How do weapon works?

[Khwarizmi]

Hi guys. Just a simple question. If you have knee spikes and hand spikes does that add/work on if you have a melee weapon equip? Or no equipped melee weapon for the pawn to use it??

Edit: If you equip a normal sword will the pawn not use those body upgrades to yeet enemy?

[Frin24]

I think its mostly based on damage type.
From weaponized body part damage to an actual wielded weapon.

Though not sure.

[PanzerJug]

The weapon works very simply. Shot and done.

[ronw]

True as simple as that

[Mr_Fission]

Okay, it's sort of cryptic, but here's what I saw in the patch notes:

Source: https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Version/1.1.2610

"Implemented category-based melee verb selection. Previously, pawns would select which melee verb to use simply by a weighted random selection according to the power of their different verbs. However, this created an incoherency where adding, for example, a knee spike to a pawn with a longsword would actually make him worse, since the knee spike is less powerful than the longsword but now he is more likely to choose a verb besides the longsword. The new verb category system places each verb in one of three categories – best, mid, and worst. It then chooses randomly between best (75% of the time) and mid (25% of the time). So adding a knee spike to a longsword wielder will not make him use the longsword less often; rather it will replace his fists as the mid-tier verb and improve his damage per second."

This patch note doesn't really clarify that well what's actually going on behind the scenes.  But from what I can make of it, melee attacks have three categories of power, "best", "mid" and "worst.  Adding an implanted weapon *should*, if I am reading this essentially-incoherent patch note correctly, upgrade one of those three categories to a higher-damage attack.  So that even if you're wielding a high DPS weapon, you will ultimately still see an increase in overall damage.