Crafting

Four stages and two verbs. Fusing combines like with like to get a better one of the same kind. Crafting moves up a tier.

Stages 1 and 3 are optional. You can go straight from found shards to a material to a piece of gear, and fuse only when you want better than you were given.

Substance and process

Within stage 2 — and only there — the four affinities split in two.

grade = KINETIC + |DENSITY| + COHESION

Heat is not an ingredient, it is what you apply to ingredients. A material's composition and its heat treatment are independent, and that independence is the only thing that can distinguish two materials of identical composition — which is the whole reason iron and steel are different words.

The split is local to stage 2. At stage 1 caloric is an affinity like any other: a caloric shard fuses into another shard and contributes CALORIC to it, needing no heat to do so.

One roll, everywhere

Intelligence is a budget. Every attempt spends against it, and the tier sets the exchange rate.

headroom = intelligence − (weight × TIER_DIFFICULTY)
chance   = clamp(0.50 + headroom × 0.07, 0.05, 0.95)

Weight already means "the magnitude of the thing you are making" everywhere in this game — a technique's weight is the same formula.

Bounded at both ends on purpose: nothing is impossible and nothing is certain.

Stage 1 — fusing shards

Every axis sums, and so does intensity. A kinetic shard fused with a cohesion shard yields one carrying both.

Density and caloric are bipolar, so opposites cancel: +3 dense and −3 diffuse sum to zero on that axis, and both shards are still spent. That is the one thing stage 1 teaches, and the result names the axis that went.

It costs a Binding Salt, and it is the only step where failure yields nothing: on a failed roll the shards and the salt are gone and no shard is made. The odds are available before you commit, and you should look at them.

Fusing passes the drop ceiling. A found shard never exceeds 9 on an axis; a fused one can. Past 9 each point is worth less than the one before, so fusing always helps and never stops helping — it just stops paying in a straight line.

Where the extra axes matter depends on the slot:

So fusing across axes is the deliberate way to build a weapon shard.

Stage 2 — crafting a material

Substance comes from the non-caloric axes of the shards you commit. Caloric shards are spent as fuel.

A quench needs heat and cold. Hardness comes from the rate of change, not from cold alone: heat and cool slowly and you get annealed; heat and cool fast and you get hardened; cool too aggressively and it cracks. Cold with no prior heat does nothing at all.

Heat required rises with bond strength and mass, since kinetic is motion rather than bonding:

requiredHeat = max(1, cohesion + ceil(|density| / 2))

Short of it the craft is refused and nothing is consumed, naming both numbers.

Then two rolls, with deliberately different consequences:

Cracking costs the socket rather than more grade, so one craft is never punished twice.

Stage 3 — fusing materials

Grade sums. The temper is always lost — there is no heat here, and recombining without re-establishing temperature destroys hardening. Two hardened materials give one annealed one.

So this is consolidation, never an upgrade. It needs no catalyst: the lost temper is the cost.

Stage 4 — forging

Fabrication Bay interiors only. Costs stamina, hunger and thirst scaled to the material's grade — stamina equal to it, and half that of each of the other two. This is the first thing in the game that spends hunger or thirst.

points = min(cap, floor(grade / 3))       cap 3, or 4 if hardened (+1)
core stats (strength/reflex/fortitude) → +points
pool stats (hp/mana/stamina)           → +points × 5

Each slot has a primary and a secondary stat, taken from what the slot already does in combat. The secondary gets half the points and is left off entirely when that is zero.

Intelligence is never a craftable bonus. It would raise the odds of the next quench and the next forge, so the system would pay you in the currency it charges.

If the material suits the slot, that table holds. If not, the two swap — a cohesion material forged into boots makes an odd pair carrying more stamina than reflex. It never ruins a craft; it makes a different item.

Each line rolls separately, and the item is always produced. A forge where both lines miss still yields a socketed piece of equipment, which is exactly what found starter gear is.

A grade-2 material makes no stat lines at all — floor(2/3) is zero. What you get is a socket-holder.

One socket, and the sidegrade

Found equipment carries no stats and rolls up to two sockets whose affinities nobody chose. Crafted equipment carries stats and gets exactly one socket that its maker chose.

Directed and narrow against broad and lucky. Neither dominates.

What a material weighs

Not a constant. A material's mass is what it is made of:

weightGrams = 120 + |DENSITY| × 90 + COHESION × 40

Kinetic contributes nothing — motion has no mass. Magnitude, so a diffuse material weighs what a dense one does: "diffuse" means the matter is spread, not that there is less of it.

Worth knowing before you plan around it: a dense material can outweigh the shards it was made from. Fusing is not a way to lighten a pack.

Shapes beyond equipment

The seven equip slots are innate — anyone can forge armour and a weapon from the first day, so crafting is never blocked behind a drop.

Everything else needs a pattern, and a pattern is a book entry rather than a mold. Carry a pattern book and you can forge what it teaches; every carried book counts, so a looted one works the moment you pick it up, and patterns are never consumed — knowing how to make a bag does not wear out.

A non-equipable shape has none of equipment's outcome properties. A satchel has no equip slot, no socket and no stat lines; it spends its points on carrying capacity instead, off the same roll against the same grade. A missed roll leaves it at its base capacity rather than producing nothing.

Naming what you made

The game ships no recipe list. There is no "steel" until a player decides there is.

A material reports a signature: which substance axes it carries, with their signs, and what heat did to it. Magnitudes are deliberately left out, so a grade-6 and a grade-14 material of the same shape and treatment share a signature — they are the same material at different qualities, which is what lets your name for something survive your sourcing getting better.

Name a signature and every future material with it carries the name, and so does the gear forged from it: a Steel Cuirass rather than a Forged Cuirass.

Names live in your own book, which you are created holding and which nothing in life can take from you — it cannot be placed, put in a container, or deposited in a stash. Reading draws on every book you carry, so a looted one works immediately; writing always goes to your own.

Two rules, and neither ever overwrites your vocabulary: one signature cannot have two names, and one name cannot mean two things. Two players naming the same signature differently is not a conflict at all — the maker's word travels on the object, and disagreeing about a word is how a word spreads.

Where catalysts come from

Binding Salt drops from monsters at every distance, and turns up in stash caches as a bonus. It is not gated to the starting sectors the way cloth is: a supply that thinned as you travelled would switch fusing off exactly when shards became worth fusing.

Provenance

Every material records who fused it; every forged item records who fused each material that went into it, and who forged it. Names are written when the thing is made and never change afterwards — a maker's mark survives its maker.

A two-name item is evidence of two people having had a hand in it.