Is the UA Warforged considered to naturally be wearing armor?

Question

I know Warforged are Unearthed Arcana races, and considered in play testing and/or incomplete, but based off of the information available to Warforged, would you consider a Warforged to be wearing natural armor; furthermore, would said natural armor prohibit the ability to wear other additional armor on top of the +1 AC bonus trait or would you be able to wear extra protection?

Warforged

The warforged were made as the ideal soldiers to serve in the devastating Last War. Although they are constructs, they have much in common with living creatures, including emotions and social bonds, and perhaps even souls.

Traits

As a warforged, you have the following racial traits.

Ability Score Increase. Your Strength and Constitution scores increase by 1.

Size. Warforged are generally broader and heavier than humans. Your size is Medium.

Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

Composite Plating. Your construction incorporates wood and metal, granting you a +1 bonus to Armor Class.

Living Construct. Even though you were constructed, you are a living creature. You are immune to disease. You do not need to eat or breathe, but you can ingest food and drink if you wish. Instead of sleeping, you enter an inactive state for 4 hours each day. You do not dream in this state; you are fully aware of your surroundings and notice approaching enemies and other events as normal.

Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and one other language of your choice.

One last question is, would the Warforged be considered to be unarmored? Seeing as this is merely a trait, I wouldn't assume it to mean that a Warforged cannot wear armor, unless it gets the unarmored bonus, or natural armor bonus. If it is considered to be unarmored, would unarmored abilities such as the Barbarian's, Druid's, or Monk's abilities work in addition to this +1 AC?

Seeing as the Warforged is sacrificing an Ability Score increase in place of this bonus to AC, I wouldn't say that none of these abilities are applicable, in fact, I believe a Warforged would function just as a normal PC only with +1 AC.

I've read in the rules that Armor Class bonuses always stack with the current AC, but the rest of my group seems to have ruled that a Warforged cannot wear armor. I'm just looking for some thoughts on this matter.

Answer 1

It doesn't say it counts as armor or natural armor or anything, so it doesn't. It's just 1 AC on top of everything else, to emphasize the sturdiness of Warforged. It should stack with everything and prohibit nothing.

To support this, note that the Warforged trait provides a bonus to AC, rather than setting it to a number, as armor is wont to do. The Tortle, another race with an armor-related ability, sets its armor class to 17 like armor usually does, and correspondingly disallows further benefits from wearing armor, further illustrating that abilities that provide bonuses to the class of worn armor (like the Warforged trait) are not armor and are intended to modify armor, while abilities that provide a different default armor class probably count as armor and definitely don't modify the effective class of worn armor.