Skip to content

Currency Systems

Canon

Three first-class currencies, each with one job:

  • Coins — the general economy: the bazaar (Grand Exchange), NPC merchants, fees and services. Coins are an account balance — a number on your character, not an item. Nothing about death touches it.
  • MobCoins — the combat reward track. Also an account balance, earned only by fighting (creatures, bosses, combat milestones), spent in the MobCoin shop. Creature kills roll a MobCoin drop chance once per island tier of the island the kill happens on — the deeper the reaches, the more rolls per kill; the chance itself is owner-tuned data. Bound by default, but withdrawable: a balance can be withdrawn — free of fee — into tradeable items, Bounty Notes, minted in a fixed set of denominations; any holder may redeposit them into their own balance. Withdrawal is deliberate friction: the default track stays personal; trading it is an explicit act.
  • Prestige currency — already canon (see vision): earned only, minted only by the prestige action, never tradeable, never power. This page references it and changes nothing about it.

Every other V1 currency idea is deferred to the session that owns its system, or rejected outright — the deferred registry lives in D-CURRENCY-01 below.

Where Coins come from and go. The bazaar is pure player-to-player — it moves Coins, never creates them. Coins enter the economy through the NPC town merchants, who buy player goods at a low floor price (this is the "NPC purchasing lives elsewhere" slot created by the Grand-Exchange vision amendment), and later through quest and milestone rewards once the quest system is designed. Creatures never drop raw Coins — they pay in MobCoins and loot. Coins leave the economy through NPC shop purchases, market-tent rent, featured-slot fees, and service costs. Every faucet and sink is owner-tunable data, never code.

MobCoin shop, inside the P2A wall. The shop sells cosmetics, collectibles, keys, and quality-of-life items freely. Anything that touches progression speed routes through provider rate hooks (XpBonusSource-style) — the shop never writes a progression component or an earned deed, same as the real-money shop. V1's "progression items" category ships only in forms that pass that audit.

Boundaries with other systems.

  • Death: balances are component state — no death penalty, ever. Bounty Notes are items, and the main world drops nothing on death anyway; Life Essence remains the sole death-drop exception (mastery session).
  • Ironman: the ratified docs/design/IRONMAN.md authority governs — its trade gates apply to Bounty Note trading like any other player trade; earning bound MobCoins by combat is unaffected.
  • Offline trades: Grand-Exchange settlements for offline players land as claimable escrow at the bazaar, GE-style, collected on next visit.

Decisions

D-CURRENCY-01 — three first-class currencies; everything else deferred or dead (ratified 2026-07-16)

Coins, MobCoins, Prestige currency. Deferred to owning sessions: event currency → events world; Mastery Points and Life Essence → mastery; Eternal Crystals → dungeons & enchanting, as a material, not a currency. Dead unless their systems ever exist: reputation tokens, merchant-specific currencies.

Rejected: V1's full seven-currency roster (designs against five undesigned systems; the new-player overload V1 itself warns about); profession tokens (Profession Mastery 1–10 already rewards focused play — a token duplicates it); Eternal Crystals as first-class currency (they are a crafting/enchanting material with market value, like any rare good).

D-CURRENCY-02 — Coins are an account balance (ratified 2026-07-16)

One authority mod owns the per-player balance component (single-writer), exposing JDK-typed read/credit/debit plus provider hooks for consumers (bazaar, shops, records). No inventory tax, no drop-on-death carve-outs, and bazaar settlement debits/credits directly; offline settlements become claimable bazaar escrow.

Rejected: physical coin items (inventory clutter; forces death-drop carve-outs everywhere — Life Essence deliberately occupies the droppable carried-item slot alone); purse + bank hybrid (two states to sync with no game reason — nothing threatens a purse under no-death-penalty).

D-CURRENCY-03 — MobCoins: bound balance, withdrawable for trade (ratified 2026-07-16)

Owner ruling. Balance-shaped like Coins and earned only by combat; a withdrawal turns balance into tradeable Bounty Notes, and any holder may redeposit. Combat value can reach the market, but through a deliberate act — the default reward loop stays personal.

Rejected: fully tradeable MobCoin balance (couples both currencies' inflation and makes every purchased crate's MobCoin yield bazaar-buyable — P2A audit gets hard); strictly bound (combat players' surplus is dead value to the wider economy); bound currency with only shop outputs tradeable (owner preferred trading the currency itself, with withdrawal friction).

D-CURRENCY-04 — MobCoin shop passes the P2A audit structurally (ratified 2026-07-16)

Cosmetics, collectibles, keys, QoL items sell freely. Progression-speed items route through provider rate hooks only; the shop never writes a progression component or an earned deed. Same wall as the real-money shop — one audit rule for every shop in the game.

