Armor and Damage

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A hit doesn’t automatically mean “full damage.” Once a shot has cleared the accuracy, dodge, and critical checks, the target’s final line of defense comes into play — armor and resistances. This is where it’s decided how much harm actually reaches health, and sometimes whether any reaches it at all.

Two layers of defense: DT and DR

Every target — your character and your enemies alike — has a defense built from two distinct layers that work in sequence:

• DT (absorption, the “cut”) is a flat number subtracted from incoming damage. It is deducted once for a single hit; burst damage is calculated as described below.
• DR (resistance, a percentage) is a percentage taken from the attack’s original damage. The harder the blow, the more absolute points DR removes.

They’re calculated together with a simple formula: damage removed = DT + DR × damage / 100, and final damage = damage minus what was removed, but never below 20% of one hit’s damage (and never below one). First the flat DT is subtracted, then percentage DR kicks in based on the original value.

The practical takeaway: DT is especially brutal against weak, frequent hits — a small shot can get almost entirely swallowed by flat absorption. DR, on the other hand, scales and “bites off” the same fraction from a weak hit and a powerful one alike.

How DT works against a burst

A burst’s landed rounds against one target are calculated together. With the baseline setting, each additional hit adds 0.25 to the number of DT deductions, which is then rounded to a whole number. Five landed rounds therefore pay DT twice, and twenty pay it six times. A burst loses less to flat absorption than the same number of separate shots, but does not pass through for free.

Resistances by damage type

Defense is not equal against all threats. Characters and armor have a separate damage threshold and resistance for each damage type. There are six types:

• Physical — ordinary bullets, blows, claws; the basis of most encounters.
• Cold — direct cold damage.
• Radiation.
• Poison.
• Energy — laser weapons, for example.
• Fire.

An attack uses the threshold and resistance for its damage type: the character’s own protection plus the contribution of worn armor. That is why armor that holds up brilliantly against bullets may do almost nothing against cold, fire, energy, poison, or radiation. Think about your gear ahead of time for different threats.

An example from the gear. Raider armor has a physical threshold of 16 and resistance of 12%; for fire and energy, its threshold is 1 and resistance is 0%. The KS-2 set has a physical threshold of 7 and resistance of 22%. Compare both values and the relevant damage type, rather than the armor’s appearance alone.

How armor adds to your defense

Worn armor adds threshold and resistance: its threshold and resistance are added to the character’s own values for the corresponding damage type. The character’s own values are floored at zero. Negative resistance on the armor itself follows a different rule: it is a vulnerability to that type and can increase the damage taken.

There’s a flip side too: broken armor offers no protection at all — until the item is repaired, it provides zero DT and DR. Wear is sneaky here: protection stays full right up to the breakage threshold, and then the broken armor is automatically moved to your inventory, and you can only put it back on after a repair.

Armor penetration

Armor penetration reduces positive DT and DR from worn armor, including an equipped armor part. Below the configured full-penetration threshold, protection is reduced in proportion to the penetration score; reaching the threshold removes the armor’s positive contribution completely. Armor-piercing ammunition and forced penetration from certain abilities immediately bypass all positive equipment protection.

The boundary matters: penetration does not remove the character’s own protection. It also leaves negative armor values intact: vulnerability to a damage type remains even with full penetration. Penetration helps against thick armor, but does not leave the target defenseless.

A brief AP tag appears above the target for partial or full penetration when worn armor or an equipped armor part provides positive DT or DR against that damage type. The tag does not mean all of the target’s protection is gone. It does not appear without relevant equipment protection, or for damage that simply ignores resistances.

Armor reduces damage, it does not cancel it

Armor alone does not make you invulnerable: for an ordinary nonzero hit, the baseline DT and DR calculation preserves a fifth of one hit’s damage, rounded down but never below one point. This floor applies at the resistance stage; the final damage-taken modifier is applied afterward. Flat absorption used to swallow a weak blow whole, so good enough armor erased entire families of enemies from the game: they did not deal little damage, they dealt none at all. Better armor now raises how much you survive instead of switching off part of the world.

The share is measured against one hit, not the whole burst: otherwise a long burst would take its floor from the total and walk through heavy armor as if it were a rounding error. A weak tool against dense defense is still a weak tool, though — if a fight feels endless, it is usually not your character’s nerve but the choice: a different damage type, armor-piercing rounds, or simply a more powerful weapon.

There’s also a final multiplier: after resistances are calculated, the target’s overall “damage taken” modifier is applied to the damage (it, too, never pushes the result below zero). This applies even to attacks that ignore resistances entirely.

Armor is a trade-off

Protection isn’t armor’s only property. Gear can affect other things as well: camouflage, speed, warmth. The “Raider Armor,” for instance, has a camouflage bonus and a built-in heat source, but its dark colors mark you as a bandit. So choosing armor is always a balance between protection, mobility, stealth, and warmth — not just a “take less damage” button.

The core principle of armor and damage in Last Frontier is simple: think ahead about which threat awaits you. One thing against bullets, another against fire and energy, a third against poison and radiation. And against an enemy’s dense armor, prepare penetration or the right damage type before the firefight even begins.