Hoids Power Collection Question

[Sleep deprived nerd]

A rambling post discussing a topic that I'm sure has been tread into oblivion.

It has been established in a WoB that Aon Dor can, with an appropriate investiture infusion, replicate pretty much any investiture in the cosmere.

We have seen a hint of investiture absorption abilities that Sigzil seems to have gained from a very brief time holding the dawnshard. 

We also know that with appropriate skill, Breath can be used to expand your soul.

I wonder if increasing the "size" of ones soul would also increase the strength of one's allomancy.

Further, based on all of this, is there anything we have seen or learned that would indicate Hoid is not now able to expand his soul increasing the amount of power he can get directly from the spiritual realm using allomancy, then use the investiture to fuel his Aeon Dor he gained in Tress? And while he is at it, creating a limitless supply of allomantic metals to fuel these powers? 

[PanLin they/he]

On 5/7/2026 at 2:22 PM, Sleep deprived nerd said:

We also know that with appropriate skill, Breath can be used to expand your soul.

I wonder if increasing the "size" of ones soul would also increase the strength of one's allomancy.

Small note on this—being an allomancer requires having a piece of Preservation in your spiritweb (burning Lerasium makes you a stronger allomancer as a side effect of essentially attaching a bigger chunk of Preservation directly to your spiritweb), and each Breath is a little chunk of Endowment.

So it's not quite just having a bigger soul, but a more Invested one, and that Investiture is almost always keyed to a specific Shard.

Having more of Endowment's Investiture via Breaths wouldn't directly make you a stronger allomancer, but it would make you generally stronger and potentially able to better utilise allomantic powers.

 

On 5/7/2026 at 2:22 PM, Sleep deprived nerd said:

Further, based on all of this, is there anything we have seen or learned that would indicate Hoid is not now able to expand his soul increasing the amount of power he can get directly from the spiritual realm using allomancy, then use the investiture to fuel his Aeon Dor he gained in Tress?

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but the power gained from allomancy can only be used for allomancy, because of how Preservation set it up. It's a pretty strict Invested Art in terms of how much 'power' you get for burning different metals, which is why Compounding is so nutty in how it bypasses the guard rails entirely.

Similarly, AonDor can only be fuelled with Dor.

Generally speaking, you can't use keyed Investiture of one Shard to directly power the Art of another. Vasher, for example, can survive on Stormlight because he just needs raw Investiture, but he can't (or at least, hasn't yet worked out how to) use it to power Endowment's Awakening. WoB:

Spoiler

ZenBossanova (paraphrased)

Can Vasher use Stormlight to Awaken things?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

No, all it does is keep him alive. But he has tried and has not figured out how to Awaken things.

Firefight Phoenix signing (Jan. 21, 2015)

 

On 5/7/2026 at 2:22 PM, Sleep deprived nerd said:

We have seen a hint of investiture absorption abilities that Sigzil seems to have gained from a very brief time holding the dawnshard. 

This is an edge case, but one that Hoid shares. We don't really understand Dawnshards well enough yet. Can they innately unkey Investiture? Or is it just that the abilities they grant can be fuelled by any Investiture, similar to Vasher surviving on Stormlight? (Based on how Sig and Aux talk about storing BEUs of Investiture, my money's on the latter)

Either way, holding a bunch of any Investiture makes you generally stronger (Heightenings aren't unique to Breaths, they're just what happens when someone is heavily Invested), but you can still only fuel Invested Arts with the right Shard's Investiture (or unkeyed Investiture, of course).

 

Obviously there are ways of unkeying and hacking Investiture to do different things, but in Preservation's case, you don't get an influx of Stasislight or whatever when burning a metal, you directly get the power associated with that metal, so it isn't really in a format you can use to just store the Investiture.

The Dor is so interesting because there's just a bunch of raw Investiture kind of sat there twiddling its thumbs in the Selish sub-astral, ready for the taking (as long as you can survive the extremely hostile environment caused by it).

A much better solution would've been to collect and unkey Stormlight, but obviously that's a bit more difficult now the main source of Investiture on Roshar comes from Retribution, who actively decides whom to give it to.

 

On 5/7/2026 at 2:22 PM, Sleep deprived nerd said:

And while he is at it, creating a limitless supply of allomantic metals to fuel these powers? 

There's nothing inherently special about allomantic metals; they're not Invested. With the general tech level advancing across the Cosmere, a better angle here would be something like:

• finding and hoarding an asteroid or similar that contains a huge supply of an otherwise rare metal
• finding a more efficient way to generate otherwise rare metals (looking at you, aluminum)

 

To summarise: Hoid has access to a wide range of abilities and Investiture, but he can't intermix the power sources and effects directly without unkeying the Investiture or finding other hacky workarounds.

Edited Tuesday at 01:27 PM by PanLin

[Qianweilian He/him]

On 5/7/2026 at 9:32 AM, PanLin said:

There's nothing inherently special about allomantic metals; they're not Invested.

That not what the op is saying, merely that Hoid could use it to make metals. 

[Nitpicking]

18 hours ago, Qianweilian said:

That not what the op is saying, merely that Hoid could use it to make metals. 

And some are rare and thus expensive, like gold . 

[Sythrin]

On 5/7/2026 at 4:32 PM, PanLin said:

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but the power gained from allomancy can only be used for allomancy, because of how Preservation set it up. It's a pretty strict Invested Art in terms of how much 'power' you get for burning different metals, which is why Compounding is so nutty in how it bypasses the guard rails entirely.

Its not clear yet if you cannot "clean" the investiture from allomancy. There are multible ways we have seen people remove the key to a investiture. Ether by direct force like Shallan did in WaT or like Sigzil with an Emberheart. Or like Navani discovered in RoW.

[PanLin they/he]

On 6/12/2026 at 4:49 PM, Sythrin said:

Its not clear yet if you cannot "clean" the investiture from allomancy. There are multible ways we have seen people remove the key to a investiture. Ether by direct force like Shallan did in WaT or like Sigzil with an Emberheart. Or like Navani discovered in RoW.

Yep, I'm aware I addressed that later in my post, actually:

On 5/7/2026 at 3:32 PM, PanLin said:

Obviously there are ways of unkeying and hacking Investiture to do different things, but in Preservation's case, you don't get an influx of Stasislight or whatever when burning a metal, you directly get the power associated with that metal, so it isn't really in a format you can use to just store the Investiture.

Everything we know about allomancy points to the metals being a key to access a specific power. When burning a metal, Preservation's Investiture sort of comes pre-packaged with the ability for that metal.

If it is cleanable and storable at all, I suspect it'd be much harder than for other forms of Investiture.

 

On 5/8/2026 at 11:42 PM, Qianweilian said:

That not what the op is saying, merely that Hoid could use it to make metals. 

I know  the phrasing of the question made it sound like the idea was to use Investiture to create the metals from scratch, which is just spending Investiture to create metals that obviously don't have the original Shard's fingerprint on them, in order to use them for allomancy. It could work; it just seems like a very roundabout and lossy way to achieve it.

I was just pointing out that a more efficient method would likely be to use Invested abilities to either find or develop better ways to synthesise the metals needed for allomancy, as the metals themselves don't need any special treatment.

Edited Tuesday at 01:32 PM by PanLin