Catalyst & Essences
Distill tools into essences, then gamble their charge to promote another tool's quality.
Overview
The Catalyst turns tools you no longer use into raw material for upgrading the ones you keep. It has two halves: distilling, which destroys tools to fill an essence with charge points, and reforging, which spends a whole essence for a chance to raise another tool's quality.
The life of an essence
An essence does not exist before your first distillation — distilling is what creates it. Pick `new` as the target to open a fresh bottle, or the id of an existing essence to pour the charge into it.
Essences live in your inventory as unique items, each with its own id and charge. You can keep as many as you like and fill them across several sessions: nothing evaporates over time. ` >catalyst` lists them all with their current charge.
Distilling essences
Distilling sacrifices tools. They are destroyed permanently and their combined value becomes charge points inside a single essence.
A tool contributes exactly its net worth in charge points — the full recursive resource cost of crafting it, tempering included. Charge accumulates without any cap, so you can keep feeding the same essence over several sessions.
You can select tools one by one, or use the bulk filters to take everything eligible at once. Some tools are always excluded and cannot be unlocked by a filter.
| Tool | Distillable? |
|---|---|
| Tempered | Excluded until you enable the filter |
| Rare quality and above | Excluded until you enable the filter |
| Equipped | Never — no filter unlocks it |
| Frozen | Never — no filter unlocks it |
| Favorited | Never — no filter unlocks it |
| NPC-locked | Never — no filter unlocks it |
Reforging a tool
Reforging spends one full essence on one tool. If it succeeds, the tool's quality is promoted to the rarity you aimed for.
Your chance is the essence's charge divided by what that rarity costs on that specific tool, capped at 100 %. At 100 % the promotion is guaranteed. A chance that rounds below one percent is shown as < 1 % rather than hidden — it is still attemptable.
You pick the target rarity yourself. A cheap rarity is often a guaranteed upgrade, while a higher one trades that certainty for a bigger jump. Only rarities strictly above the tool's current quality are offered.
Some tools can never be reforged: broken tools, frozen or NPC-locked tools, and tools already sitting at the highest quality.
How much charge you need
Everything revolves around a tool's net worth: the total raw resources needed to craft it from scratch, tempering included. A wooden tool is worth 1,000, an Iron Pickaxe 55,000, an
Obsidian Pickaxe 625,000. Every tool page shows its net worth.
The charge required scales with the target tool's net worth, multiplied by the rarity you aim for:
| Target rarity | Charge required |
|---|---|
| Uncommon | 0.5× the tool's net worth |
| Rare | 1.25× the tool's net worth |
| Epic | 2.5× the tool's net worth |
| Legendary | 5× the tool's net worth |
A concrete example, with the same essence on two different targets:
| Situation | Outcome |
|---|---|
| 3 | 3 × 55,000 = 165,000 charge points |
| On a | Uncommon 100% · Rare 64% · Epic 32% · Legendary 16% |
| On an | Uncommon 52% · Rare 21% · Epic 10% · Legendary 5% |
This is why an essence that guarantees a legendary on a starter tool may only be worth a few percent on an endgame one: the requirement grew with the target, not with the essence.
Commands
Commands
| Crafting | catalyseur | 3 |