Mages in Dominions may forge magic items with a massive variety of effects. Similar to casting a ritual, forging an item has a path requirement, gem cost and requires the mage to take an entire turn at a lab.

Unlocking the ability to forge more powerful magic items is the primary use of the magic school of Construction, which provides a new tier of items at research levels 2, 4, 6 and 8.

Magic items may only be equipped on a commander with the proper slots. Gift of Reason and Divine Name must therefore be used to equip a regular unit with items.

Like gems, magic items can be passed between commanders in a province, they can also be withdrawn from and stored in the magic item treasury if a lab is present.

Many items have beneficial effects off the battlefield such as enhancing research ability, reducing forge costs or boosting the wearer's magic paths. Others are simply weapons or armor, to be given to a commander to help them fighting. Careful choice of equipment is an important part of building an effective thug or supercombatant.

Similar to spells (albeit rarer), some nations have national items that cannot be forged by others. Some nations also get a discount when forging certain items.

Most items do not stack with themselves at all, see stackable items for known exceptions.

Each unit, including non-commanders, has a specified number of slots that is inherent to their chassis, an unmounted humanoid generally has two hand slots, a head slot, a body slot, a feet slot and two miscellaneous slots. Other units may not have a tangible set of feet or don't use their own feet, have four arms, additional heads or no head at all, details like these are reflected in a unit's slots.

Slot availability can be modified by afflictions such as the loss of one or both arms.

When a unit transforms into a chassis lacking slots which were filled with items, the items are lost. When the transformation happened outside of a turn roll, the "Redo turn from scratch" option in the game menu is the only way to restore the lost items.

Magic items will replace a unit's starting equipment in certain situations. Armor and headpieces will generally only replace what the unit is wearing in that spot. Equipping a weapon will always remove every built in weapon the commander has to use their hands for, no matter how many hand slots remain unused, this prevents the commander from incurring an attack penalty. Shields however will only replace starting weapons if there is an insufficient number of hand slots, although The Copper Arm may break this interaction in certain situations. Natural weapons that aren't hands will never be replaced by an item.

While most commanders can wear any headpiece in their head slot, some cannot wear regular helmets and are therefore limited to wearing crowns, be it due to head shape, hornedness or just plain snootiness. Commanders with this limitation feature a crown icon on their head slot instead of a helmet.

Hand slots will alternate between weapon slots with a sword icon and shield slots with a shield icon, weapon slots may not be used to equip a shield.

Besides having a cost and forging requirement, some items have common traits:

• Item is cursed - The item cannot be removed, except by shapeshifting into a form which lacks a slot for the item.

• nofind ¹⁾- The item cannot be recovered if the wearer dies, generally implies that the item is cursed.

• Tainted - The item attracts the attention of horrors from the beyond. For every turn that passes the wearer may become horror marked, the probability of being marked is different for each item and is not displayed in game.

• Afflictions - Certain items will cause afflictions in whoever wears them. The afflictions caused vary by item, items with the Disease tag disease the wearer, items with the chestwound ²⁾ flag cause chest wounds and items with the magiceye ³⁾ flag cause the loss of one of the unit's natural eyes.

• Helmet - This item may not be worn in a crown slot.

• Shield - This item may not be worn in a regular weapon slot.

• Two handed weapon - Carrying this weapon requires an additional unused hand slot. When holding a two handed weapon there is no visual indication of the second slot being used and clicking it will still open the treasury, even with all other slots full.

• Start of battle spell - Carrying this item causes the specified spell to be active at the start of any battle, including both sides of an assassination and patrol discovery.

• Spell - The wearer may use the specified ritual or combat spell, see spell items for more detailed information.

All items requiring Construction 8 to forge are unique artifacts. Only one of each artifact may exist at any time. If an artifact is lost, it can be reforged by any player with Construction 8. If multiple players attempt to forge the same artifact on the same turn, one player is randomly chosen to succeed in the forging, while the other players lose the forging cost.

Additionally, using the default game settings, a player may only forge a single artifact per turn.

