Items

Item Capabilities

Each item definition declares a set of capabilities that determine how it can be interacted with:

Equipment Slots

Items can be equipped to one of seven body slots:

What a socketed affinity does depends entirely on the slot holding it:

Density is the one affinity with two homes: in your arms it is damage, in your torso it is defence.

A socket only ever permits what its slot can read. Shoulders and feet take kinetic; arms take density. There is no such thing as a socket that accepts a shard and changes no number — offer one the wrong affinity and it is refused outright, with nothing consumed. What varies between two copies of the same item is how many sockets it has and which single affinity each one takes.

Two of the four axes defend backwards, on purpose. Kinetic and cohesion only ever run one way, so socketing them in head, torso or legs takes 0.02 off the damage of that kind per point. Caloric and density are poles, and what you socket is the pole you align with: a caloric shard makes you 0.02/point harder to hurt with cold and 0.02/point easier to hurt with heat. You armour yourself in the opposite of what you expect to face — and the shards dropped by what you have been hunting are the wrong ones to wear against it.

Negative values carry through elsewhere too. A diffuse (negative-density) shard in ARMS reduces damage — a gas does not penetrate — though the multiplier never falls below zero.

DNA Socketing

Items can have sockets that accept slottable items. Each socket permits a set of affinities:

A slotted item's properties augment the host item. A cold (negative-caloric) shard socketed into a Warden Helm is what protects you from fire; a caloric one in the same socket makes fire hurt more and cold hurt less.

A shard fits a socket when an affinity it actually carries is permitted there. Carrying means a non-zero value: a shard reading KINETIC 3 with the other three at zero fits a kinetic socket and nothing else, and a shard at all zeroes fits nothing at all. Sign is irrelevant — DENSITY -4 counts as carrying density.

Sockets are per-item, not per-item-type. A definition names a default layout, but an individual instance can carry its own: two cloth caps found in different rooms may permit different affinities and even differ in socket count.

Containers

Items with the container capability hold other items with a weight limit. Containers can be opened/closed and items can be transferred between containers and inventory.

The Field Cache Box is a portable container item.

Carry Weight

Total carried weight (inventory + equipped items) is limited by:

CarryCapacity (grams) = (10 + strength * 7 + fortitude * 11) * 1000

Exceeding capacity restricts further item pickups.

Most items weigh what their definition says. Materials do not. A material's mass comes from its own density and cohesion — kinetic contributes nothing, because motion has no mass — so two materials with the same name can weigh different amounts, and a dense one can outweigh the shards it was made from. See crafting.

Item Operations

There are fourteen item operations, and doing one twice by accident is never possible:

Idempotency

Every operation carries an identifier the game remembers, and a repeat of one it has already done is refused rather than done again. A dropped connection that retries, or two attempts landing together, cannot spend the same item twice.

The two kinds of shard

They are different items and it matters, because the game charges in both.

The id stays eco_essence_shard — nothing is migrated. The name is the client's to build, not the server's: the snapshot carries currency.affinity and each client puts it in front of the definition's noun. That is why the affinity is never merely decoration on a chit's line — it is the only thing distinguishing one from another, and a client that groups these must group per affinity rather than per baseItemId.

An ask like "kinetic at 5 or better" only means something against the first. A currency shard is typed but not graded, so a market term naming one asks for the variant and nothing else.

Market tickets

A ticket is the claim capability's first use: a bearer right to something held elsewhere, redeemed at a place and consumed by redeeming. It is not useable, deliberately — item:use decrements before effects run, so a useable ticket could be destroyed anywhere in the world by a misclick, taking the claim with it.

The item operations grow again: list, buy, cancel and collect join the ten already there. All four are room-gated to a market interior, and all four run under the same inItemTransaction + request-id + row-lock + audit contract as everything else.