Rejected: V1's raw "progression items" shop category (a shop write into progression components breaks the ratified single-writer invariant and the earned-only Almanac).

D-CURRENCY-05 — Coin faucets: NPC buy-floor + authored rewards; creatures never drop Coins (ratified 2026-07-16)

Town merchants buying player goods at a floor price are the primary spigot — controllable, owner-tunable, and they fill the "NPC purchasing lives elsewhere" slot from the Grand-Exchange amendment. Quest/milestone Coin rewards join when the quest system lands. Combat pays MobCoins and loot, never raw Coins — no double payment, and the highest-volume loop stays off the most inflationary faucet.

Rejected: classic mob Coin drops (inflation magnet on the least controllable loop; double-pays combat); quest/milestone-only faucets (gathering-focused players starve at launch with nothing sellable for Coins).

D-CURRENCY-06 — Bounty Notes: fixed denominations, free withdrawal (ratified 2026-07-16)

The withdrawn form is the Bounty Note (combat-flavored, reads as loot). Notes mint in a fixed owner-tuned denomination set — each denomination one fungible item id, so stacks trade and the bazaar order-matches them like any commodity. Withdrawal costs nothing: the friction is the act itself; the shop remains the sole MobCoin sink.

Rejected: "MobCoin Voucher" (bureaucratic, no lore texture); arbitrary-value note (non-fungible metadata item — every value a unique listing, excluded from bazaar order matching); one-note-one-MobCoin (inventory pain at scale); percentage or flat withdrawal fee (owner ruling — no economic tax on trading combat earnings; act-only friction).

D-CURRENCY-07 — the mastery slots resolve: tree points are not a currency; Life Essence is an item currency (ratified 2026-07-16)

The mastery session (skill-trees) resolved both deferred slots from D-CURRENCY-01. Tree points are per-skill, bound, minted only by that skill's levels — progression state, not a wallet currency; they never trade and never appear in a shop. Life Essence joins the economy as a tradeable carried item fueling Eternal Node purchases — droppable on death (the sole exception, vision amendment 2026-07-16), bazaar-tradeable like any commodity. The three-balance first-class roster of D-CURRENCY-01 is unchanged; Life Essence is an item with currency-like demand, not a fourth balance.

Rejected: a universal Mastery Point wallet (breadth out-points focus; also re-opens the bound/tradeable audit for no gain); Life Essence as a component-backed balance (contradicts the ratified carried-item death-drop ruling).

D-CURRENCY-08 — the event-currency slot resolves: bound, event-shop-only (proposed)

The events-world session (events-world, D-EVENTS-WORLD-03) resolved the last D-CURRENCY-01 deferred slot: event currency is a bound per-player balance, earned by event participation, spent only at the event shop. It never trades and never touches the bazaar. All deferred slots are now resolved or owned (Eternal Crystals remain with dungeons & enchanting, as a material).

Rejected: withdrawable-note pattern (attendance becomes sellable income); tradeable event currency (couples the event loop to the bazaar for no design gain).

D-CURRENCY-09 — rank purchases join the MobCoin sinks (proposed)

The ranks session (ranks, D-RANKS-01/03): Knight and Arcanist tiers and the standalone command unlocks are MobCoin-priced. Supersedes D-CURRENCY-06's "the shop remains the sole MobCoin sink" clause — sanctioned sinks are now the MobCoin shop, rank tiers, and command unlocks. Withdrawal stays free; nothing else changes.

Rejected: Coin-priced ranks (owner chose combat play as the grind route); leaving the sole-sink clause and routing ranks through the shop fiction (a rank is not a shop item; name the sink honestly).

Tuning

  • data/currencies.json — the currency registry: forms, tradeability, faucet and sink lists, deferred slots. Owner-edited; merchant floor prices, MobCoin award rates, and the Bounty Note denomination values land here when their content sessions run.

Implementation

No owning mod yet. The balance authority is a new component-owning mod (single-writer, JDK-typed API + provider hooks per the root CLAUDE.md progression invariants); bazaar escrow rides the existing bazaar.db — no new SQLite consumer. Bounty Notes are plain fungible items (one id per denomination), never a component.

Open questions

  • NPC town-merchant catalog (what they buy, floor-price philosophy per profession) — Markets & Economy session (market tents, featured shops, rotating stock all live there).
  • Quest Coin rewards — quests / Lore & NPC session; must route through owner-edited reward config like all quest XP.
  • Guild shared coin balance (V1 guild-islands idea) — guilds session; this page defines only per-player balances.
  • Event currency — events-world session; the deferred slot is reserved.