Why Answering Every Deep-Dive Question 'Perfectly' Won't Max Out Your Score
Synastri's deep-dive compatibility layer — speech style, dream themes, hand shape, clothing style, sleep position, and a few more — hands out a small bonus for each optional question you both answer. It would be easy to just sum every bonus and let a couple who fills in all of them walk away with a suspiciously perfect score. That's not what happens.
Bonuses are sorted by size, then each one is worth half the last
Before adding anything up, every bonus is sorted from biggest to smallest by magnitude. The largest counts in full, the second counts at half weight, the third at a quarter, the fourth at an eighth — each additional layer you fill in contributes half of what the previous one did. It's a geometric decay, not a flat sum.
The ceiling that creates, and why it matters
Because each new bonus is worth less than the one before it, there's no way to mechanically push the deep-dive total to some maxed-out ceiling just by answering more questions — even a run of nothing but the strongest possible bonuses converges toward a limit rather than climbing without bound. That keeps the deeper percentage meaningful: a high score has to come from bonuses that are actually strong, not from sheer quantity of optional fields filled in.
What this means for you filling it out
Skip a question you don't know the answer to — it costs you far less than the naive math would suggest, since later-added bonuses are already discounted anyway. Fill in the ones you do know for real signal, not to game a total. Check your own on `/compat`. For entertainment.