Armor & Damage
Understanding armor and damage types is essential for both building durable ships and designing effective weapons.
Damage Types
All damage in StarMade is split across three types:
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Kinetic | Physical impact; most effective against physical structures |
| Heat | Thermal damage; bypasses some resistances |
| EM | Electromagnetic; most effective against electronics and shields |
Different weapons deal different mixes of these types. The Damage Beam, for example, is heavily EM (≈50% EM, ≈33% Heat, ≈17% Kinetic), making it more effective against shield-heavy targets. Effect blocks connected to a weapon computer can shift its damage type distribution.
Armor Blocks
Basic Armor blocks provide structural protection. They come in multiple colours (Grey, White, Dark Grey, Black, and many more) and shapes (full block, wedge, corner, hepta, tetra, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 slab) for hull construction.
All armour variants have the same combat stats per block; the shape variants are purely for aesthetics and hull smoothing.
Higher-tier armor blocks offer greater HP per block but are more expensive to craft.
How Armor Works
Armor uses an exponential formula to determine how much damage passes through:
Damage dealt = D² / (A³ + D)
Where D = incoming damage per shot and A = total armor HP in the path of the shot.
Key takeaways
- Small hits are almost completely absorbed. A wall of armor is nearly impenetrable against many weak shots.
- Massive single hits penetrate. A weapon doing more than 20× the armor block's HP bypasses it entirely via overpenetration.
- Depth doesn't multiply — armor blocks in a line each absorb independently; there is no stacking bonus for wall thickness beyond the sum of individual block HP.
- Non-armor blocks (hull, system blocks) are unprotected but overpenetration still requires at least 2,500 damage per shot to punch through them directly.
Practical Implications
| Situation | Best approach |
|---|---|
| Defending against many small rapid-fire hits | Thick armor wall; LMG and sustained beams struggle |
| Defending against high-damage burst weapons | Harder to block; armor is bypassed at high D |
| Attacking armored ships | Use high-damage burst combos (Charge Cannon, Bomb, Artillery) to reach overpenetration threshold |
| Attacking unarmored ships | Any weapon works; shields are the main barrier |
Effect Blocks and Damage Type Shifting
Linking effect blocks to a weapon computer shifts the weapon's Kinetic/Heat/EM distribution. Different armor tiers and special block types may have varying resistances to each damage type — this is exposed in the block properties panel in build mode.
Effect block combinations and exact resistances are configurable on servers and may vary.