Destiny Most Useful Tools Wasn’t Made By Bungie

If you play a lot of Destiny, chances are you’ve had a hard time keeping track of all your gear. It’s fun to collect rare and exotic weapons and armor, Destiny power leveling offer more powerful weapons, but it can be a headache organizing everything. Thankfully, there’s an app for that.

The app is a Chrome extension called Destiny Item Manager (DIM for short). Once you log into your Bungie.net account, DIM lets you easily move weapons, armor, crafting materials, and currency between your various characters with the click of a mouse. If you’re fighting a boss and you need that rocket launcher you left back in your storage vault, you can simply open your laptop, drag it over to your character, and bam! It appears in your inventory.

Here’s the remarkable thing about DIM: It’s unofficial. Destiny developer Bungie had nothing to do with it. Rather, DIM was created earlier this year by a programmer named Kyle Shay and made available for free to all Destiny players.

Shay saw how that could be useful but figured that an even more useful tool would let you move items between one of the three “alt” characters that many Destiny players maintain. “When Bungie made it possible to move items via their API, I knew that it just had to be made,” he told me.

The term API is short for “Application Program Interface.” Basically, an API is a way for one piece of software to talk to another piece of software. When a developer releases their API to the public, outside developers are able to make new software that talks to (and therefore makes use of) the original developer’s software. For example, popular third-party Twitter apps like Tweetdeck use Twitter’s API to put a new interface on top of Twitter’s existing software.

Shay described the process of making DIM as “some reverse engineering of the Bungie website and some crazy long nights prototyping and polishing.” He finally released it on March 4, about a week after it first became possible to do such a thing.

Destiny Item Manager, and the other apps like it, are just more examples of the Destiny community in action. Bungie’s decision to make their API public is a welcome demonstration of faith in their community, not entirely unlike PC developers who open their games up to modders. 

For all that we may knock Bungie for their frequent lack of communication around Destiny in general, it’s nice to see that they trusted their players to come up with creative ways to make it better. Now if only the Item Manager could somehow conjure that Hawkmoon I’ve had my eye on...