Improved Equipment Upgrade System

The current system for weapons/armour and their upgrades is very restricted. Low tier gear often has useful unique abilities, but doesn't fit into higher tier gameplay very well. There is also virtually no ability to customise appearance, which is a widely sought-after feature.

I propose a few changes to the underlying system to give players more options without having to keep adding more and more new content.

• Allow a way to apply a different appearance to any piece of armour (Spend bug parts/resources to make X piece look like Y, but retain all stats and effects). This could apply to weapons too, but only for weapons of the same type (can't reskin a 2H hammer as a 2H sword, to avoid confusion).

• Allow a permanent one-way "Link" upgrade to make a piece of armour from Set X count as being from Set Y for activating the set bonus. It shouldn't be cheap, but doesn't need to be crazy expensive either. By being a one-way upgrade, if you want Item X to work with Set Y and Set Z, you would need to make two copies of Item X and link them separately.

• Make shields upgradeable, like weapons.

• Allow certain armour bonus effects to be swapped at a Smithing Station, like swapping the Gas Guard effect of the Mantis helmet for the same buff the Chest/Boots give. Add a handful of other buffs that are available to all armour of that archetype. That way, if you don't like a certain bonus effect, you could swap it for something else. Sleek effects could be swapped out in the same way, if desired.

• Make the Tier of an item be a separate upgrade path (1), or be part of the normal upgrade path (2).

1. For a separate upgrade path, each tier would require resources specific to each weapon category or armour archetype, based on the tier (Like, all T1 Ranger armour takes the same materials to upgrade to T2). This would just bring the base stats of the item in line with being a higher tier. But, it runs the risk of being confusing since it would be a bit ambiguous.

2. For the normal upgrade path, lower Tier items would need extra levels to upgrade, but every 3 levels would upgrade the Tier of the item as a general rule. This means a T1 helmet might need Brittle Marble to upgrade from levels 1-3, then it would use Brittle Plating to upgrade, but be T2 from levels 4-6. Then when you get to Sturdy Plating it becomes T3 from levels 7-9. However, this means that items that are already Tier 3 start off needing Sturdy Plating (or the weapon equivalents). The stat improvements would need to be shifted accordingly, since there would only be 3 levels per tier rather than 5.