Add "wetness" penalty to clothes

[koteko]

You are in the coldest days of winter. The "cold bar" is empty. You should stay indoor like the many game guides say, treasuring your firewood, but you don't care: you are fully clothed in deer with woollen footrags, mittens and cowl. You could dip into a frozen river and come back up, and instead of freezing to death you'd warm back to optimal.

Why? Because the warm system of clothes (which is simple but works very well, usually!) fails to take "wetness" into account.

Proposal

• Every wearable piece must have two additional fields: wetness and wet-warmth. When wetness is full, the effective warmth is equal to the wet-warmth. When wetness is empty, the effective warmth is the usual "warmth" field for this item. If willing to go the extra mile, effective warmth decreases linearly with wetness, with minimum being the "wet-warmth" and maximum the base warmth.
• Dipping increases the wetness very rapidly for some materials, and less for others. Linen/nettle/wool should go instantaneously to maximum wetness. Fur would only be half-wet if you go out immediately. Leather and, special case, seal fur, go 25% wet at every turn: so getting in water and coming out immediately only makes you 25% wet. I would also make the wet-warmth closer to the effective warmth for seal fur and leather (as well as iron/mail/lamellar, for all the good it'd do).
• Rain and snow make you wet little by little, proportionally to the rain/snow strength and the material of the cloth, like above.
• Ambient temperatures reduces the wetness with time, proportionally. Changing clothes to dry your wet ones by the fire/in your smokehouse becomes a thing.

This would make seal fur great again (as well as leather), excluding the coldest months of winter, because of its reliability under wet conditions. Your nice reindeer suite is still great but you need to keep covered, as one supposed ancient Finns did.

Extra happiness if the first to get wet is the outer layer (the last worn) for each body part, so that having a seal overcoat over your bear/stag suite makes a lot of sense.

[Privateer]

Some other reads on this topic from the past;
Sweating and clothing http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/ar/t6607.htm
Ice Cold Improvements (Dev thread) http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/index.php?showtopic=6524

[Theroleplayer]

The roleplayer likes this idea.

I have always been annoyed at how my ridiculous amount of fuzzy layers will protect me from cold even when I'm supposed to be soaking wet, my bear fur overcoat is already good enough, being waterproof is just ridiculous. I think wetness should also add a bit of weight to the the clothing, or at least increase encumbrance. I mean wet fur coats are pretty hard to move around in.

[koteko]

Thanks Privateer, although they are a bit off-mark. My suggestion involves adding another state to clothes, not modifying the relatively simple (but arguably quite realistic right now) drowning dynamic/freezing in cold water.

You can see something like this in "The Long Dark", a survival 3D game. Wet clothes can get frozen and both things reduce a lot the warming potential of those cloth pieces. This can rapidly kill you if you stroll around under rain/snow if you don't see shelter and light a fire. It's quite amazingly immersive, really.

[PALU]

Snow doesn't make you damp unless the temperature is close to thawing, as the clothing insulates the snow from the body warmth. You can just brush snow off you clothes when it's cold enough (a few degrees below zero) until you get indoors, of course. Getting wet from the inside due to sweating is a much greater threat (which I guess Privateer's first link explains).
Rain is more of a pain as "natural" textiles tend to soak up water. Wool and rain is not a great combination...

[koteko]

Snow doesn't make you damp unless the temperature is close to thawing, as the clothing insulates the snow from the body warmth. You can just brush snow off you clothes when it's cold enough (a few degrees below zero) until you get indoors, of course. Getting wet from the inside due to sweating is a much greater threat (which I guess Privateer's first link explains).

When the fur is wet, it insulates much less (there's another topic by me that shows picture from research done on this topic. Even polar bear fur has a huge decrease in insulation capacity when wet).

So there must some cycle: the snow melts very slowly on your clothes (because insulation is never perfect), but this wetness in turn makes the fur less insulating, thus speeding the snow-melting. I have no clue if the melted snow would freeze again faster than the body temperature can melt it, though.

