---
title: Destiny Blessing Catalog — Unique Unlocks Under a Weighted Point Budget
date: 2026-07-02
status: current
tags: [meta-progression, unlocks, destiny, balance, catalog]
fg-type: decision
fg-sources: [.lore/work/design/unlock-catalog.md, .lore/work/brainstorm/unlock-system.md, .lore/work/specs/unlock-system.md]
fg-status: current
fg-evidence:
  code:
    - src/data/unlocks/catalog.json
    - src/data/unlocks/catalog.ts
    - src/data/unlocks/types.ts
  tests:
    - src/data/unlocks/catalog.test.ts
  symbols:
    - UnlockDefinition
    - DESTINY_BUDGET
    - buildRunModifiers
    - activeWeight
    - canActivate
---

# Destiny Blessing Catalog — Unique Unlocks Under a Weighted Point Budget

The Destiny Blessing catalog is purchased with Memory Fragments and activated within a per-run Destiny budget (`DESTINY_BUDGET = 5`). Two design rules anchor the catalog:

- **Unique unlocks only.** No stacking — each unlock exists once. A stronger version of an idea is a separate catalog entry, not a purchasable tier.
- **Weighted activation budget.** Each unlock declares a `destinyWeight` (0–3). The budget is what prevents a player from activating every owned Blessing at once and forces a build choice. A weight of 5 with unlocks spanning weight 1–3 was validated by hand-checking that several distinct 5-point builds (e.g. a fog specialist, an athlete, an aggressor) all feel viable and distinct — the budget isn't felt as a constraint until a player owns at least two unlocks, which is judged to be the right pacing.

Each `UnlockDefinition.effect` is a discriminated union tag consumed by `buildRunModifiers`, which folds all activated unlocks into one `RunModifiers` object read by the core engine at world-build time. The engine never inspects the unlock catalog directly — only the assembled `RunModifiers`.

## Effect categories established by this catalog

The original catalog defined six categories of unlock, each still present in the live catalog:

- **Starting stats** (weight 1, e.g. Tough Hide `+3 HP`, Charged `+1 starting energy`, Fog Lantern `+2 starting light`, Braced `+2 starting brace`) — cheap, additive, and often world-specific in effect (light/brace only matter in worlds with those mechanics).
- **Hand size** (weight 2, Adaptable) — `handSizeBonusPerAct` grows hand size as the run progresses (base +1 per completed act), read at draw time rather than recomputed on an act-transition event.
- **Combat** (weight 2, Sharpened Instincts) — `keywordDamageBonus` adds to keyword-triggered progress bonuses (e.g. Explore's Hidden bonus, Sprint's Slow bonus), silently buffing every keyword-tagged card the player owns.
- **Resource floor** (weight 2, Fog Signal / Steady Pulse) — `minResourcePerTurn` clamps light or energy to a floor after the normal turn-start change, restructuring a world's pressure loop (Fog Signal) or rewarding aggressive spending with a refund (Steady Pulse).
- **Character** (starter deck override) — replaces the default starter deck with a themed alternative. The catalog has grown to one starter-deck override per world (footballer, contractor, harvester, archivist, surveyor, …), each mutually exclusive at activation time (`canActivate` blocks activating a second starter deck).
- **Discovery** (Fortune, `act-reward`) — offers a reward choice after each act. The concrete mechanism (a boon-pool offer with template ids, not a raw 3-random-card draft) was finalized later; see [[fortune-act-boon-rewards]].

## Divergence from the original weight rationale

The original catalog design gave starter-deck overrides weight 3, reasoning that choosing a character identity is the highest-level build decision and should consume most of the budget. The shipped catalog instead gives every `starterDeckOverride` entry `destinyWeight: 0` — a starter deck choice is exclusivity-gated (only one active at a time) rather than budget-gated. World-access unlocks (`worldUnlock`) are a separate, later addition with their own weight-0, purchase-only semantics; see [[world-access-unlocks]].

## Alternatives considered for god-mode prevention

Before landing on the weighted budget, the design brainstorm considered two other gates:

- **Flat slot limit** ("bring 3 Blessings per run"). Rejected: easy to communicate, but with unlocks of unequal power the choice degenerates into "always pick the 3 obviously-best ones" rather than a real trade-off.
- **Category caps** ("1 offensive, 1 defensive, 1 utility per run"). Rejected: requires categorizing every unlock, adds ongoing design overhead as the catalog grows, and reads as arbitrary to players who don't share the designer's taxonomy.

The weighted budget won because it expresses relative power directly in data (no need to argue two unlocks are "equivalent"), generates a real trade-off between many cheap picks and one expensive one, and is extensible without a redesign — a feat could grant "+1 to your Destiny budget for this world" without touching the unlock catalog itself. A related rejected idea: scaling the fragment cost of a stacked purchase (first "+1 HP" costs 5, second costs 15). This was ruled out by the unique-unlocks-only rule above, which removed the need for stack-cost curves entirely.