Sympathetic Resonance
What it is
Sympathetic Resonance is a unique artifact that cascades weapon levels across the player’s arsenal. Every time the player picks a weapon-upgrade card to level up an owned weapon, every other owned weapon also gains a fixed number of levels determined by the artifact’s tier. The cascade fires once per weapon-upgrade pick, applies to every weapon other than the one the card chose, and respects the same weapon-level ceiling the chosen weapon does. The effect is a passive on every weapon-upgrade choice — there is no manual activation and no per-run trigger limit beyond the rate at which the player can pick weapon-upgrade cards.
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Display name | Sympathetic Resonance |
| Category | unique |
| Damage tag | none |
| Trigger | weapon-upgrade card chosen |
| Trigger conditions | the player owns more than one weapon |
| Passive flat-bonus stat | weapon damage percentage (flat additive points) |
The card-pick trigger fires for every weapon-upgrade choice but has no effect when the player owns a single weapon, because the cascade explicitly skips the weapon the card targeted.
This artifact is the wiki’s first documented exception to the unified effect-engine convention: its cascade is implemented inline in the level-up application code, not in the effect-engine effect list on the artifact definition. The reason recorded in the source files is that the engine has no weapon-upgrade signal and no built-in level-up-a-weapon action, so wiring the cascade through the unified pipeline would require new primitives just for this one artifact. The cascade therefore lives next to the level-up code path that already mutates weapon levels.
Per-tier values
The cascade carries one named magnitude — the number of bonus levels granted to each other weapon when the trigger fires — plus the per-tier flat passive weapon-damage bonus. Tier 1 shares the same cascade magnitude as tier 2, and tier 3 shares the same cascade magnitude as tier 4; the difference between paired tiers comes from the flat passive bonus alone, which follows the global per-tier ramp shared by every artifact.
| Tier | Bonus levels per other weapon | Flat weapon-damage bonus |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (common) | +1 | +10 |
| 2 (uncommon) | +1 | +20 |
| 3 (rare) | +2 | +30 |
| 4 (epic) | +2 | +40 |
| 5 (legendary) | +3 | +50 |
The cascade magnitude pattern is +1/+1/+2/+2/+3 across the five runtime tiers. The flat passive bonus follows the standard 10/20/30/40/50 ramp.
Effect
When a weapon-upgrade card is applied — that is, when the level-up code path leveling an owned weapon executes — Sympathetic Resonance runs the following sequence after the chosen weapon’s level has already been raised:
- Look up the artifact’s current tier and pull the bonus-levels value from the per-tier values record.
- Iterate over every weapon the player owns.
- Skip the weapon the upgrade card chose.
- For every remaining weapon, raise its current level by the bonus-levels value, clamped so that the new level never exceeds the global weapon-level ceiling.
- Push the artifact’s banner to the on-screen artifact-banner stack and set its HUD flash so the player sees that the cascade fired.
| Constant | Value |
|---|---|
| Global weapon-level ceiling | 20 |
| HUD flash duration after cascade | 0.3 s |
The cascade does not respect or interact with the rarity multiplier on the weapon-upgrade card itself. The card’s rarity multiplier determines how many levels the chosen weapon gains; the cascade always adds exactly the tier’s bonus-levels value to each other weapon, regardless of card rarity.
The cascade does not fire if the bonus-levels value resolves to zero, but every tier from common through legendary has a positive bonus-levels value, so in practice the cascade always fires for every weapon-upgrade pick while the artifact is equipped and the player owns at least two weapons.
Stacking rules
- The cascade fires every time a weapon-upgrade card is applied. There is no internal cooldown, per-run cap, or proc budget.
- Each other weapon’s level rises by the full bonus-levels value on each cascade. Multiple weapon-upgrade picks in the same level-up screen cascade independently and stack additively across the run.
- The cascade target list is the player’s currently owned weapons at the moment the card resolves. Weapons acquired after a cascade do not retroactively gain those levels.
- The clamp to the global weapon-level ceiling is applied per-weapon, per-cascade. Weapons already at the ceiling are unaffected by the cascade but still count as valid targets — they simply don’t gain levels.
- The flat passive weapon-damage bonus is independent of the cascade. It applies as a flat additive to the ship’s weapon-damage percentage stat for the run, regardless of whether the cascade has fired or whether the player owns weapons capable of cascading.
- Sympathetic Resonance is flagged in its own source comments as stacking brokenly with the run modifier that converts every reward card into a legendary card. Because that modifier makes every weapon-upgrade pick a legendary card, the cascade fires on every card the player ever picks; at legendary artifact tier, every weapon-upgrade pick cascades three levels into every other owned weapon, which the source describes as a known broken interaction rather than an intended balance point.
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags
- This artifact is the codebase’s documented exception to the unified-effect-engine pattern. Candidate concept page:
concepts/effect-engine-exceptions.md, covering when and why an artifact is allowed to live inline in the level-up code path rather than as a registered effect. - “Cascade across other owned items, skipping the chosen one” is a standalone pattern with no other current consumer but is general enough that a future passive or shooting-star variant could share it. Candidate concept page:
concepts/cascade-other-items.md. - The global weapon-level ceiling and the clamp behavior around it appear in multiple level-up code paths and are referenced indirectly by every weapon page. Candidate concept page:
concepts/weapon-level-ceiling.md. - The tier-pairing data shape — four data-file tier entries indexed zero through three, runtime prepending a fifth “common” tier that shares the uncommon record — is the universal convention for every artifact. The artifacts roll-up page already documents this, but the per-pairs-not-per-tier cascade-magnitude pattern (1/1/2/2/3 here, the same pattern Adept uses for its triggered effect) is worth its own design-notes page on intentional tier pairing.
- “Brokenly stacks with all-legendary-cards run modifier” is the first explicit interaction note flagged in artifact source. Candidate concept or design-notes page:
concepts/known-broken-interactions.md, capturing accepted-as-fun balance outliers and the artifacts they involve.