The headline: 140 EVENT relics — more than half of StS2 relic acquisitions are event-scoped. The sequel moved relic acquisition decisively out of tiers and into events.
StS1: six tiers, one runtime filter
186 relics sort into COMMON 37 / UNCOMMON 39 / RARE 36 / BOSS 30 / SHOP 20 / STARTER 4 / SPECIAL 20. The boss pool is a fixed 30, filled at runtime from the shared/class tables — with locked relics removed before the pool fills (cross-referenced against progression unlocks). A boss relic you haven't unlocked doesn't just fail to drop — it was never in the pool.
The SHOP tier is its own spawn class: those 20 relics appear only through shop slots, priced flat 150.
StS2: pools as code, plus an EVENT ocean
300 membership edges from per-class pool files:
| Pool | Relics |
|---|---|
| SHARED | 118 |
| EVENT | 140 |
| Per-character (Ironclad/Silent/Defect/Necrobinder/Regent) | 8 each |
| Deprecated / fallback | 1 + 1 |
That EVENT ocean sits on top of a separate system: the Ancients' offering pools from opening blessings are another 102 edges. Compare StS1, where events grant from general tiers and no EVENT tier exists in the relic table at all.
What stays constant
Both games keep character-exclusive pools tiny (StS1: 3 exclusive potions per class; StS2: exactly 8 character relics each) against a large shared mass — identity comes from the starter relic and a thin exclusivity layer, not from parallel item sets.