(I'm not surte if you have a complete answer yet, so ...)
I have found that I only need to "give" an item to someone else or "equip" an item onto someone else for it to register in the encyclopedia. (Just "selling" an item doesn't work.)
I am not aware of instances or items where "give to" or "equip upon" does not work, so report back if you find some, please!
Equipping items onto and using them on both downed opponents, your elemental partner, or willing partners does add them to the encyclopedia, I never said it didn't: Ideally, though, I'd like to
not have to use and equip items to have them added there.
It's a little silly that I can dye them, reforge them, enchant them, buy them, and sell them, but I only apparently ever learn what they are by putting them on either myself or someone else first. Especially so if they're things I just stripped off that person. It's kind of like undressing and redressing a mannequin and somehow having an epiphany from putting the clothes back onto it. "I know I took them off myself to begin with, but only now that I've put them on again do I truly understand: You really
do put pants on one leg at a time! Anyway, time to strip those off again so I can sell them."
I did learn that, conveniently, your elemental partner's body is considered to be fully pierced. So you can equip any piercings and clothing items onto them by getting them to transform.
I also found out that if you give a filled Moo Milker to someone else to drink that you didn't strictly defeat (i.e.- the Slime Queen), they'll keep the empty Moo Milker in their inventory and you'll be unable to take it back. So that's pretty funny.
Anyway, all that aside: Does anyone know if there's an up-to-date-ish list of Weapons/Clothing/Items that are legitimately available in-game without debugging out there? I tried browsing through the github to see if there was anything organized within the source code but it looks like the clothing and item definitions are scattered pretty haphazardly throughout old builds of the repository.
