Protection

Protection (often called armor) is a way for the player and his enemies to reduce the amount of damage they take.

Each point of protection reduces the damage received by one. This rate may be doubled if the damage type is shrapnel, or halved (rounded down) it is plasma. Note that sometimes a single firing action can result in multiple attacks (e.g. firing a chaingun); protection is applied to each bullet separately. No matter how high protection is, it will never reduce the damage below 1.

Protection from armor and boots does not apply to every source of damage. Protection from armor only applies to attacks from various weapons and explosions. Protection from boots only applies to the damage from hazardous tiles like acid and lava. There are a few sources of damage (kill levers and teleports) that don't use protection from either armor or boots. Other sources of protection, however, apply to all sources of damage.

Armor and boots also lose durability whenever the player is damaged by a source that their protection could apply to. The amount of durability lost is equivalent to the amount of damage you take with the armor on (specifically, it is the difference between unarmored damage and the protection value of the armor). Like damage, the durability lost in this way cannot be reduced below 1. Acid damage doubles the amount of durability lost (after the reduction).

Sometimes the protection value of a piece of armor changes when it is damaged. In this case, the initial protection value before the armor is damaged is still applied against the damage from the same attack that damaged the armor.

The most common sources of protection are:

• Wearing armor (only against enemy attacks)
• Wearing boots (only against hazardous terrain)
• The Tough as Nails trait