Refactor clothing taint to be temporary.

[Zombull]

It just doesn't make sense for a pawn of good mental health to have such high anxiety over wearing the apparel and armor that someone died in. A neurotic pawn, perhaps. But most pawns shouldn't care, or at least not for very long. Eventually, they would get over it and come to think of the apparel or armor as their own. In fact, it probably wouldn't even be anxiety about the equipment to begin with, but would be a form of survivor's guilt instead - and only if it were a fellow colonist who died wearing the gear.

Also, it makes no sense to not be able to sell such "tainted" gear. The trader shouldn't know or care that it was removed from a corpse.

So my suggestion is that the tainted flag on clothing:
- Should have an expiration timer.
- Should be considered expired immediately if taken from an enemy corpse.
- Should have no effect when expired, unless the pawn is neurotic (or similar traits).
- Should have no effect on trade.
- Should have no effect on pawns joining the colony after the death.

[5thHorseman]

I'm pretty sure this is a balance thing. Clothes are too valuable (both to the colony and to traders) to just get for free from every raid.

I agree though that it makes no real sense.

[AileTheAlien]

I think a better way to balance it, would be to damage items that you get off of dead raiders. There's two reasons for that. First, it's not a hard binary thing - item damage goes in percentages, affecting value and (I believe) ability the whole way. Secondly, it makes more sense story-wise; You just shot that raider full of lead - of course his armor is doing to be damaged / full of holes!

The other fix for this, is to just cheat. It's a bit of a sledge-hammer approach, but so is the mythical "taint". Just have raiders get better items than what you find on them. Or roll a dice for whether or not to drop the items at all. "Oh no, your turrets shot holes in that raider's bottles of go-juice! It's spilled onto the ground, wasted." There's dice-rolls and unequalness in the game already; I see no reason to keep combat / the items of other humans sacrosanct.

[Adamiks]

I understand it's for the sake of balance, but this whole mechanic is rather poorly done. There are few ways to balance it without making it straight up dumb, which is the case with dead man's apparel.

[Klomster]

I think it's more weird how easy it is to dodge it.
Since i can shoot down a raider, she's bleeding out, i strip her leaving her on the ground.
So the thing with "ah the clothes are bloody" is still a thing logically.
Then i leave that poor sod to die and voila! Nice clothes no one cares where they came from.

Sure, to code that this wouldn't be a logical fallacy would be near impossible. But i think the solution is the option of dismantling the clothes to materials. Getting less from dead mans apparel because less of it is in prime condition due to damages and stains.

Since if you think about it one step further.
You are living in a colony, life is actually kinda fine. You get food, a room with a bed and help out during the day.
And luckily, James and Clara are ex-military, and when the going gets rough, they protect the colony.
However, there's a shortage on cloth, but it's fine Clara sais, just wear this.

It's a shirt, with literal bullet holes and dried blood on it.
You manage to get most of the blood out, but it's still stained, and you patch up the holes, but you still know they were BULLET holes.
It will constantly nag at you.

So i say the penalty makes sense. It's more of a question of how much the penalty should be.
And if you honestly feel that "Oh but i wouldn't care about some blood and bullet holes." you are either 1) Lying. 2) Have the Psycopath trait IRL and therefore don't mind the dead mans clothing penalty.
But in general, YES, people will be uncomfortable with wearing the apparel of dead people.

The trader thing is obviously more on the clothing being stained and tarnished combined with raw game balance.
Since if you could just sell all the clothing from all those raiders without a penalty, you'd never be short on cash, you'd never need to sew clothing since there's a steady stream of clothes showing up.
A massive part of the crafting and stats would be kinda 'Eh, why bother' since higher quality clothes don't actually give that much at the moment honestly.
It's expensive / takes a lot of time / short supply, to get sewing materials from buying, growing, skinning in that order.
If a whole section of the game becomes moot, just because of hordes of raiders it's a bit sad on all that work honestly.

I remember when the dead mans clothing tag was introduced and thought "Oh yeah, that makes sense" and just rolled with it.
Sure it can be a bit of a hassle but there are workarounds.

IIRC, some traders pay more for dead mans clothing as well. And if not, i'd say that a "Questionable collector" trader should even pay more for dead mans clothing.
Seeing that it has a "history" and is a "genuine article" from a rimworld.

[Adamiks]

It does make sense in theory but practically, it doesn't, because you can just strip everyone just before they die, and suddenly, that bloodied and bullet holes filled t-shirt is perfectly fine to wear.

I'd honestly prefer if it was just done in a "fuck logic, it's for balance" sort of a way than this. For example, all clothing from raiders simply has lower market price and stats after you strip them. Illogical? Yes. But it wouldn't bug me as much as this realistic-wanna-be feature that is actually pretty dumb.

[Zombull]

Here's another approach... Remove the "Strip" command from corpses. Replace it with "Search and Salvage". Give it a chance of salvaging wearable clothing, but a greater chance of just salvaging a handful of whatever material the clothing or armor is made from. Also, leave all the pawn's items on the corpse instead of dropping them to the ground on death. Put everything on the ground when Search and Salvage is done instead.