Sockets, gems, runes, jewels and charms

The reason to pick up a plain white item. Sockets appear on basic-quality equipment of any base tier - so the cheapest thing in the game is also the raw material of the best thing in the game.

Where sockets come from

• of qualifying drops arrive socketed.
• Only basic quality equipment qualifies - magic, rare, set, unique and primal items never roll sockets. Every base tier does, though: a Torment base is the better host, not a worse one.
• Jewelry is the exception. Rings and amulets have no basic versions at all, so they socket at magic, rare, unique and primal instead. Being 1x1, they get exactly one.
• All thirteen worn slots can host them.

How many

An item's socket ceiling is the number of 28x28 inventory cells it occupies - the same footprint the backpack grid uses to place it, so the cap can never disagree with what you see.

The count is weighted from one socket to six, then truncated at the item's own ceiling and renormalised - so a 1x2 glove rolls one against two, rather than rolling six and having every high draw clamped down onto two. A full-footprint roll on a large item stays an event.

What a gem does depends on the host

A loose gem or rune lists what it grants in each of the three hosts, so the choice is made before you commit the stone rather than after. Runes fill all three lines; a gem often does nothing in one of them, and simply says nothing about it.

A gem's effect is chosen from three categories, and every gem row below reads across all three. These three are about the gem's EFFECT only - runewords use a finer split of ten equipment slots, further down.

The seven gems

Numbers are the normal quality of each type, which is the tuned row; the other four qualities are this row scaled. Where Diablo II uses a channel this engine does not have - cold, poison, damage to undead, life steal - the effect moves to the nearest channel that exists, and the substitution is named in the last column.

Five qualities

Each type comes in five grades, and a grade is a straight percentage of the row above.

Scaling never rounds a real effect away: a chipped stone with a small number still gives 1. Perfect is exactly double normal, which is where Diablo II's own perfect values land.

The thirty-three runes

All of Diablo II's runes, in D2's own order. Runes have no quality ladder - a rune is a rune - and they carry D2's own numbers wherever this engine has the channel. Seven needed no substitute at all: knockback, faster attack, faster hit recovery, fast block, thorns, life and mana steal, and triple damage to demons are real effects here. The rest name their substitution in the last column.

The ladder maps D2's own span onto this game's 1-96 area levels, so El is a first-floor find and Zod is a deep Torment one. Value climbs 13% a rung, which is what makes the ascend recipe a real ladder rather than a formality.

Runewords

A runeword is not a recipe you have to look up - every rune's own description lists the words it belongs to, so the recipes drop with the ingredients. Fill a socketed item of the right slot with the exact runes, in the exact order, with no socket left empty, and the item takes the word's name.

• The word must fill the item exactly. A three-rune word needs a three-socket host - not two, not four. Six-rune words can only form in a 2x3 host, which is what makes them the endgame chase rather than a rarity roll.
• The host is the slot, not the gem's three-way category: a belt word and a helm word are different things even though both are "armour" to a gem.
• Jewelry has no words. Rings and amulets hold one socket, and a one-rune word is just a socketed rune.
• A word's grant is on top of its runes. Every rune still does what it does in that host - the word is the bonus for spelling it, which is why building one beats socketing the same runes loose.
• Sixty-one are Diablo II's own, with D2's own recipes: Steel is Tir El, Enigma is Jah Ith Ber. The rest are this game's.

Runeword state is derived from what is in the sockets rather than stored, so it cannot desync and it costs the save format nothing.

The fifteen jewels

The third thing that goes in a socket. Five families - Fervor, Focus, Aegis, Ruin and Warding - each in three grades at 60%, 100% and 160% of the tuned row. Unlike a gem, a jewel is not a ladder you climb past: a Radiant is better than a Flawed, but the family is the choice and there is no sixteenth grade waiting to make your Radiant obsolete.

Diablo II rolls a jewel's stats per instance. These do not, deliberately: a socket stores its contents as a bare item index, so per-instance rolls would mean a new record in the save format and a migration for every existing character. Fifteen fixed entries buy the variety for none of that.

