Introduction #

Every Heathen product name comes in two flavours, a Foundation and a Toolkit, and the split isn’t just a pricing tier. It’s an architectural boundary: the Foundation is the functional base layer, the Toolkit is everything built on top of it. Understanding where that line sits tells you exactly what you’re getting with each, and why.

Best Practices #

• Start from the Foundation’s public repo if you want to understand the real mechanics. It’s FOSS, so the actual implementation of the base layer is always readable, regardless of whether you own the Toolkit.
• Check the Foundation first if something feels missing. A capability you’d expect might already be in the free Foundation layer, not gated behind the Toolkit at all.
• Don’t assume Toolkit parity across engines. Foundation and Toolkit maturity can differ per engine (see any product’s own KB welcome page for what’s actually shipped where).

The Foundation: free, open, no strings #

A Foundation is FOSS (MIT/Apache-style licensing), the functional base layer of the product. It’s a complete, working thing on its own, not a crippled trial. You can read it, fork it, ship it, and never pay Heathen a cent. Every Foundation lives in its own standalone repo, one per engine, hosted on Codeberg.

The Toolkit: paid, built on the Foundation #

A Toolkit extends its Foundation with higher-level, more elaborate quality-of-life work: deeper editor tooling, more complete coverage of an underlying SDK’s surface, prebuilt UI, the parts that turn “the raw capability exists” into “this is fast to actually use in a real project.” The best working example of the split is Unity’s Steamworks integration: Foundation for Steamworks wraps the core Steamworks API access, and Toolkit for Steamworks builds the deeper editor tooling, UI, and workflow layer on top of it.

A note on naming #

Heathen-owned IP leads with the product name: GameplayTags Foundation, GameplayTags Toolkit. Where the underlying platform is someone else’s trademark (Steamworks is Valve’s), the name flips to avoid implying endorsement: Foundation for Steamworks, Toolkit for Steamworks, not the other way around.

Why the split exists at all #

This isn’t a freemium gate bolted onto one product. It’s the same shape across the whole catalog on purpose: it means the core mechanics of everything Heathen ships are auditable and forkable by anyone, and it means paying for a Toolkit is paying specifically for the QoL and depth on top, not for access to the underlying capability itself. If Heathen ever stopped supporting a product, the Foundation underneath it keeps working, because it was never anything other than a real, independent, open-source project to begin with.