Method principles
Display official or explicitly identified supplemental records, then label any Paracausal calculation separately.
Use counts, rates, durations, targets, and stated tie-breakers instead of compressing a Guardian into an unexplained rating.
The same normalized inputs and options should produce the same ordering.
Privacy settings, source coverage, refresh timing, and capped searches are part of the result, not footnotes to hide.
Public activity reports
A search begins with a full Bungie Name. Paracausal resolves the public Destiny memberships, prefers the active Cross Save profile when Bungie identifies one, reads the public characters, and requests recent raid and dungeon history for each character. The current window is up to 100 entries per character for each of those two activity modes.
Entries without a reference activity, instance identifier, or timestamp are excluded because they cannot be grouped and displayed reliably. Manifest activity definitions supply names, descriptions, and artwork when available.
- Indexed runs
- Every valid raid or dungeon history entry returned inside the requested window, not a lifetime total.
- Completions
- Entries where Bungie’s
completedvalue is greater than zero. - Completion rate
round(completions ÷ indexed runs × 100). An empty window returns zero, not an inferred rate.- Fastest clear
- The minimum Bungie activity-duration value among completed entries only.
- Average time
- The rounded arithmetic mean of activity duration across completed entries for the grouped activity.
- K / D / A totals
- Sums of the basic kill, death, and assist values in the indexed entries. Missing or non-finite values normalize to zero.
Activities are grouped by activity type and manifest hash, and recent sequences are sorted newest first. This method does not establish checkpoint versus full clear, flawless status, encounter damage, global rank, or speedrun validity. An activity-history completion and duration mean only what Bungie returned for that entry.
Current rotation
The Today view begins with Bungie’s current Milestones response. It resolves milestone, activity, activity-type, modifier, objective, and reward definitions from the Bungie manifest. Paracausal normalizes those records into a common shape, classifies activity categories using Bungie mode identifiers and definition names, removes duplicate entries, and orders the result by published order, category, then name.
Some schedule details are supplemented from Today in Destiny’s public activity page when that source is reachable. Supplemental entries are identified internally and the response source becomes bungie+today-in-destiny. When supplemental retrieval fails, the view continues with Bungie data. Today in Destiny is an independent source, not Bungie, and an in-game Director change can supersede either feed.
Start and end timestamps determine reset windows and “ending soon” order. Countdown text is computed in the browser from those timestamps. Favorites and completed checkmarks are personal browser-only annotations; they are not Bungie completion claims and never modify the game account.
Weapon archive
The archive is generated from the current official English Destiny 2 manifest at build time. The pipeline identifies weapon definitions, resolves category, damage, season, reward-source, and stat definitions, downloads Bungie CDN artwork to local assets, and writes a versioned searchable index. It records the manifest version, generation time, original asset path, Bungie CDN URL, local path, and download outcome.
Search and filters operate on the local index, so results are fast and reproducible but can lag a newer live manifest. Names, descriptions, types, seasons, sources, and artwork are Bungie source material. Paracausal adds indexing, filtering, presentation, provenance fields, and cross-field search; it does not label a roll “best” or assign a hidden performance score in the public archive.
Private Armor Lab ranking
Armor Lab operates on the owned armor snapshot loaded through the authorized account path. It first applies user choices for class, equipped items, Vault items, locked items, and an optional pinned item. A valid set has one helmet, gauntlets, chest, legs, and class item, and no more than one Exotic.
For each set, raw stats are summed across the six displayed stats. Up to the selected limit of five simulated +10 stat mods are assigned toward unmet targets. A result’s deficit is the sum of all remaining points below targets. Waste is the sum of each final stat’s remainder after division by ten. These are planning calculations; the optimizer does not equip gear or spend materials.
| Strategy | Primary order once eligibility is applied |
|---|---|
| Balanced | Meet all targets; otherwise reduce the worst single-stat and total deficits. For successful sets, reduce waste, then prefer final total and fewer mods. |
| Fewer mods | Meet all targets, then use fewer simulated mods, reduce waste, and prefer raw total. |
| Maximum total | Meet all targets, then prefer final and raw stat totals before waste. |
Stable item identifiers break remaining ties. To keep large inventories responsive, each slot can be limited to 120 candidates and intermediate search frontiers to 600 partial builds. The run reports when that pruning occurred. A capped result is a deterministic set of strong candidates, not proof that the globally optimal combination was exhaustively found.
Freshness, quality, and corrections
- Bungie privacy settings can remove characters or history from public results.
- Source outages, throttling, missing definitions, and stale manifests can produce incomplete or delayed views.
- Cross Save selection follows the usable primary membership indicated by Bungie; unusual account states can still require a fresh sign-in.
- Public report responses may be cached briefly. Private Bungie inventory responses are marked private and no-store.
- Display rounding is intentional. Calculations use the normalized numeric values described above, then round where specified.
- When the website and the in-game Director disagree, users should rely on the current in-game state before spending resources or starting an activity.
Paracausal’s value is the transparent transformation of available records, not a claim that the source data is perfect. For the project’s purpose and independence statement, read About. Data-handling boundaries are in the privacy notice.