In Falsus Card Integration: Blueprints, Iota and Penalties

The loop in one paragraph

You unlock Blueprints through the Scenario. You earn Iota, small hex-shaped pieces with a colour, a Potency and sometimes a Trait, by clearing Encounters. You place Iota on a Blueprint’s grid to Integrate a card. The card then goes into your five-card loadout for songs. You can Integrate the same Blueprint again whenever you have better Iota; each run makes a new card.

Step by step

Choose a Blueprint. You can Integrate it even if you already own a card from it.
Place Iota on the hex grid. The grid has white blank tiles, coloured Zones and dark unsafe tiles. Iota cannot be rotated or flipped.
Fill Zones with Iota of the same colour. Each filled Zone adds Power, Defense or Trait slots. Each Zone shows a counter such as 0/3 or 0/6.
Press Integrate. Power and Defense must both be at least 1.
Pick Traits if you have slots and placed Iota that carry them.
Confirm. You get the card, and the Iota you placed are used up.

The maths

Power / Defense = (sum of filled Zones) × Potency Multiplier × penalty multiplier.
Potency Multiplier = average Potency of the placed Iota ÷ 100.

Because it is an average, one low-Potency piece dragged in to finish a Zone lowers the whole card. Iota in the store screenshots sit between about 158 and 228 Potency, so most cards run at roughly ×1.6 to ×2.3.

The five penalties

Penalty	Cause
Overload	Each Iota past the card’s Iota Limit.
Out of Bounds	Each Iota touching an unsafe tile, once per Iota.
Overlap	Each tile with two or more Iota, once per tile. Three is the hard cap per tile.
Disconnect	Each separate cluster of Iota after the first.
Falsehood	Any Iota touching no safe tile. Zeroes the card and blocks Integration.

And what they cost, per the community’s measurements:

Total penalties	Stats kept
0	100%
1	89%
2	56%
3 or more	0%

Character skills bend the rules

Each character has skills that change what is legal for their Blueprints:

Expanded Iota Limit lets you place more Iota before Overload counts.
Overload, Out of Bounds, Overlap and Disconnection Tolerance each ignore a set number of that penalty.
Infusion decides, per colour, the highest Iota Tier that character can use.

The store screenshot of Nia’s screen shows Expanded Iota Limit at level 3 and Disconnect Tolerance at level 0, so these improve as you play. A layout that costs one character a penalty can be free for another.

Where Iota come from

Iota drop from Encounters, and only when you get both an Encounter Connected and at least a Dive Cleared. Each Encounter has its own pool of shapes and colours and a maximum Potency. In Music Play you have to link a Remembrance to get any Iota.

Discovery and Mastery

Each Blueprint has a Discovery bar and a set of Mastery challenges on its recipe screen. Cards are shown as In Discovery, In Mastery or Mastered. The achievement Master of Integration asks you to fully Discover and Master every recipe.

Tips for clean cards

Fill every Zone before worrying about blank tiles; blanks add nothing by themselves.
Zero penalties beats an extra Zone almost every time, since one penalty already costs 11%.
Keep clusters connected unless the character has Disconnect Tolerance.
Save high-Potency Iota for the Blueprints you actually bring into Encounters.
For the achievements, a Tier 1 card with every Zone filled and no penalties unlocks Grandmastery Challenge I.

Data: cards and Blueprints · How cards fight: Encounters · achievements

Sources: Miraheze Cards and Integration page, the wikiwiki card crafting page, the Steam store screenshots, and a demo-era walkthrough video of the Integration screen, read 10 September 2026.

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