Mechanics

The RPG framing is a way of making three real quantities visible: what your skills cost, what your sessions produce, and which commands you trust.

Perk points are context cost

Every skill's name and description are loaded into every Claude Code session so the model knows when to use it. That is the skill's always-loaded cost. Const.Elate estimates it from the frontmatter at four characters per token and labels the number as an estimate.

The CTX bar at the bottom compares the total against a budget you set (4,000 tokens by default). Over budget warns; it never blocks. The summary also splits the total into the part you can change (personal and project skills) and the part you cannot (plugin and synced skills).

XP comes from outcomes

XP is read from the session transcripts Claude Code writes under ~/.claude/projects. It counts outcomes, never tokens:

Approvals are not in the logs today, so the approval weight does nothing until they are. Levels are linear: 1,000 XP per level by default. All weights live in config.

Trust unlocks

A trust unlock watches a command prefix such as git or npm. After it has succeeded enough times (25 by default), the ledger suggests a matching allow rule such as Bash(git status *). You confirm every suggestion, and the rule is written to settings.local.json through the same diff-and-backup path as any other write. Three unlocks ship by default; add your own in config.

The tree grows upward

A constellation is laid out by tier, from the bottom of the screen up:

Within a tier, nodes sit in alphabetical order on zig-zag rows so the links between neighbours read as a constellation rather than a table. The tree prefers height to width: it uses as few columns as fit the nodes in the rows available, so a small category still climbs.

Categories

Skills are sorted into Coding, Writing, Research, Ops and Design by a keyword heuristic over the name and description. Anything it cannot place lands in Unsorted. You can override any assignment with c and add your own categories.

Assignments are a sidecar file, ~/.config/constelate/categories.toml. SKILL.md is never edited to record a category, so a skill you share keeps working for people who do not use Const.Elate.

Theme

On Omarchy, colours come from the active theme's colors.toml under ~/.local/state/omarchy/current/theme/. Anywhere else, Const.Elate uses the terminal's own ANSI palette, so it follows whatever theme the terminal already has.