Economy & banking

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.

Two artisans you can visit #

Most upgrades aren't bought with gold — they're earned by hunting the scrolls that monsters drop, then carried to the right artisan. Both have their own NPC, their own scroll, their own success-chance maths, and their own failure rules.

Fatewright — the gear upgrader #

Walk up to Fatewright, the purple-hooded mystic. Bring any weapon or armour piece plus one Upgrade Scroll (drop-only loot from mid-tier monsters and bosses). Fatewright will roll a public success chance to raise the item's +N by one. The starting chance hovers around 60 % at low +N and tapers as the item climbs; the panel shows the exact odds before you commit.

Three things stack the odds in your favour:

• Stardust — drop-only event currency. Each one you add bumps the chance by ~10 percentage points, capped at two Stardust per attempt.
• Higher-tier scrolls — Plating Scroll, Vitality Scroll, Focus Scroll, Warding Scroll all roll like Upgrade Scroll but with better base odds on the gear they're shaped for.
• Lower current +N — the lower the plus, the cheaper and the more likely the next bump.

Failure consumes the scrolls AND the item. This is on purpose — if upgrade were free-with-retries, the +N badge would mean nothing. Read the success chance before you press Begin.

Twinbinder — the accessory compounder #

Twinbinder is the artisan with the apron and the bench. Bring two of the same accessory (rings, amulets, earrings, trinkets) plus a Compound Scroll. The bench fuses them into one accessory at one +N higher than the input pair, capped at +5.

The base success chance is around 60 %; Stardust raises it the same way it does at Fatewright. Failure consumes both accessories and the scroll. The two inputs must match exactly — the same kind, same +N — so the system rewards farming pairs from the bestiary's accessory drops.

Both artisans live in the world; the Ledger's Beasts tab lists which monsters drop the relevant scrolls, and clicking any monster card now shows their full drop table at a glance.

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.