Economy & banking
Gold, vendors, the bank vault, and the slow inflation that nibbles every twelve hours. Anti-shelter — you can't hoard your way out.
Qwazy Land has one currency: gold. (There's also a separate cash field reserved for future cosmetics; ignore it for now.) Gold drops from monsters, comes out of chests, and changes hands at the merchant. It also slowly drains back toward baseline through inflation.
Earning gold #
- Chests. Every monster kill spawns a chest at the death point. Pressing E at the chest credits gold to your wallet.
- Selling. Drag any item onto the merchant's sell drop-zone and the merchant pays you 50 % of its base price. Yes, just half.
- Quests. Some NPCs (Nessa with her Goblin Ear errand, others later) reward gold on quest hand-in.
Spending gold #
- Vendors. Click an item in the merchant's wares panel; the price comes out of your wallet.
- Storage upgrades. A future feature — extra inventory and bank slots beyond a generous default. Gold or cash, TBD.
- Forge / upgrade. Press an item with a
+Nupgrade against another of the same kind to keep the +N alive (decay still applies).
The bank vault #
A separate gold pool held at the banker NPC. You can move gold between your wallet (on-hand) and your vault (banked) at the banker. Why two pools?
- Wallet gold can be lost on death (currently it isn't, but it could be in a future patch).
- Vault gold can't be spent at distance — you have to walk to the banker.
Both pools are taxed by inflation at the same rate. There is no shelter — see below.
Inflation — the anti-shelter rule #
Every twelve hours, your gold (wallet + vault, summed and calculated separately) loses 1 % of its value. The game logs a short line into the game-log when this happens.
Why: same reason as item decay. If gold could be hoarded for years and then dumped on the market, the late-game economy would tilt toward whoever started earliest. Inflation keeps the prices and the player population synchronised.
Practical consequence: spend gold while you have it. A pile of 10,000 gold sitting in the vault for a week becomes ~9,800 gold. A purchased upgrade keeps its full value (until the upgrade itself decays).
Bank inventory slots #
Separately from gold, the bank also stores items. You drag items into the bank panel from your inventory. The bank is much bigger than your inventory and a useful overflow for kit you're not currently running. Items in the bank decay at the same rate as items in your inventory — there's no preserve-by-banking trick.
In code #
Inflation tick + bank schema: design/balance.md and design/items.md. The wire frame inflation ships to each affected player whenever a period boundary is crossed.