Tablet placement: why yours does nothing

A stone tablet that appears to do nothing is almost always one of three things: its own activation condition is not met, its pattern is pointing off the edge of the bag, or it is pointing at cells that hold tablets rather than artifacts. All three are visible before you place it, once you know a tablet has two separate ranges and they are not the same range.

The two ranges

Every tablet carries an effect pattern — the cells it changes — and some also carry an activation condition, which the game labels Tablet Activation Condition. The condition decides whether the tablet is switched on at all.

The order matters and it is unforgiving: the condition is checked first, and a tablet whose condition fails applies nothing whatsoever. Not a reduced effect, not the positive half without the negative half. Nothing. A tablet with an unmet condition is a slot spent on an ornament.

Most tablets have no condition and are always active. The ones that do carry a condition in 1.0.23 all care about the same thing: where the tablet itself is sitting. Justice only works from the left or right end column. Flag only works from the left end column. Good Will only works from the bottom row. Shade only works from the top row. The game’s own wording for this is “Only active in the marked slots”, and the tablet’s tooltip names the area it needs.

A tablet’s condition is about the tablet’s own position. Nothing another tablet does changes whether it passes.

What a tablet reads, and what it changes

A tablet reads nothing about the artifacts it covers. It does not check their level, their rarity, or their category — it changes whatever is in the cells its pattern lands on, and it does the same thing whether those cells are full or empty.

There are exactly four things a tablet effect can do to a cell, and the game names them all:

Effect	What it does
Increase Artifact Level	adds levels to the artifact in that cell
Reduce Artifact Level	subtracts levels from it
Disable Artifacts	switches the artifact in that cell off outright
Ignore artifact constraints	waives that artifact’s trigger condition — see the guide to what that waives

Two consequences follow immediately, and both are usable.

Tablets have no level of their own. Levels belong to artifacts. That means a tablet parked inside another tablet’s negative range is completely unaffected, and so is a tablet sitting under a Disable — the label is Disable Artifacts, and a disabled cell holding a tablet keeps projecting its own pattern normally. Parking a spare tablet in a cell you cannot use is the standard way to neutralise the downside of a strong tablet like Last Stand, whose +5 above comes with −1 to the cells below, left and right.

Negative cells can be aimed off the grid. A pattern that points at a cell outside the bag simply does nothing there. Placing a tablet against an edge so its penalties fall outside the grid is the other half of the same trick, and it costs you nothing.

The level chain

Levels are worked out per cell, and the arithmetic is plain addition:

1. Start from the artifact’s own level.
2. Add every level change landing on that cell, from every tablet, in any order. They stack. Two tablets each giving +1 to the same cell give +2. A +2 and a −1 give +1.
3. The result is what the artifact runs at.

Because it is simple addition, the chain across a bag is easy to build deliberately. A tall column pattern like Conviction, which gives +5 to the cell above it, is a single enormous push on one artifact. The Eternal pair Heaven and Hell work at the opposite scale: each one reaches every cell in the bag except the one it occupies, Heaven at +9 and Hell at −9. Those are not adjustments to a layout, they are the layout, and Hell in particular is only survivable if the things it lands on are tablets or artifacts you were happy to switch off.

Artifacts have a level ceiling of their own, and it varies enormously from artifact to artifact — some have a single level, others climb well into double figures. Pushing past the ceiling is shown rather than blocked, and an artifact already at its maximum cannot be enchanted further. Before you spend a whole tablet on a +5, check the artifact’s page: a +5 on an artifact that tops out at level 2 is three levels thrown away.

What happens below level 1

Drag an artifact’s level far enough down and it stops working. The bag planner on this site marks a cell as inactive once its final level lands below 1, or once any tablet has covered it with Disable Artifacts, and the artifact’s own card carries a restriction line reading “Artifact must be level 0 or higher”.

Two things this is not:

• It is not partial. A switched-off artifact is not running at reduced strength; its effect is off.
• It is not something a constraint-ignoring tablet fixes. Ignore artifact constraints is a separate effect from level changes and from Disable Artifacts. It does not add a level and it does not undo a disable, so it cannot bring back an artifact that has been pushed under.

Whether a switched-off artifact still counts toward its category’s combo total is not something the game states anywhere — do not build a layout on the assumption that it does.

Rotation

Many tablets rotate; the ones that cannot say so on the tooltip as “Disable Rotate”. One step of rotation turns the whole pattern a quarter turn, and it turns both ranges together — the effect pattern and the activation condition rotate as one piece, which is why rotating a conditional tablet can switch it off.

The cycle in play reads up, then left, then down, then right. Patterns anchored on the tablet’s own cell, and patterns that cover every second cell of the bag, do not change under rotation at all. Full-line patterns do something more interesting: a pattern that covers the whole row turns into one that covers the whole column, and back again. That single fact makes a line tablet worth carrying in a tall bag and dead weight in a short one — see how bag size works.

Reading a layout before you commit

The bag planner shows both ranges for the tablet you are holding, the level every cell ends up at, and which tablets contributed what to that cell. It is the fastest way to answer “why is this artifact still at level 1” without burning a run finding out, and it takes rotation and your real capacity into account.

When a layout is not doing what you expect, work through it in this order: is the tablet’s own condition met, is its pattern landing inside the grid, is it landing on artifacts rather than tablets, and is anything else in the bag subtracting from the same cell. One of those four is almost always the answer. The tablet listings show each one’s pattern, rarity and whether it rotates, so you can check a tablet before you decide it is broken.