When do you start seeing the Sturdy and Heavy armor types (or do you craft them)? My last character was level 32 and I don't recall seeing any of these armor types.

Thanks.

Don know the exact lvls but at lvl 32 you should have seen plenty of sturdy gear already.(if i rember corectly it starts droping somewhere around lvl 20-25).

Maybe I saw it but just assumed the 'Sturdy' was just an added mod or upgrade of the standard armor piece. Dang I didn't even know these types existed until I saw them in the wiki. Well I'll keep a lookout for them now.

Yeah they are sometimes hard to indentify especialy since if they have some other mods on them they will often lose the sturdy in the name.(easiest way is kinda checking by resistances)

I have armor and science perks almost maxed out and on some armor the damage resist is as high as it will go just not the mods (like ultra lightweight and double pocketed) but mods don't effect damage resist except for like radiation and energy resist, and I'm woefully unimpressed by it, I find better gear with higher resistances on low level enemies and in chests.
However these perks have allowed me to make some OP power armor mods and upgrades pretty early on, but I don't use power armor much so it really hasn't been too helpful for the 6 points I put in them combined.

But I don't think sturdy or heavy is as important as the particular kind of damage resist the gear offers in fo4, I have a set for ballistics, a set for energy, and a hazmat suit for radiation along with the damage resist and adamantium limbs perk. I keep the hazmat suit and store whichever other one I don't need.

Well looking at the tiers in the wiki the improvement from Standard to Sturdy to Heavy are pretty good I think. The Leather chest piece for example goes from 3 to 14 to 24 (Dam) and 10 to 23 to 36 (Eng), without any upgrades.

Personally I HATE having to carry around sets of clothing/armor for every type of attack and prefer to just find something that covers everything some. It's bad enough I have to carry around a CHR outfit just for dialog.

Well you cud always get the balistic weawe perk(you will get it if you do some quests for the RR) that one alows you to convert many clothes into decently armored ones(at final lvl balistic weawe gives 110 dmg and 110energy resist and can be applied to some clothes that support wearing the full armor over them as well-like army fatigues etc,,)

And getting it wont lock you into RR story since you can get it relativly quick into their questline.

You can pretty much get away without investing in any of the upgrade perks as long as you are patient, and do a good job scavving

Strip down guns and armors that you find for the upgrades you want.

I find the first perk of scrapper is really nice still though, because screws

Dang I didn't even know about the Balistic Weave either. Course my last character hated the RR and considered Synth as unnatural and needing to be destroyed (BoS follower). But if I put some of that on some Military Fatigues, and then armor on top of that ... I'll be freaking unstoppable ... kinda. Sweet.

Is it worth equipping your settlers with good armour? I'm sure decent guns help them, but when defending their own settlement, does anyone know if good armour helps too?

Just trying to work out if it's worth giving to them, or keeping it all to upgrade my own armour.

I hope it is. I've been armoring them and giving them better 10mm guns.

Sure it helps i often just travel in to the setlment that is underatack and watch em decimate the attackers(you still wana show up personaly), also incase you didnt know settlers/provisoners dont use up ammo so you can quip em with some nice weponary which they will use very well.

I'm pretty sure I had a couple heavy pieces in the early thirties, but that was a while ago. I do notice that gunners tend to wear combat armor and tend to drop higher quality pieces compared to raiders. Find some gunner strongholds to crack if you're hunting for armor. Some of the boss-type gunners come pretty decked out.