Penetration in Affliction inflicted by items doesn't do anything against non-deflective armor

[michael-fakefish]

From slack:

Joonas: "It turns out that afflictions can't penetrate armor unless that armor deflects projectiles."

Lauri: "it could be that the penetration was intended to only affect deflective armor, meaning e.g. shells etc. I guess it would make sense for it to also affect non-deflective armor, like some clothing. Changing this might require rebalancing. At least older monsters, for example Hammerheads, have non-deflective damage reductions. So if we make penetration affect them, they would effectively become weaker against many weapons."

Discussed in https://github.com/FakeFishGames/Barotrauma/discussions/16698

^{Originally posted by ubertpendragon November 16, 2025}

Disclaimers

• [X] I have searched the issue tracker to check if the issue has already been reported.
• [ ] My issue happened while using mods.

What happened?

Penetration="1" in Affliction doesn't do anything, you can still resist afflictions that are intended to NOT BE RESISTED by wearing clothes

Note that this only seems to affect StatusEffects in ITEMS. The Radiation Poisoning uses Penetration and it works just fine, bypassing PUCS

Confirmed with both the Ancient Weapon and a custom irradiated sausage Ancient Weapon vs Rad suit vs Naked

Reproduction steps

1. Give a bot a PUCS
2. Put another naked bot besides it
3. Boost penetration on Ancient Weapon to 1 currently <Affliction identifier="burn" amount="50" penetration="0.5" />
4. PUCS still resists the burns

Bug prevalence

Just once

Single player or multiplayer?

Single player

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No response

Version

v1.10.7.2 (Autumn Update 2025 Hotfix 4)

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No response

Which operating system did you encounter this bug on?

Windows

Relevant error messages and crash reports

No response