Charms

Three kinds now share the charm slot, and they all compete for the same cap. The six basic charms are fixed. Three growing charms — Trials, Deeds and Legend — start below their fixed cousin and gain value with every milestone you claim, passing it at eight; the growth belongs to the character, so two copies are worth the same. And three encounter charms are the guaranteed rewards of the named encounters: large in one stat and nothing else, so carrying one costs a slot rather than filling one.

Only basic charms can be reworked. The recipe will not consume a growing or encounter charm — those are earned rather than found, and a recipe for surplus should not be a way to destroy them.

Charms work from your backpack; they are never equipped. Only the first in reading order are live - main backpack first, then the extra tabs in order - which is the whole answer to Diablo II's charm-rack inventory. Which three are live is answerable by looking, and each charm's description carries the rule as well as the effect.

What drops, and how often - the treasure classes

One draw on each monster death covers all four families. What that draw is taken against depends on where you are. Each dungeon type has a treasure class: a chance that anything drops at all, and a split saying what this place gives more of than anywhere else.

Every zone has a clear majority family rather than a gentle tilt, because a 5% edge is not something a player can feel, and a treasure class nobody can feel is a table that exists for its own sake. The shallow end has no jewels at all - the Cathedral should not be teaching two socket economies at once.

The family columns are shares of the socketable draw, so they read across to 100%. The first two columns are chances per kill.

Then the monster multiplies both of those chances: a champion pays and a unique pays . That is a multiplier on the zone's own numbers rather than a table of its own, so re-tuning a zone re-tunes its bosses with it - and it is deliberately not a guarantee, because a boss that always drops a socketable turns farming into a loop with no roll left in it.

A gem drop picks a type flat across the seven, then a quality from the ones the floor's depth has opened, weighted from chipped to perfect. Deep floors still drop chipped stones; perfect ones stay rare even where they are allowed.

Mystic Orbs

Not a socketable — an orb is consumed into an item's stats rather than held in a socket. Drop one onto an item in your backpack and it is absorbed, permanently. Eight of them: four that give +3 to a single attribute, plus damage, all-resistance, magic find and gold find.

Any one item can take six, ever. The cap is per item and not per kind of orb, so six into one weapon finishes it and the seventh has to go somewhere else — which is the whole point. An orb is a decision about which item you are committing to, not a stat you accumulate. Every item that can still take one says how many it has left, because applying an orb cannot be undone.

The values are deliberately small. An orb is worth roughly a third of an affix, so six is a real upgrade to a good base and never a substitute for finding a better item — the moment orbing beats finding, the drop tables stop mattering.

Orbs take a slice of every zone's draw rather than owning one. They are useful everywhere and to everyone, so a zone that was the orb zone would be the only zone worth farming.

Where the salvage materials go

Salvaging gear yields one of seven materials, graded by what you broke down: White Scales from plain items, Rare Fibres from rares, Unique Encrustments from uniques, Set Engravings from set pieces, and so on. Several of the recipes below spend them, and which material pays for what is deliberate - you salvage uniques to reforge, rares to ennoble, set pieces to recast. Each recipe is funded by the kind of item it operates on, so the loop closes on itself.

Levski's Roar - the crafting monument

A monument in town, one tile north of the stash. Click it and a grid opens - the Horadric Cube's twelve slots - with a Transmute button and a recipe book that opens beside the window so you can read while you work.

You choose a recipe by what you put in. The monument runs the one that uses the most of what is in front of it, so putting in only what a recipe needs is how you pick it - which is how the Horadric Cube always worked.

The monument is the only place a recipe produces anything. There is no backpack crafting: the belt's burger-menu Crafting window lists all seventeen recipes in the same order the monument's own book does, but it is a book - a row there is something to read, and clicking one says where to go. Everything is made at Levski's Roar.

Freeing sockets is the recipe that makes an empty socket a decision you can revisit: the item comes back with its sockets emptied and every stone beside it, its durability restored, and - if it was a runeword - its base name, because with the runes gone it is a base item again.

Reforging rerolls an item completely, at its own item level - the depth it was found at, not the depth you are standing on - so rerolling in town cannot launder a shallow item into a deep one. It refuses a socketed item: the stats would come back without the stones that are inside it. Empty it first.

Ennobling turns a rare into a random unique built on the same base, gated on that unique's own level requirement against the item's level. Recasting turns a set piece into a different piece of the same set - never the same one back - which is the answer to a ladder stuck one slot from complete.