Gold & Shop

Gold is the resource you'll run short of most often in this game.

Where to earn it

• Defeating monsters — your basic income. Gold isn't reduced when the enemy is weaker than you (only EXP is)
• Rift Spire — pays out every time you clear a floor. For the same time spent, it earns 1.5× what exploring does, making it the best place to collect Gold. In exchange, there's no EXP and no auto-progress
• Selling items — gear and materials you don't use
• Daily Quests — for each quest, plus a bonus for completing them all
• Union — the Gold slot in the daily supplies, and joint goal rewards
• Outpost — accumulates while you're away
• City clear rewards
• Archive of Engravings ranking rewards · World Boss · Otherworld Chests · Codex rewards · Spire milestones · level milestones

Where to spend it

• Auto-progress — costs Gold per step. However, if you pay with Auto-Explore steps, no Gold is spent
• Alchemy and crafting — cost Gold on top of materials
• Enhancing — gets steeply more expensive at higher grades
• Shop — the Merchants' wares
• Outpost — construction, training, and instant completion when you'd rather not wait
• Do-overs — attribute respecs (after one free respec), Talent refunds, rerolling Union Exchange slots, Essence Attunement
• Revival

⚠ If you fall, reviving costs Gold. If you don't have enough, the shortfall is taken from your EXP instead. Walk into a tough region with an empty purse and you lose twice.

Early on

Early in the game, alchemy tends to be your biggest Gold expense, because without potions your exploring grinds to a halt.

Save on auto-progress and play manually, and your Gold will last much longer.

The Shop has two tabs

• Merchants — buy and sell with Gold.
• Premium — buy with real money. It sells only four things — Auto-Explore steps · Auto-Gather steps · Spire Climbing Passes · Outpost Shields — plus the Otherworld Covenant.

🔴 There is no way to buy Gold with real money. There's no Gold anywhere in the Premium tab, and there never will be. Gold is the resource that sets this game's difficulty — the moment we sell it, we'd be selling difficulty.

For the details, see Currencies & Passes.

Merchants

Three merchants stand in the market at a time, each selling three items. Merchants rotate after a set time, and their stock is reshuffled each time. A merchant who visited recently won't come back for a while.

Prices move, too. Items that sold well get more expensive at the next rotation, and items that didn't sell get cheaper. Still, each merchant has fixed upper and lower bounds that prices never cross.

If you don't buy now, you'll have to wait for the next merchant — so if you see something you need, grab it. Things that are hard to collect on foot, like Essence, Enhancement Cores and Conqueror's Sigils, sometimes show up here.

Each item has a per-player purchase limit. The remaining quantity is shown on each item, and it resets when the merchants rotate. In other words, you can't sweep up the whole stock.

What to sell and what to keep

• For gear you don't use, disenchanting is often worth more than selling.

Sale price depends only on rarity, not iLv, so the gap widens the higher the gear's level.

• Keep your low-grade materials. They're used in high-grade recipes too.