * Quality Multiplier. Picking the right base item with the Right Multiplier is often more important then any offsets.

A number of Items have Positive Social Impact. These are irrespective of Material and Quality.

Material

If clothes make the man, materials make the clothes. Picking the right material for any piece of clothing is far from Arbitrary and the default setting will just have nearly all materials checked. The algorythm by wich the crafter picks the material to use is unkown.

Cloth

Cloth is the most "boring" Material of all. It has no offsets or multipleirs of any kind. That makes it suiteable as a baseline to compare everything else against. It also can be easily farmed from Plants.

Leathers

Leathers offer pretty good defenses and are easy to aquire. Leather types are defined by the Animal they come from. All Leathers seem to use the same Leather base values, however especially thermal resistancces and Marketvalue are often overriden on a per-speceies level (going from x0.5 to 2.0 with no apparent Rhyme or reason). On armor values they are almsot entirely interchangeable.

Wools

Wool can only be aquired from Domestic Animals, and has high Thermal Multpliers. That can make them both the best and the worst clothing for Thermal Resistance. It does not offer relevant protection.

Care most be taken to not mix up the Wool and Leather from a animal.

Advanced Fabrics

Sporting both Offsets and decent Multipleirs, these are often the best material to make protective not-quite Armor from. Thermal resistances are neither a strenght nor a weakness, making them good replacements for cloth.

Protection

Sharp and Blunt Armor

Most Items have identical Armor values for Sharp and Blunt protection and most materials have the same offsets and multipliers against both. See [Armor] on picking the right amounts.

However there are a few Exceptions like Dusters and Parkas, wich work more like Armor and thus provide better Sharp Protection. In the same way, advanced Fabrics tend to offer more protection by adding a offset and high Multiplier.

Heat Armor

Not to be mistaken for Heat Resistance, this provides protection against fire Damage, including natural fires and fire based weapons.

Materials that have high Heat Resistence also tend to have high Fire ones, but the best ones are oddly among the leathers.

Electric Armor

Electric Armor is no longer in use by the game. Electrical attacks now Stun applicatable targerts (like Mechanoids), rather then dealing Physical damage.

Cold Resistance

Practically all clothing has some level of Cold Resistance. A deeply negative value is often the goal. Even Normal quality Cloth Jacket, Pants and Button-Down Shirt easily provide -22°C Cold Resistance, often being enough for most biomes with plantgrowth if added to a pawns base value. And all that without interfering with movement speed or relevant parts of the Armor. But Wool can be used as material and easily tripple that value to -66°C.

Only for really extreme cases, specialized clothing like a Duster or even Parka might be nessesary. And a wool Parka can easily offer -120°C on it's own, but at a cost to Workspeed, Movement Speed and -9°C Heat Resistance (see there).

Heat Resistance

Not overheating is a lot more tricky then staying Warm, as there is often a lot more heat sources then cold ones. Generally a high positive value is preferable with a low positive being a big issue even with normal indoor temperatures.

Clothing here can swing into any of 3 directions:

Neutral. This clothing provides no positive or negative heat resistance. The material multipliers are irrelevant at least for this Metric. This is very common.
Keeps Cool/Positive Heat Resistance (+X °C). These clothing keep cool/increase the upper thermal treshold. Mostly these are associated with the more "Western" attire, but some odd cases like Helmets provide it too. Cowboy Hat and Duster provide +22 °C. If you have such a Item, you want to maximize the value using a high Material Multiplier using Wool, in particular Alpalca or Camel wool.
negative heat resistance(-X°C). This one makes a character more prone to overheating and should always be considered a negatvie value to be avoided. Items with exceptional Cold Resistance tend to have this too, so for this case the material becomes a tricky question: If you want to maximise Cold Protection, that usually involves also ending up with a high Heat Multiplier.

Deadmans Apparel

Clothing stripped from corpses is considered dead man's apparel and is noted with a D. Dead man's apparel status applies a 10% multiplier to its market value, greatly reducing its sell cost. Colonists wearing dead man's apparel gain a persistent mood debuff as long as they're wearing it.

Number of items	Debuff
1	-3
2	-5
3	-7
4+	-8

Clothing Layers

Main articles: Apparel layers and Table of Human Body Part Groups

Each item of apparel or utility gear is worn on a specific location of the wearer's body. That location is determined by two things:

The body part groups it covers.
The layer or layers it occupies.

Apparel combinations are limited by layer and coverage - an item cannot be worn with another item that covers the same body parts and on the same layer. Thus, items covering the same parts but on different layers are compatible, as are items on the same layer but with no overlap in coverage. Items that cover multiple layers conflict with items on all layers.

Layers are also used to determine the order in which armor calculations are performed, with the outermost layer's armor applying first, and progressing through the layers until the attack is stopped or there are no more layers.

The layers, from innermost to outermost, are:

Skin: The closest layer to the body, and mostly used for apparel below the head.
Middle: The second closest layer to the body, and mostly used for apparel below the head.
Outer: The third layer from the body, and mostly used for apparel below the head. Note that it will be displayed on the pawn's sprite above all other layers, even though it is considered below the following layers for actual mechanical effects.
Belt: Technically the fourth layer. A distinct layer for utility items to allow them to be worn alongside any other apparel but not with each other.
Headgear: The fifth layer, and used for headwear. There are several items that cover body parts typically covered by the other layers however, in which case this will be above them.
Eyes: The outermost layer. A distinct layer only used for the blindfold to allow it to be worn alongside headwear.

Which body parts currently have items that occupy each of the layers is shown in the table on the below; layers and body parts which are not currently used by gear were omitted. As such, the hands and feet which are not covered by any apparel or any layer, are omitted.

Body Part Group	Coverage	Skin	Middle	Outer	Headgear	Eyes	Belt
Full Head	Head, Ears, Nose, Jaw, Eyes				×
Upper Head	Head, Ears				×
Eyes	Eyes					×
Shoulders	Left & Right Shoulders	×	×	×
Arms	Left & Right Arm	×	×	×
Torso	Torso	×	×	×
Waist	Waist						×
Neck	Neck	×	×	×	×
Legs	Left & Right Leg	×	×	×