Repairs and armour

§What armour does

By default armour never makes you harder to hit. Every blow that lands is cut by the armour on the body part it struck. How much it cuts depends on the piece’s tier and on the kind of weapon (edged, blunt or fist). The full table is in Armour damage taken; for example, at normal condition steel plate lets about 78% of an edged blow through, ebony plate 50% and daedric plate 34%. Worn armour lets more through, up to a cap. See Combat basics and Which rules apply.

A piece’s tier is its armour value halved and rounded down. The armour value comes from the material: leather 3, chain 6, and for plate iron 7, steel 9, silver 9, elven 11, dwarven 13, mithril 15, adamantium 15, ebony 17, orcish 19, daedric 21. See Materials.

Shields are worth 1 (buckler), 2 (round), 3 (kite) or 4 (tower) in the classic armour value, but in a fight a shield uses its own material’s tier and can block a blow outright. See Buckler and the other shields.

§Condition

Weapons and armour wear down. A worn piece cuts less damage (armour) or hits weaker (your weapon), and a piece worn to nothing stops working until repaired. In this game every weapon type wears from one shared pool of 1,600 condition points, multiplied by its material’s ladder (×1 iron up to ×8 daedric), so a dagger is no more fragile than a warhammer of the same material.

§Smith repairs

• A smith repairs a piece, and the repair cost calculator prices it, for 0.6 of its base value times the fraction of condition it is missing (at least 1), run through the shop’s price (which doubles it at an average shop and moves with the shop’s quality and the region’s price index) and any guild discount, then divided by three: this game charges a third of that price. So a little damage is cheap and a wrecked piece costs more.
• An undamaged piece is free, and the smith will say it does not need repair.
• Enchanted and magic items cannot be repaired.
• Repairs take game time: one day per 1,000 missing condition points, and never less than a day.

§Repair kits

• A smith-made Repair Kit (one ingot of any metal and one Cured Leather) mends a quarter of a piece’s condition, once.
• A field kit, found in dungeon piles and on enemies and never crafted, mends 15%.
• No kit mends a piece past three quarters of its condition. A Superior or Masterwork kit reaches nine tenths.

So a kit is for getting out of a dungeon; a smith’s bench is for getting back to full. The recipe is in Crafting and professions.