let it leave me like a long breath

so wrt hell game i'm trying to... basically as i make more variants for encounters i'm realizing that it's actually pretty important that i have a guarantee that all of them will be selected in the game. which means random rolling is out, and even random selection from a deck isn't sufficient. what i actually want is an ordered list where each item is least like every prior item as possible.

basically to use the sobek encounter as an example, the sobeks come with a few variations: a Muscular | Fat one, and a Wet | Gloaming | Mutated one. (also a dick size one but two is all we need for example purposes.) so technically a Muscular Mutated sobek is distinct from a Muscular Wet sobek, but they're not as distinct as they could be. those are both small, not-really-relevant body differences, but some of the flags are like, plot relevant, and it's kind of important that at least one having each one is generated.

i've been looking at my code for enumerating items (see prior post) and i think there's like, two lines of math that i'd have to change to make it output maximally-distinct values by default. but ugh today i have just not in a math brain kinda state.