Catalyst profiles

An item does not have 4 slots. It has 4 slots per activity, and the game reads a different set depending on what you are doing.

The activities are Default, Exploring, Crafting, Galaxy Boss, Voyager and Dungeons. Default is the one everything falls back to, and for most players it is the only one they will ever fill.

The rule

A profile you leave empty uses that item's Default profile instead.

That decision is made item by item and activity by activity, and it is what makes the whole thing optional. If you never touch a profile, every activity reads your Default set and the game behaves exactly as it always did.

The part that catches people

The moment you install one catalyst into a profile, that item switches over for that activity and its Default catalysts stop counting there. A profile does not add to Default, it replaces it.

An example. Your engine holds 2 fuel efficiency and 2 catalyst drop chance in Default. You install a single Voyager jumps catalyst into the engine's Voyager profile. From then on an expedition reads that engine as jumps only: the fuel and the drop chance are gone for expeditions, and still there for everything else.

If you want the fuel on expeditions too, you have to install fuel into the Voyager profile as well, and pay for it again.

Because it is per item, you can mix

The fallback is decided per item, so you can leave one item on Default and give another one a profile, and the activity reads both at once.

Say you want expeditions to keep the fuel efficiency and drop chance you use every day, plus the extra jumps:

• Engine: fuel efficiency and drop chance in Default, and leave its Voyager profile empty.
• Sensors: the jumps catalysts in Voyager.

Now an expedition finds nothing in the engine's Voyager profile, so the engine contributes its Default set (fuel and drop), while the sensors contribute the jumps. You get all three, and you paid for the fuel once.

Which profiles an item offers

An item only offers the profiles that can read its category of catalyst. Filling any other one would be paying an install for a bonus nothing will ever read.

Lasers and probes are where profiles matter most: eight boost stats competing for eight slots, and every activity wants different ones. Engines and sensors are the opposite, four stats for eight slots, so Default alone covers almost everything and the only reason to split is Voyager jumps, which are worth slots while you plan an expedition and dead weight the rest of the day.

How to think about it

Put in Default everything you want everywhere: drop chance, fuel efficiency, your general combat set. Use a profile only for what a single activity wants and the others do not.

Filling every profile is possible, but each one needs its own catalysts and the install price does not go down. Two or three well-chosen profiles beat six half-filled ones.