Overview
Catalysts are equippable items in Silver Palace that grant characters damage or support buffs. Each character can hold up to three Catalysts at once, and players can freely select which Catalysts to equip based on their build strategy.
How Catalysts Work
Catalysts activate their effects when the player spends Silverdrip segments or uses an Ambush attack during a character swap. When a Catalyst triggers, it provides its specific effect: elemental damage bursts, defensive shields, healing over time, stat buffs, or crowd control debuffs on enemies. Different Catalysts on the same character produce different outcomes, so one character can fill different tactical roles depending on their Catalyst loadout.
Build Strategy
The three Catalyst slots per character create real build choices. A damage character could equip three offensive Catalysts for maximum burst, or swap one for a defensive Catalyst to improve survivability. Support characters might stack healing and buff Catalysts, or mix in offensive options for hybrid builds. Loadouts tend to follow the character's class, with damage Catalysts on Hero, mitigation on Guardian and buff triggers on Witness.
Catalyst selection sits alongside a character's element. Resonance itself is per-character: a character builds their own meter and its effect fires on their Reactor attribute, so matching elements across the party does not amplify anything. What Catalysts do influence is how often a character reaches those windows at all, since a loadout tuned for faster Silverdrip generation and more frequent swaps also means more attacking, and attacking is what fills a Resonance meter.
Obtaining Catalysts
During the Monotype Beta, Catalysts were obtainable through gameplay rewards, story progression, and event participation. Whether they also appear in the gacha system alongside characters and Motives has not been confirmed for the full release. No shop counter documented from either closed beta listed one for sale: the Ounces economy covers materials, gifts and basic Motives, and Catalysts appear on none of those shelves, so the reward tracks remain the only route on record.
Comparison to Other Systems
The Catalyst system fills a similar role to relic or artifact sets in other action RPGs, providing an equipment layer that modifies and enhances a character's base abilities without changing their fundamental kit. The per-character customization through three freely selectable slots gives more flexibility than fixed set bonuses.
Status After the Combat Rebuild
Everything above describes the Catalyst system as it worked in the first closed beta. The combat system was rebuilt for the second closed beta, and the detailed description published ahead of that test covered parries, executions, weakened states, synchronised swaps, Resonance effects and Casual Mode without restating how Catalysts hook into Silverdrip spending, which left the system's status open for a time.
That question is now settled in one direction at least. The post-test report published in August 2026 names Catalysts directly, alongside the Reactor and buff states, as effects that were too easy to overlook during a fight and whose presentation is being rebuilt. Catalysts are therefore a live system in the current build, not a retired first-test one. What has still not been restated is the trigger: whether they still fire on Silverdrip spending and Ambush attacks specifically, or on some other condition in the rebuilt loop, has not been said.
Related pages: Combat System and Dichotomy Beta.