Rimworld Clothing Guide: Making, Selling, Repairing

Clothing protects the colonists from heat and cold, and provides some damage resistanse. There are different armor attributes, such as Sharp, Blunt and Heat, and these attributes are affected by the clothing material.

There are different clothing types with different defensive bonuses for body parts; for example, t-shirts won’t protect the arms, while button down shirts (at least they offer some protection).

Devilstrand is one of the best choices for protection, and wool is the most efficient for temperature insulation.

The duster is probably the best clothing; a wool duster gives some good protection from heat and cold, and the devilstrand one is ideal for warrior pawns.

A good combo for protection would be: a superior devilstrand duster and a superior button-down shirt and pants will give you 52% of armor. You can add a cowboy hat on top of that.

How to get Cloth?

For that you need to create a growing zone and plant cotton there. Harvesting it will yield cloth.

Creating a growing zone should be one of the first things you do in the game

To craft clothes, besides the material cost, you will need a tailoring bench, and a powered one works faster.

If you are very short on resources, build a crafting spot and set it to craft tribal wear. While it is far from being decent clothing, it works without eating up many resources.

There is also leather, furs or wool for clothing, which can be harvested from animals. When tailored, leather gives the same stats as cloth. The skins of your enemies can also be used for that purpose.

Keep in mind that different animals give different amounts of leather - you won’t get much from a rat. To see how much you need, look at the Bill options in the Tailoring table or bench.

To make a piece of clothing you need enough quantity of a single leather type; combining different types won’t work. In this sense, growing cotton can be more efficient for clothing, though such clothes will be the least protective and least durable.

If you got some rare pieces of leather you can’t do much with, just sell them.

Domesticated muffalos and alpacas can be a good source of wool, which gives good cold/heat insulation stats to your clothing.

If you want better stats, go for synthread, hyperthread or devilstrand - you can grow the latter, but it takes a long time. Nevertheless, a devilstrand duster will give you more protection against blades and bullets than a flak jacket (source). It is very expensive and since it offers high damage resists, it can work as armor.

Best Clothing in Rimworld

Button-down Shirt

These are the first choice for the upper body clothing; you can go for T-shirts if you are short on the material supply, but a T-shirt has lower cold insulation - 20%, compared to a button-down shirt with 26% - and does not protect the arms of your pawns.

Tuque or Cowboy Hat

The hat choice will depend on the climate where your colony is. With this being said, the tuques are good for colder regions with their 50% cold insulation, while cowboy hats are great for warmer biomes, since they offer 50% hot insulation.

Besides these stats, cowboy hats give additional 10% bonus for social interactions, but you can also craft a Bowler Hat with 15% bonus, and equip it when needed.

If you manage to get some Hyperweave to make these, you can even use them instead of a simple helmet.

Duster

This is the best clothing item in all of Rimworld due to its balanced cold and heat insulation, full body cover and the best armor rating.

Duster is not the best for cold insulation (Parkas and Jackets are better here), yet it gives you enough insulation for most hot and cold biomes, and the said armor rating is higher than the one of Parkas and Jackets.

Of course, a duster made of devilstrand or hyperweave becomes probably the most efficient armor. It severe climates, use Alpaca Wool, Chinchilla fur or even Thrumbofur for crafting dusters.

Best Clothing to Sell in Rimworld

Generally speaking, there is no best clothing for trading; some stuff is more labor intensive, which makes it more expensive (such as dusters), and some stuff can be produced quickly and sold cheaply, which can be useful if you’ve got some large stock of a particular material you can spare.

If your production line is strong, craft dusters, since they have the highest materials to value reward; jackets get the second place.

I’ve found an example of the efficiency ratio for selling cloth:

Duster = 3.1875

Jacket = 3

Parka = 2.75

Cowboy hat = 2.48

How to Repair Clothes in Rimworld

In the vanilla game you can fix your tattered apparel only with mods. Without them it’s not possible.

To remove a cloth form your pawn, click the down arrow to drop the article off the person and let it rot outside; your pawns will go choose something else. Or you can sell them also.

For the organizing purposes, you can create two zones: one for the items with the best conditions, and the other one for something you want to get rid of.

To avoid keeping the vast warehouses of garments, you can use MendAndRecycle mod. You can find some nice tips for using it on reddit.