Items
Open the inventory with the Inventory HUD button or I. Items are not catalogued here; each states its own weight, slot, sockets and, for a shard, what it fits and carries.
Inventory
| Entries | Stacked by type: picture, name, quantity (x3), weight in kg |
| Details | Hover for all of them; click to open them beside it with every action (on a phone, a tap opens a drawer) |
| Weight | Shown against capacity, e.g. 12.50/46.00kg; over capacity, nothing more is picked up |
| Capacity | From Strength and Fortitude (Character) |
| Materials | Weigh by their own density and cohesion (Crafting) |
A bound item cannot leave your hands: it cannot be dropped, put in a container, or deposited in a stash.
Equipment
Open Equipment from the character sheet. Seven slots: head, shoulders, weapon,
arms, torso, legs, feet; empty shows -. An item equips only to the slot it
names. Equipping, unequipping and socketing are refused in a fight.
Gear adds its own values (damage, defence, resistances) and its socketed shards, read by slot:
| Slot | Role | Affinity read | Rate | Other affinities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weapon | Damage multiplier | All four, signed: cold and diffuse subtract | 0.05 per point |
— |
| Arms | Damage multiplier | Positive density | 0.02 per point |
Resistance at 0.015 |
| Arms | Reflex | Negative density | floor(0.25 * abs(density)) |
Resistance at 0.015 |
| Head, torso, legs | Resistance | All four, each separately | 0.02 per point |
— |
| Shoulders, feet | Reflex | Kinetic | 1:1 up to 9, softened past it | Resistance at 0.015 |
A diffuse arms shard buys reflex instead of damage and never lowers damage; under 4 points it buys nothing. Full rates: Reference: Equipment contribution.
Armour polarity
| Affinity | In head, torso or legs |
|---|---|
| Kinetic, cohesion | 0.02 less damage of that type per point |
| Caloric (heat) | 0.02 per point harder to hurt with cold, easier with heat |
| Cold, dense, diffuse | Each the same way: harder to hurt from the opposite pole, easier from its own |
Heat and cold cancel across all slots, since they land in one total. A monster's shard aligns with that monster, so wearing it lowers your resistance to its damage.
A dropped shard averages the monster's techniques by how often it uses them, per axis, within −9..9, with at least one point on its strongest axis; farther monsters drop larger shards. See Reference: World.
Sockets
Every socket takes every affinity. A shard fits only equipment of the slot it names (shown on the shard), and there any socket, if it carries any non-zero affinity, either sign. A shard at all zeroes fits nothing. Sockets belong to the instance: two items of one type can have different counts.
| Action | Where | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| Slot | Inventory | A filled socket is refused; unslot first |
| Unslot | A Maintenance Bay only, from its panel | Rolls INT, REF and FOR; a miss grinds every axis toward 0, and a shard left with nothing breaks |
chance = clamp(0.45 + 0.05 * (INT + REF + FOR), 0.25, 0.90)
miss = every axis moves max(1, ceil((roll - chance) / 0.15)) toward zero
Consumables
| Item | Restores |
|---|---|
| Minor Recovery Vial | 25 HP |
| Minor Mana Vial | 15 mana |
Used from the inventory outside a fight, or with Item in a fight (Combat). They apply at once; food and water take time.
Food and water
Food answers hunger and water thirst away from a Meditation Sanctum. Water may be drunk in a fight; food may not.
Water
Water comes from a well, a river or lake, or a matched pair of shards; the whole of it is in Fluids.
| Action | |
|---|---|
| Drink from cupped hands | At water; 3 thirst |
| Fill here | On a vessel, where there is water; flasks, canisters and jugs are forged (Crafting) |
| Drink | Anywhere; 1 unit = 1 thirst, 1 second (a litre of rain, 50 units, is 50 s); a step stops it and keeps what was swallowed |
| Pour out | Empties the vessel, the only way water leaves |
| Make water | One hot and one cold shard of equal magnitude become rain; overflow is lost; an unequal pair is refused and kept |
grams = round(magnitude² * 20) ±1: 20 g ±5: 500 g ±9: 1620 g
Hot water scalds and cools in its vessel (Fluids).
Food
Food is not sold and does not start in your pack. Meat creatures may drop a Raw Cut, plant creatures Forage Greens.
| Food | Hunger restored | Caloric to cook | Time to eat, per unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forage Greens | 5 | 1 | 4 seconds |
| Raw Cut | 12 | 4 | 8 seconds |
| Treatment | Effect |
|---|---|
| Cook | From the pack, spend shards whose caloric sums to the need (each shard counts once per item in its stack); +10 freshness, never past 100; restores the same |
| Freeze | Offer cold shards of the same magnitude: stays raw, never spoils; heat and cold together cancel, and a pair cancelling to nothing is refused |
| Freshness (100 to 0) | Lost |
|---|---|
| Raw | 12 an hour |
| Cooked | 1.5 an hour |
| Frozen | None |
| Carried, not frozen | 0.02 a step on top; none in a stash |
Above 0 it feeds in full; at 0 it is refused and nothing is lost. Each Raw Cut eaten has a 1 in 4 chance to cost 4 HP, cooked or not. Storing food: see Stash.
Containers
Portable storage with its own weight limit, such as the Field Cache Box: Open, Transfer between it and the inventory, Close. Its contents count against its limit, not your capacity; only its own weight is carried. One lying on the ground opens only for a character standing on it.
The two kinds of shard
| Essence Shard | Chit | |
|---|---|---|
| Carries | A signed vector, up to four affinities, with magnitude | One affinity, no magnitude |
| Weight | 400 g | 1 g |
| Used for | Socketing, fusing, crafting | Currency: stash upkeep, network retrieval, market prices |
A chit is named for its affinity (Kinetic Chit, Caloric Chit) and pays only that affinity. A price that asks for a minimum strength, such as kinetic 5 or better, can only be paid with essence shards.
Drops
In the origin sector, monsters sometimes carry starter equipment (a walking stick, a piece of cloth); elsewhere they carry consumables and shards instead. Vials are commoner there too: each one drops from 30% of kills in the origin sector and 12% beyond it.
When loot arrives with the inventory full, Inventory Full - Resolve Drops blocks everything else: tick items from your inventory to drop, beside the pending loot, then Resolve. A dropped item is visible to anyone nearby and anyone can pick it up.
Tickets and recon
| Item | |
|---|---|
| Market ticket | Replaces a listed item. An ordinary item with weight and a slot; droppable, lootable, storable; not useable. It is the only claim on the goods: lose it and you lose them, a killer takes it with the rest of your pack, and if it is destroyed nobody can claim them |
| Job board ticket | Replaces a posted job's reward; behaves as a market ticket |
| Recon book | Bought at a job board, ten blank pages |
| Recon note | Torn from the book; records where it was written; tradeable and handed in |
Neither the book nor the note is useable.