Guardian Relic Spawns No Longer Random

Overview

Relic placement used to be drawn at random from every pedestal on the map. Since Patch 14.0 the game picks which zones get the Relics using a fixed rule with no randomness in it at all, and only shuffles between the pedestals inside the chosen zones. Because more than half of the chosen zones contain just a single pedestal, the same one or two spots hold the Relic on essentially every Absolute run.

On Absolute, 79 of the 123 Relic pedestals are dead; a Relic can never appear on them however many times you play the mission. Only 44 are still reachable.

Patch 14 Relic Placement Logic

Step 1 - how many Relics. A base of 6, scaled by difficulty. Absolute scales it to 6 x 0.3 = 1.8, which rounds to 2 Relics. Squad size makes no difference.

Step 2 - each zone gets a share. Every zone carries a weighting. A zone's claim is 2 Relics x its share. If that comes to at least 0.5 it rounds up to 1 and the zone is directly served a Relic. If it comes to less than 0.5 it rounds down to 0, and the zone is set aside on a waiting list. A zone needs a share of 25% or more to be directly served a Relic on the first offering.

Step 3 - the waiting list. The waiting list is kept sorted by share, largest first, and the game walks down it handing one Relic to each zone until it runs out. Ties are broken by the order the zones were set up in the mission.

Step 4 - leftovers. Anything still unplaced goes into a genuinely random draw across every pedestal on the map. In practice this is no longer ever reached.

Step 5 - picking the pedestal. Once a zone has been chosen, the game picks one of that zone's pedestals at random. This is the only randomness still remaining since Patch 14. A chosen zone holding one pedestal has no randomness and that pedestal will always receive a relic on Absolute difficulty

Example: Inferno, Absolute

Steps 1 and 2 are shown in the table below:

The 'Final' zone is the only one on the map that reaches the 25% bar. 25% converts to 0.5, which rounds up to 1. So zone "Final" is granted Relic 1.

Step 3:

The other zones go to the waiting list, sorted largest share first:

Start (20)  ->  Camp (20)  ->  Bomb Drop (20)  ->  Abandoned Base (15)

The start zone is first, takes Relic 2, and the count is met. The game stops there.

Step 4:

Since 2 Relics are already placed, Step 4 is skipped. The camp, bomb drop and abandoned base are never reached, and their 6 pedestals are dead.

Step 5:

The zone "Start" only has 1 pedestal, so it will always receive a relic.
The zone "Final" holds 2 pedestals, so its Relic alternates between them across runs. This is the only variability players will see with Relic spawns on Absolute.

Relic Determinism Summarized

Three things compound:

1. Zone selection has no randomness in it anywhere. Step 2 is a rounding threshold and step 3 is a sort. Neither consults the shuffle. For a given mission and difficulty, the set of zones that receive Relics is completely fixed.

2. The bar is high relative to the Relic count. On Absolute difficulty (2 Relics), a zone needs a 25% share to be served directly. No Operation has more than one such zone, and most have none. So the waiting list, the fully ordered step, decides most of the Relic placements.

3. The chosen zones are thin. 15 of the 26 Relic slots across the 13 missions land in a zone holding exactly one pedestal, which removes even the within-zone variability.

Pre-Patch 14 Logic

The rounding on step 2 was different: before Patch 14 a claim of 0.50 was cut down to 0 rather than rounded up to 1. This means that Step 2 never directly served a relic.

Also, the waiting list did not exist. A zone whose claim came out below the bar on step 2, which means all of them, would immediately move on to Step 4. So every zone would have the potential to receive a relic, with both relics being served during Step 4.

Example: Inferno, Absolute

So on Inferno at Absolute in Patch 13.2, every zone's claim came out as 0, nothing was placed by zone at all, and both Relics fell through to the random draw across all 9 pedestals.

Scale of the Problem

Listed in mission order, and the two Relic columns are in the order you reach them on the route, not the order the game places them internally. Live means a Relic can land there. Dead means it never can on Absolute.

• Disruption and Fall of Atreus are completely static. On each of these operations both relic spawns are pinned to an exact pedestal with no variation at all.

• Obelisk and Ballistic Engine strand the most pedestals outright, 9 of their 12.

• Decapitation, Exfiltration, and Reliquary maintain the most variability; each of their served zones have more than 1 pedestal, so no relic spawns are pinned.

Which difficulties are affected

Live Pedestal Count and Percentage per Operation per Difficulty:

Every Operation Explained

Rows are shown, to the best of my understanding, in route order so the table reads the way the mission plays

Game Files

• ssl/lootable_system/pickups_manager/pickup_manager_profile.sslbin.

• ssl/lootable_system/pickups_manager/pickups_desc_library.sso.

• ssl/lootable_system/pickups_manager/pickup_spawn_desc_profile.sslbin

• pickup_count_influencers/pickup_count_difficulty_influencer.sso

• ssl/game_mode/scenarios/scenario_pve_acid_bomb_server.sso

• ssl/game_mode/scenarios/

• xscenes/pve_*/pve_*_scenario_server.sso.

• ssl/lootable_system/pickups_manager/gamearea_desc_profile.sslbin.