Certain items allow the wearer to cast a specific combat- or ritual magic. Casting a spell this way will disregard path- and research requirements, cost and lack of a laboratory.

The spells are always cast using the minimum requirements for the spell, scaling therefore does not apply even when used by a high level mage. This means that using combat spell items with non-mages is a viable option as it fills their otherwise useless script and unlike mages they will only ever pick an item spell when following the "Cast spells" general order. The precision stat of the caster may still apply.

Combat spells cast with an item will increase fatigue by 5-10 instead of the regular fatigue cost and are seemingly unaffected by encumbrance, casting from items is therefore generally much less demanding for mages.

Combat spells unlocked this way will appear at the top of the spell list for scripting while rituals appear as an order.

Some items are capable of boosting the wearer's magic paths. These magic boosters can grant a mage access to higher level items as well as combat magic and rituals.

Magic boosters will not boost magic paths that the wearer doesn't have at least a single point in.

Many (cross-)paths allow players to reach high level magic using a low level mage with little to no empowering, by simply boosting the mage with items until they can summon a higher level mage and passing on their boosters, see MelficeBelmont's Boosting & Access Guide for detailed information on boosting each path.

After a battle, each item from dead commanders has a chance to be found by a random commander as follows:

However, if the randomly picked commander has no free slots for the item it found, the item is lost anyway. Some items are marked "nopickup" and are lost when the commander dies in battle. These include Soul Contracts, items that replace body parts such as Crystal Heart and Eye of Aiming, and a few more.

If a commander dies outside of battle, such as from disease, Transformation or a Seeking Arrow, the items are lost unless there is a lab in the province. If there is a lab, the items are saved and go in there.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of every item known to fully or partially stack with itself.

• Auto spell items and start of battle spell items will cast the specified spell multiple times when stacked, so their ability to stack depends entirely on the spell.
• Extra effects on hit from weapons can be stacked, Fire Brand for example will create additional small area fire effects every attack turn when stacked.
• Equipping The Copper Arm a second time grants an extra shield slot as opposed to the weapon exclusive slot that the first Arm provides, subsequent Arms will alternate between adding weapon- and shield slots.
• Elixir of Life and Crystal Heart will each provide additional extra lives when worn multiple times.
• Eye of Aiming and other items with the magiceye trait will remove an additional eye every time they are stacked.
• Ice Lances will add additional charge attacks to the wearer's first attack when stacked.

Some magic items cannot be forged and have to be obtained through other means.

A very small number of units, mostly pretenders, start with an unforgeable magic item. For example, Jomon's Ryujin start with a Dragon Pearl.

The majority of unforgeable magic items can only be obtained through killing the independents which carry them when they spawn as a random event or at the start of the game.

• Does the Storm Spool let the carrier discharge multiple times per battle?
  • Yes. As opposed to the similar spell and bless, the Storm Spool does not lose its overcharge when hit.
• Why isn't my Magic booster giving my Mage a new Magic path?
  • Path boosts only work for Mages who already have levels in those Magic paths, just like with Path-boosting combat spells.
• Why do I never recieve a discount to my Blood Slave cost when forging items, even though my mage is holding the Dwarven Hammer and is located in a province with The Steel Ovens?
  • Blood Slave cost for forging takes into account Blood magic discounts, not forging discounts. In order to reduce the Blood Slave cost on items, seek out magic sites with Blood magic bonus and global events which say "The stars are right for blood magic".

• List of Trinkets (Construction 0)
• List of Lesser Magic Items (Construction 2)
• List of Greater Magic items (Construction 4)
• List of Powerful Magic Items (Construction 6)
• List of Artifacts (Construction 8)

Magic
Concepts	Blood Hunting • Communions • Empowerment • Gems • Items • Magic Sites • Research
Categories	Combat Magic • Ritual Magic • Notable Spells
Paths	Fire • Air • Water • Earth • Astral • Death • Nature • Blood • Holy
Schools	Conjuration • Alteration • Evocation • Construction • Enchantment • Thaumaturgy • Blood • Divine