As all novices know, a drucrafter can’t control any bit of random essentia floating around in the air. They can only control their personal essentia; essentia that has taken on the psychic imprint of their mind and body.
All living creatures have a reserve of personal essentia. Essentia capacity measures this reserve’s effective size.
Personal Essentia
Personal essentia is crucial for two out of the three drucraft disciplines. It allows a drucrafter to channel (by directing their personal essentia into their sigls to activate them) and to shape (by forming the kernels of sigls).
The turnover rate for personal essentia is very high. It is constantly created (as new essentia flows into a creature’s body and assimilates to it) and lost again (as it drifts away and become un-attuned). Since essentia is everywhere, this constant cycling is not usually an issue – a living creature’s personal essentia reserves will continually rise and fall, but this naturally evens itself out, like water finding its own level. This ‘evening out’ process happens constantly, from minute to minute, typically without the person in question ever noticing that anything is happening.
However, all this changes once that personal essentia is spent on something. A normal person can’t possibly deplete their reserves of personal essentia, since they have no way to spend it. A drucrafter, however, can. At this point, their essentia capacity suddenly starts to matter.
The Lorenz Scale
Essentia capacity is measured on the Lorenz scale, named after the drucraft researcher who formalised it. The Lorenz Scale is calibrated to the Lorenz Ceiling, which is the maximum amount of personal essentia input that a sigl can accommodate before its efficiency drops sharply. The Lorenz Ceiling is defined as a 1 on the Lorenz Scale.
Most sigls have a Lorenz rating of 1. Thus, a drucrafter’s Lorenz rating measures how many (ordinary) sigls they can sustainably use at once. Sigls with a Lorenz rating of less than 1 consume proportionately less of a drucrafter’s ‘budget’; sigls with a higher Lorenz rating consume proportionately more.
Reserves and Rates of Change
Although essentia capacity is commonly viewed as a reserve, or a pool, it can be more accurately viewed as a rate of change. It’s not a measurement of how much personal essentia you can hold, it’s a measurement of how quickly you can replenish it. So if you have an essentia capacity of exactly 3, this means that:
- using 1 standard-rated sigl at once is easy;
- using 2 standard-rated sigls at once is easy;
- using 3 standard-rated sigls at once is possible but difficult (you would have to channel very efficiently, and might need to pause to take breaks)
- using 4 or more standard-rated sigls at once is impossible (you would run out of essentia almost immediately).
What Determines Essentia Capacity
Essentia capacity is primarily physiological. It’s a physical trait, like height and weight, and can be measured quite precisely with modern instruments.
While many factors seem to affect essentia capacity to some degree, the strongest correlation is with a person’s skeletal mass: the combined weight of their bones and skeletal muscles. Note that this correlation, while strong, is not one-to-one; there are some rare drucrafters with a high skeletal mass and a low essentia capacity, and vice versa. Total body mass is sometimes used for a quicker estimate, but this produces a less accurate result since fat tissue and parts of the body that are metabolically inactive seem to affect essentia capacity to a much lesser degree.
Average essentia capacity in the United Kingdom is 2.8 for men, and 2.4 for women. These values vary across the world in rough proportion to average height and body size.
Changing Essentia Capacity
Because of how essentia capacity is viewed (see next section), significant efforts have been spent researching ways to increase it.
These attempts have for the most part shown limited success. By far the most effective methods to increase essentia capacity have proven to be drucraft training and strength training. Channelling practice can slightly (but reliably) increase a body’s efficiency in assimilating essentia; physical training and conditioning to increase muscle mass has a similarly positive effect.
These increases, however, are quite small. Such training virtually never produces an increase of over 20% (10% is more normal) and in any case brings diminishing returns. No matter how dedicated, all drucrafters eventually reach the point where they are forced to accept that they have pushed their essentia capacity as high as it’s going to go.
More invasive techniques have been tried, but these tend to come with unwelcome side effects, and as such, their use nowadays is frowned upon; common consensus is that the benefits of trying to force a higher essentia capacity simply aren’t worth the costs. However, given how much value is placed on essentia capacity, there’s always someone willing to take the risk.