Anyway, one could just exclude snow from this to make it still interesting, I believe, for all the times the temperature is above freezing and for when one enters the water.

I still think that, purely on gameplay terms, having to protect yourself from snow during the coldest weeks of winter (especially when coupled with wind) is extremely compelling. Much more interesting than any sweating penalty that requires you to fine tune your clothing, which is very tedious in such a game (as Sami also says in the first topic linked by Privateer).

Plus weatherlore would actually make sense.. skiis wouldn't be enough to travel in winter, you'd have to know if there's a storm coming.

[JEB Davis]

I really hope Sami can work the clothing wetness into the game in his usual wizardly way.
This would be a very nice realism enhancement and would make winters dangerous (as they should be).

[PALU]

If the temperature is just a few degrees below zero the warmth from the body that penetrates through the clothing dissipates before it can melt the snow. If it's cold and you get water onto the clothes (such as e.g. drops from an exposed face melting snow, not soaking) the water freezes, so you'd get pellets of ice clinging to the hairs of the pelt.
Note that the situation is different if you have snow that's already wet at around zero temperature. That's the worst weather, in my view: wet and miserable.

I agree that it's probably a bad idea to implement sweating penalties due to the tedium of having to adjust the clothing all the time (all work; no fun). My comment wasn't intended to be takes as a suggestion to implement it, only a comment as to what's worse in reality.

[Theroleplayer]

I just realised, although they aren't clothes, shouldn't Kotas be effected by wetness too, they are made from fur after all, shouldn't they leak in the rain when made from reindeer furs and the like? I couldn't find any information on what the sami did to waterproof their tents, so I'm not sure how much of a problem it was.

[koteko]

I just realised, although they aren't clothes, shouldn't Kotas be effected by wetness too, they are made from fur after all, shouldn't they leak in the rain when made from reindeer furs and the like? I couldn't find any information on what the sami did to waterproof their tents, so I'm not sure how much of a problem it was.

I think this adds an additional layer to the problem, so although interesting I would exclude it from this particular suggestion.

We know that tanned hides (and leathers!) are not strictly waterproof (I've done some research and the finding was consistent. It needs to be treated with eg sprayed silicon to be waterproof). Their "proofing" comes from the hairs, but the more the hide is wet the less it insulates and eventually too much water will rot it/soak it.

In gameplay terms, this would mean that furs and leathers should be damaged, slowly, by rain and immersion. This would affect Kotas too, thus requiring a change of covers.

I suggest opening a new suggestion if interested - I personally find it much too damaging to the gameplay (clothes are already quickly ruined in fights).

[koteko]

Incidentally, the above would also make seal furs the best one for Kotas (and overcoats, as said), because they are the ones that retain most insulation when soaked wet (thus it can be assumed that they are also more waterproof).

[koteko]

From Art of Siberia, a very cool book, traditional winter clothing was clearly reindeer furs (like URW) with some precious fox and wolf garments (considered very warm, contrarily to URW), while summer clothing was bear, walrus and seal. Interestingly they also made a coat of walrus intestinal membrane for sea travels or in high humidity, because it's waterproof. Pretty cool!

Adding wetness would allow mods to invent more complicate cloth pieces with an improved "wetness factor". Eg, tarred overcoat anyone?

[PALU]

Macintosh is a much later invention than the UrW time line...

I doubt clothes rotting due to being wet is much of a practical issue, as they wear out due to wear long before that unless they're constantly wet. Clothes starting to rot will stink as well.

Various migratory peoples have managed to make fur/hide based dwellings that keep the interior sufficiently dry, so I don't think that's an insurmountable problem. Again, I think wear (if torn down and rebuilt frequently) and deterioration due to the sun is a greater problem.

[koteko]

Macintosh is a much later invention than the UrW time line...

My brain might be slow today, but.. what do you mean by that?

[Theroleplayer]

Fair points all.. Also, what does Macintosh have to do with anything PALU?