As advice here is excellent I thought I would seek it on the subject of armour or apparel, I don't think I have upgraded my leather armour much since I first got it.
Even in Fallout 4 I was confused about all the weirdly named legs, arms, chest pieces etc.
So really looking for some simple help in what I should be doing here?
There are 4 or 5 factors involved in a piece of unpowered armour in FO76:
1) Basic armour type. Leather, metal, combat, robot, etc. They give different amounts of protection and different ratios of protection type. For example, leather gives more protection against energy but less against ballistic and metal is the opposite. That's why I suggested a mix of leather and metal for lower level players.
2) For some basic types only, there are three categories for it - standard, sturdy and heavy - giving increased protection but also increased weight.
3) The level of the armour piece. Higher levels give more protection. There are a few specific levels for armour pieces, e.g. leather can be L1, L5, L10, etc, but not L2,3,4,6, etc. You can only wear armour below your current level, e.g. a L11 player could wear up to L10 armour. If you have learnt the plan for a piece of armour, you can only craft it at a level you can use, e.g. a L11 player who knew how to craft a leather chest piece could craft a L1, L5 or L10 leather chest piece.
4) Modifications to the basic arnour type. For example, leather armour can be modified to boiled, girded, studded and maybe some others I don't remember. Each mod will improve some aspect of the armour, increasing protection against one or more damage types or reducing weight or whatever. You learn mods to a specific piece and basic armour type by scrapping them. It's also possible to buy or find plans for armour mods, but the great majority of them are learned from scrapping. Scrap, scrap and scrap again until you're sure you've learned all the mods. You will sometimes find armour pieces that are already modded. You will also sometimes find pre-packaged mods that will allow you to apply that specific mod once even if you don't know the mod.
5) Legendary effects. Magic armour, essentially. There are all sorts of legendary effects and I'm the wrong person for answers about that because I have never used legendary armour.
The "weirdly named legs, chest pieces etc" you refer to are probably modded or legendary. Legendary items in FO76 are also marked with 1,2 or 3 stars depending on how many legendary effects they have.
In FO76, there are two other categories of worn items - underarmour and outfits. Underarmour can be worn under armour (surprise!
) and can be modified to provide a small additional benefit. Outfits can be worn over unpowered armour and are decorative. Just in case you want to run around looking like a clown (or in a 1950s style suit, or USA civil war era formal dress, or whatever) while still having the protection of your armour.
EDIT: You asked what you should be doing and I forgot to answer that. Firstly, scrap unpowered armour pieces to learn mods and, if you're very lucky, how to make the armour piece itself from raw materials. Secondly, buy plans for making armour pieces you don't know how to make (since a few patches ago, plans you do know are labelled "(known)" in a vendor's stock, so it's now easy to see which plans they have that you don't already know). Thirdly, craft new armour pieces as you level up, for whatever armour you know. There's no point wearing less effective armour if you can easily make more effective armour. Fourthly, modify your armour with whatever useful mods you have learned for it, for the same reason. Finally, look in the apparel section of your pip-boy inventory screen to see your resistances to ballistic, energy and radiation damage. You might find it useful to change your armour based on that. If, for example, you have all leather armour you might find you have relatively good energy resistance but quite bad ballistic resistance. Since you're more often attacked with ballistic weapons, it might be useful to swap some leather armour pieces (more energy resistance, less ballistic resistance) for metal armour pieces (the opposite).
and should have been done ages ago!) is 2.5GB on PC it has the visual error again about downloading all 64.40GB of the entire game but ignore that it only takes as long as it takes to download 2.5Gb (around 4-5 minutes for me).
