Destiny 2’s latest expansion, The Edge of Fate, introduces a new way to select and customize activities. The Portal, as it’s called, is an interface to better surface the best activities for different play styles and number of players.

The Portal lets you choose from a slate of events categorized as Solo Ops (for individual players), Fireteam Ops (Strikes and other quick activities designed for three players), Pinnacle Ops (more involved and longer activities like Exotic missions), and Crucible Ops (PvP playlists).

In addition to a new organizational scheme, the Portal also reconfigures how rewards and drops are allocated, with daily bonuses granted on a rotating basis, tied to particular missions. Additionally, the Portal boasts a customization system that allows players to directly control how challenging their activities are and, consequently, how many rewards they can expect. It’s reminiscent of the Halo series’ old Skull modifiers, and it adds a fun twist to make replaying missions more interesting.

In this guide, we will walk through how this customization system works. The image above shows how activities are presented in the Portal. The selected Fireteam Ops mission, The Glassway, has a daily “Bonus Focus” assigned to it that grants a sidearm for completion at a B grade. Finishing it will also grant three bonus drops for the next completion, alongside its base reward (the “completion reward”) that is granted every time.

After selecting a mission to play but before launching it, you are given the option to customize the activity. Here, we’ve pulled up the customization screen for the Inverted Spire, another Fireteam Ops activity.

You can see that on the Normal setting, our character (power level 101) is much higher than the power level of the enemies (10). This results in the difficulty of the mission being rated Easy (top right). There are no modifiers selected yet, so the forecasted mission grade is B, which would result in a completion reward of 105 power, two bonus drops, and a bonus focus gauntlet.

There are a number of different options for boosting this score, so let’s dig into what’s possible.

On this screen, we’ve selected Advanced difficulty, resulting in the enemy power being increased to 110. Without changing anything else, this has boosted our forecasted mission grade to A, which has increased the expected power level of our drops to 106 (up from 104 on the Normal setting).

The forecasted grade is determined by your character’s power level relative to the enemy’s, so it would be lower than A here if the character was a higher level. We can tweak the mission difficulty even more by enabling Challenge Modifiers. These introduce tweaks to enemy behaviors or environmental characteristics that are generally designed to make gameplay more difficult.

Each base difficulty level (Normal, Advanced, Expert, etc.) introduces more slots for enabling modifiers. You unlock higher mission difficulty levels by gaining power levels.

Here, we show off one of the challenge modifiers that players get access to early on. When enabled, Caltrops spawns enemies that die and drop pools that do elemental damage.

Challenge modifiers increase enemy power level and, consequently, the challenge multiplier. As a result, the forecast score on the mission has gone up considerably (from 17,500 to over 28,000).

You can enable multiple challenge modifiers (one per slot, so four total in the setup shown here) to boost your score even more.

In addition to challenge modifiers, you can also enable a set of mission boons. These are modifiers that make you stronger or enemies weaker, thus increasing your own capacity in the mission.

On Normal difficulty, these boons increase your mission score; on Advanced, they don’t have any effect on score. At higher difficulties, these boons decrease your mission score.

This one that we show here, called Brawler, increases the power and reduces the recharge rate of melee abilities.

You can also tweak the rule configurations of particular activities. These modifiers are locked early on in the Edge of Fate and don’t unlock until you gain enough power and complete the “Training” path in the Portal.

The option shown here suggests that there are different types of scoring that can be chosen to further customize how activities play.

Another option type that is locked until high power level is Player Stakes. These options allow you to tweak things like how Time Bonus is awarded.

We will update this gallery with more detail on rule modifiers and Player Stakes as we progress our characters and unlock these options.