It seems like the main issues are (after Discord conversation):Basically I feel like these are the main choices you have for armor right now
- Super early game armor: Basically just wool as everything else is not really accessible
- Early game: Padded or leather
- Mid game: Padded, leather, iron, diamond
- Late mid game: Tanned leather, chain mail, diamond
- End game: Tanned leather, chainmail, plate
The main pain points in this list really are padded and iron
I don't think padded needs to be viable in end game, but making it viable into mid game would be good
- Wool armor is annoying to make for what it is
- Padded armor is borderline useless, because it's too expensive in early game and overtaken too early in mid-game
- Diamond armor cramps on iron armor's style
- Tanned leather is too intensive to make to be useful and doesn't quite extend into late as well as it should because of chainmail
Based on some consensus and ideas thrown around, it seems like increasing the durability of wool, padded and tanned leather would go a long way and EpicAaron noted that repairable armor might be a good way to make that happen. To help out wool in super early game, we could also easily add some wicker armor (sandals and hat), just for a bit of variety. This would give the following breakdown:
- Light armor: wicker, leather, chainmail
- Heavy armor: iron, diamond, plate
- Repairable armor: wool, padded, tanned
Note that I put chainmail in Light Armor, because it seems to be mainly an exploration armor and thus it competes more with leather and tanned than it does with the other heavy armors. Here is how repairable armors would be defined:
- Are infinitely repairable
- Have an intensive recipe to make
- Have a way to be automated
The automation part seems obvious. Tanned is already automatable, wool, wicker and padding could use a loom block, which is the obvious answer.
Given that definition, wool is sitting fine if we add repair and automation, padded will need to be cheaper, Dawnraider recommends making it a 2x2 recipe like wool and have it be "knitted" (sown) and I agree. Tanned is already sitting fine where it is, it just needs repairability to give it an interesting edge compared to chain. For repair, Dawn similarly suggested it should be a "knitting" (repair) action that is automatable. I think it's a bit much, but it's easier to try out Dawn's method and then tone it down, than it is to give players a feature we'd have to come back on later.
The only thing left in that case is iron armor, which consensus seemed to indicate that the best way to extend it is to make diamond more expensive, bringing it in-line with plate, by having it require padding and straps. This is fine, since plate is so super-late game.
And then a final tweak that is more contentious: make it so repairable and recyclable items don't break, but instead become useless and sit at 1 durability. This wouldn't affect balance in my opinion, it would just make it less annoying to have it break when you almost certainly were trying not to.