Suit and equipment: what you wear on your body

What you survive outside depends on a few items: suit, helmet, back item and belt. This article puts them side by side, with the values from Stationeers 0.2.6428. How canisters and filters work inside the suit is covered in its own article, Breathing air in the suit: canisters, filters and waste tank.

The character's slots#

The character itself has eleven slots. Three of them are organs (brain, lungs, stomach) and not meant for wearing things. That leaves eight:

Slot	takes	Examples
left and right hand	anything	tool, canister, kit
helmet	helmet	Space Helmet, Gas Mask, headlamp
suit	suit	Eva Suit, Hardsuit, HARM suit
back	back item	backpack or jetpack
uniform	clothing	overalls, uniform
belt	belt	Tool Belt, Mining Belt
glasses	glasses	night vision goggles, sensor lenses

Each of these slots exists only once. That is the most important rule when gearing up: a jetpack rules out a backpack, a headlamp in the helmet slot rules out the space helmet.

Suits compared#

You can make three suits and wear them outside. A fourth, the Icarus Suit, is a variant of the Eva Suit.

	Eva Suit	Icarus Suit	Hardsuit	HARM Suit
printer tier	1	1	2	2
gas space	10 L	10 L	10 L	100 L
filter slots	3	3	4	4
chip slot	no	no	yes	yes
logic values	none	none	63	63
flammable	yes	yes	no	no
convection	0.205	0.193	0.062	0
solar heating	8.19	1.45	6.23	0.13

The last two rows are factors for heat exchange with the surroundings: the smaller, the less heat the suit gives off or takes in. The Icarus Suit matches the Eva Suit in almost everything, but the sun heats it much less. The HARM suit has practically no exchange left.

The HARM suit has two more special features: a slot for a coolant tank that takes an Liquid Canister, and a back slot of its own. It is expensive, though: the Tool Manufactory needs tier 2, 20 each of Stellite, Hastelloy and Astroloy, plus 150,000 J and 120 seconds.

What 100 litres buy you#

The gas space is your buffer when the canister is empty. At 101 kPa and 20 °C you calculate with n = p · V / (R · T):

• Eva Suit with Space Helmet, 13 litres: 101.325 · 13 / (8.3144 · 293.15) ≈ 0.54 mol
• HARM suit with HARM helmet, 125 litres: 101.325 · 125 / (8.3144 · 293.15) ≈ 5.2 mol

So the HARM suit keeps almost ten times as much air in reserve.

Helmets#

Helmet	Gas space	Tier	flammable	Special
Space Helmet	3 L	1	yes (210 °C)	41 logic values
Hardsuit Helmet	3 L	2	no	less solar heating
HARM Helmet	25 L	2	no	large air buffer
Gas Mask	3 L	1	yes	no canister, two filters

According to the game code the Space Helmet and the Hardsuit Helmet have a lamp of their own, switched with On. It draws 50 J per tick (0.5 s) from the life support battery – a small cell with 36,000 J would be empty after 6 minutes from that alone. With Flush (or the button on the helmet) you blow the air out of helmet, suit and lungs in one go, for example when toxic gas has crept in. That only works while you wear the helmet; afterwards the suit refills from the air canister, provided the air supply is on.

The headlamp and hard hat take a battery but have no gas space. They are no use outside. If you need light without loading the suit battery, take the flashlight or the night vision goggles, which sit in their own glasses slot.

Back items: storage or flight#

Back item	Slots	Tier	Speed value
Hardsuit Backpack	20 of any kind	2	–
Mining Backpack	24 ore only	1	–
Hard Mining Backpack	28 ore only	1	–
Jetpack Basic	propellant + 9	1	3
Spacepack	propellant + 9	1	5
Hardsuit Jetpack	propellant + 14	2	8

On all jetpacks slot 0 takes a gas canister as propellant. Height limit (MaximumHeight 10) and JetPackPower (7.5) are the same for all of them; only the speed differs. The Spacepack is the cheapest start: iron and copper, and it is faster than the Jetpack Basic made of gold, steel and lead.

Jetpack propellant#

According to the game code the jetpack burns nothing. It blows part of the canister contents into the surroundings – which gas does not matter. The starting kit fills the propellant canister with 150 mol of Nitrogen: cheap, non-toxic and non-flammable, so a good model to follow.

• Thrust level: with the buttons on the jetpack you set it in steps of 0.1 between 0.1 and 2.0; the default is 0.5. Consumption per tick rises in the same ratio as thrust.
• Difficulty: on Easy and Normal consumption counts once, on Stationeer five times, in creative mode not at all.
• Stabiliser: the jetpack also uses gas while it holds you in the air with On.
• Outside pressure: only what the canister holds beyond the same volume of outside air is usable. With less than 500 kPa of overpressure the jetpack reports low propellant, below 100 kPa it turns critical. On Venus, with 239 kPa outside, a canister therefore loses part of its contents as a dead remainder.

Exactly how much gas level 1.0 costs per tick depends on a prefab value missing from the data used here. So go by the canister pressure: if it drops fast, turn the thrust level down.

Belts#

Belt	Slots	Tier
Tool Belt	8 tools	1
Tool Belt MK II	10 tools, 2 free	2
Mining Belt	2 tools, 8 ore	1
Mining Belt MK II	2 tools, 13 ore	2
Electrical Belt	2 tools, 6 cable supply	1
Survival Belt	chip, battery, 2 auto-injectors, 6 tools, 2 free	2

For a mining trip, the Mining Belt MK II combined with the Hard Mining Backpack is worth it: 13 + 28 = 41 slots for ore alone. For building work the Tool Belt stays the first choice – which eight tools belong in it is covered in Tools at a glance: which one you need for what.

The Survival Belt is the only belt with logic of its own. A chip inside reads HealthDamage, StunDamage and EntityState of its wearer and costs 2.5 J per tick from the belt battery. Its two auto-injectors do not fire on their own, according to the game code: only when the chip sets Activate to 1 does the injector inject. A ready-made program is in Medicine and injuries: avoiding damage, using healing.

You wear the Marine Armor in the suit slot, so instead of a space suit. It has three injector slots but no logic of its own.

What does not exist (yet)#

The Cryogenic Suit Upgrade sounds like cold protection, but in 0.2.6428 it can neither be crafted nor spawned. Only suits that are not spawnable either have a slot for it.

Next#

• Breathing air in the suit: canisters, filters and waste tank – filling canister and filter slots correctly
• Heat, cold and radiation: damage, protection and hot worlds – why heat exchange matters on hot worlds
• Survival: the first minutes – the basics after landing
• All clothing: Clothing and suits