Gear and money
What drops, how it is made, and what is spent in Catena. Most of it is design, and the page says where.
Rarity
Partly built Rarity is content data in the build. There are no gear drops yet.
Rarity is always shown as colour and shape together, so it reads for anyone who cannot tell the colours apart. The shape appears on the item card, the loot-beam base, the minimap blip and the back of the decrypt card.
Signature gear carries named, unique verb effects. It is bound to your account and never sold.
| Rarity | Shape | Colour | When it drops |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common | Circle | White | A glint. |
| Refined | Diamond | Green | A column of light. |
| Exotic | Hexagon | Orange-red | A beam. |
| Relic | Octagon | Gold | A pillar. |
| Signature | Starburst | Violet | A full comic panel. |
The decrypt
Designed The decrypt is designed and not built. Dives pay creds only for now.
Gear drops encrypted, as a beam and a pillar of light in its rarity colour. It is banked when you extract and revealed one card at a time, sorted worst to best, so the best is never spoiled first. Opening them all at once still plays the reveal. The reveal card carries the item's flavour line, and an exotic or better prompts you to save a clip. The dive page has the diver's account of why gear drops encrypted.
What you equip
Partly built The catalogue exists in the build. Items persist as a list, but there is no equipped loadout and there are no drops.
Gear fits four places: a Rig for the frame, a Deck for the weapon platform, and two Mods. Affixes are verbs: an extra air-dash at full health, less Strain from flight, an effect added to a Surge.
Gear is a side-grade. The total bonus from permanent gear and the Wetware Grid has a cap, checked whenever the game's content is built. Gear never changes your look without your consent, and the compare panel shows what the verbs do differently instead of a damage number. The flavour lines below are drafts for the design, because shipped gear has no flavour field yet.
Dockplate Harness
Rated for eleven tonnes on a crane. Nobody rated it for a person.
Suture Second
Failed the quality certification. Passed everything else.
Ration-Chit Locket
Kindling-era. Worth nothing. Insured for more than the wearer.
Crafting
Designed Crafting is designed and not built. There are no recipes and no stations in the code.
Crafting has four skills, each with its own levels and none of them ever losing XP. Salvaging gathers materials from nodes in the city and from dive wreckage. Datamining channels Lattice nodes mid-dive while the director keeps spawning. Fabrication makes hardware, and Compiling makes software: Programs, decrypt keys and Rewire Kits.
The stations are in Workshop Block. Crafted gear rolls one fewer affix than a drop, but you pick the slot and the item, and a lucky craft adds a bonus slot. Salvage turns unwanted gear back into materials, and blueprints drop as tradeable shards that you compile into permanent unlocks.
In the world, weave-alloy is salvaged Lattice substrate, so what you extract feeds what you craft.
Currencies
Partly built Creds are real in the build, and dives pay them. The rest is designed.
| Currency | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Creds | The everyday money: wages, rent, food and the market. | Partly built Dives pay creds. |
| Materials | Stackable crafting materials, and most of what the market trades. | Designed |
| ROOT Ciphers | Prestige. They are never tradeable and never for sale, and they are spent only at the Deep Market. | Designed A balance for them exists. |
| War scrip | Money for the Deadband only. It cannot be traded, and it decays each week. | Designed |
| Fragments | The in-run currency. It is gone when you jack out. | Partly built It runs in the dive. |
cred-poor, Cipher-rich
The market
Partly built The market screen reads your real balances and items, read-only. The listings half is a labelled preview.
There is one market, in Market Row. Listings are fixed-price and commodity lots, priced in creds, with no auctions to start. Direct trade between two Legends is escrowed. The design adds price history, rate limits and abuse handling from the first day.
The Counting House, a banking guild older than the registry, clears the books on the floor under the ramp. Ciphers, war scrip, Signature gear and bound items are never sold here, and rep can never be bought.
Settlement is five percent.
Processing is applied at settlement.
The Deep Market
Designed The Deep Market is designed and not built.
The Deep Market is an Undercurrent bazaar in the Warrens, and it takes only Ciphers. Its stock rotates weekly: power-appearance variants, augment side-grades, wardrobe exotics, onomatopoeia packs, prestige ink, and a back room for the Blacklisted.
Its face is the Curator, who speaks entirely in appraisals.
Where power comes from
Your power comes from your level, which you earn by playing.
Gear stays a side-grade, and in PvP level is cancelled out. Growing a Legend has the curve.