Ignore artifact constraints: what it waives

The line between an artifact's placement requirement and the condition written into its effect — and which side each falls on.

Applies to 1.0.23
Checked August 5, 2026

Ignore artifact constraints lifts the Restriction line printed on an artifact’s card — the “Triggers when…” requirement that says where the artifact has to sit, or what has to be around it, before it does anything. It applies only to the cells the tablet’s pattern covers.

It does not make an artifact’s effect fire, it does not change any level, and it has nothing to do with a tablet’s own activation condition. Almost every wrong answer about this effect comes from stretching it into one of those three.

What a Restriction line looks like

Some artifacts carry a condition above and beyond “be in the bag”. The game prints it on the artifact’s card under the heading Restriction, and the wordings are fixed. In 1.0.23 the set reads:

Triggers when placed in the top row
Triggers when in the lowest slot
Triggers when in the inner slots
Triggers when in an outermost slot
Triggers when placed in either of the end columns
Triggers when both adjacent slots are empty
Triggers when all surrounding slots are filled
Triggers when there is an artifact in the slot to the left
Triggers when there is an adjacent grimoire
Effect activates when different artifacts are in both artifact slots
Triggers when at max HP

Only a small number of artifacts carry one at all — but they are disproportionately artifacts you want, because the game charges for a strong effect by making it awkward to place. Two artifacts that both want the top row are competing for six cells; two that both want an outermost slot are competing for the ring. That competition is the problem the effect solves.

The line, exactly

Waived: the Restriction line. If the card says the artifact triggers from the top row, and a tablet covers its cell with Ignore artifact constraints, the artifact works from wherever the tablet reaches. Almost every wording above is of this kind — it asks about the slot the artifact occupies or the slots touching it, and that is exactly what the effect is built to answer.

Not waived: the condition written into the effect itself. This is where players get burned. If an artifact’s effect sentence says the bonus applies while you are above a certain range, while a debuff is on the target, on a critical hit, or once every so many seconds, that is not a Restriction — it is the effect. Nothing waives it. A tablet cannot make an artifact pay out on a trigger that never happened. The test is simple: if it is on the Restriction line, it is in scope; if it is part of the sentence describing what the artifact does, it is not.

Not waived: level. Ignore artifact constraints is one of four separate things a tablet effect can do, alongside Increase Artifact Level, Reduce Artifact Level and Disable Artifacts. It adds no levels and it does not undo a disable. An artifact that another tablet has switched off, or dragged below the level it needs to function, stays off — and covering it with a constraint-ignoring tablet will not bring it back. That is a level problem with a level fix: move the artifact, or stop the negative pattern from reaching it. The tablet placement guide works through how those chains add up.

Not applicable: tablets. The effect is named for artifacts, and a tablet’s own activation condition — “Only active in the marked slots” — is judged purely on where that tablet sits. Nothing another tablet does changes it. A tablet that must be in the bottom row must be in the bottom row.

The one case the game does not settle

Read the list again and one entry stands out: “Triggers when at max HP”. It is printed in the same Restriction line as the placement wordings, but it is not about the bag at all — no arrangement of your grid can satisfy or break it.

The game does not say whether the effect reaches that kind of restriction. The common community shorthand — “it waives placement requirements” — is right about every case that involves your bag, and the honest answer here is that a non-positional restriction is untested. If a run turns on it, put the artifact under the tablet and watch whether the restriction clears on the card before you build the rest of the layout around it. Do not take an answer on faith, including this one.

The three tablets that carry it

Only a handful of tablets have this effect, and reading their shape is most of the battle.

Surge (Advanced, rotates) is the pure version: it does nothing but ignore constraints in one direction. That makes it the cheapest way to free a single awkward artifact, and rotating it lets you point it wherever the artifact ended up.
Link (Rare, rotates) gives +2 to the cell above it and ignores constraints in the cell below it. Those are two different cells, pointing in opposite directions.
Hospitality (Legendary, fixed) is the generous one: +1 to the cell on its left, +2 to the cell above, and constraint-ignore on both of those same cells. Two artifacts get freed and levelled at once. It does not rotate, so the two cells it serves are always up and to the left.

Link is the one that generates the most confusion, and the reason is worth stating plainly: its two ranges never overlap. Players place it expecting the artifact it is buffing to also be freed of its condition, and that never happens — the buff goes up, the waiver goes down. Rotating Link turns both ranges together, so you cannot separate them; you choose which of the two neighbours gets which. If you want one artifact to receive both, that is Hospitality’s job, not Link’s.

How to actually use it

The value of this effect is almost never the effect itself. It is the slot it hands back.

An artifact that insists on the top row is competing with everything else that wants an edge — including your tablets, several of which only work from the top row, the bottom row or an end column. Freeing one edge-locked artifact into the middle of the bag releases an edge cell, and edge cells are the scarcest real estate you have. Work the release backwards: decide which edge-locked thing you most want in the middle, then place the constraint-ignoring tablet so its pattern reaches it.

Two habits make this reliable. First, check the artifact’s card in game for a Restriction line before you build around it; if it has none, a constraint-ignoring tablet is doing nothing for it and the slot is wasted. Second, plan the geometry outside the run. The bag planner shows every cell a tablet’s pattern covers, including its constraint-ignore cells, so you can see exactly which artifacts are inside the range at your real capacity — and you can see what else you would have to move.