Discord error 4013: Invalid intent(s)

The intents integer in your Identify payload contains a bit that does not correspond to any gateway intent. Intents are a bitfield: each intent is 1 << n and you OR them together. If the resulting number has a bit set in a position Discord does not define, the connection is closed with 4013. It is marked not reconnectable.

This is distinct from 4014, which is about a real intent you are not allowed to use. 4013 is arithmetic: you computed the number wrong. Common ways to do that are hand-typing a decimal value from a blog post that is now stale, copying an intents calculator output that included a typo, using + on values that overlap instead of |, passing the intents as a string, or using a library's "all intents" constant from a version that predates newer intents (which is safe) versus a home-grown "all bits set" value like 0xFFFFFFFF (which is not, because it sets undefined bits).

A worked example makes the arithmetic concrete. GUILDS is 1 << 0 = 1, GUILD_MESSAGES is 1 << 9 = 512, MESSAGE_CONTENT is 1 << 15 = 32768; OR them together and you get 33281, a valid intents value. Set bit 20 by hand, or send 4294967295 to "enable everything", and the payload contains positions Discord has never defined, so the socket closes with 4013 before the session exists. Because it is marked not reconnectable, a client that retries the same Identify in a loop fails identically every time while draining the daily session_start_limit identify budget, after which even a corrected build cannot connect until the window resets. Fix the number first, then restart: intents are only read at Identify, so a running process never picks up a corrected value.

// WebSocket close frame
code: 4013
reason: "Invalid intent(s)"

// valid example: GUILDS (1<<0) | GUILD_MESSAGES (1<<9) | MESSAGE_CONTENT (1<<15)
{ "op": 2, "d": { "token": "...", "intents": 33281, "properties": { ... } } }

Never hand-write the intents number. Declare intents by name in code so the list is readable in review, and let the library serialize it. If you maintain a custom client, keep a single enum of intent bits synced with the docs and compute from that.

The gateway table on the Discord limits page lists the identify budget this error can drain, and the 4013-versus-4014 comparison table in Discord bot not responding shows both failures side by side.