Credits, discovery and gems

Two currencies run your whole career: credits pay for attempts, discovery pays for permanent progress. Knowing which is which tells you where a reward is going before you even open the toast. A third, gems, comes 100 to every new player, is otherwise bought in the Store, and pays for what neither can.

The two currencies

Credits are money. A rocket costs credits to launch, a building's next level costs credits, and hiring a Meek costs credits. They flow both ways: a flight that goes well pays them back, and a flight that goes badly spends them for nothing.

Discovery only ever buys one kind of thing: a tech node on the tech tree, and the buildings a node gates. It never pays for a launch or a hire. You cannot spend your way to more of it either. It comes only from doing things worth discovering.

Both show on the purse, the chip at the top left of the hangar: credits large on top, each beside its coin, and discovery under them beside a world and its moon, with gems beside a cut stone once you hold some or the Store sells them. The same chip stands in the header of the Space Center, the tech tree, the Store, the Meek and the contract board, so your balance is in sight wherever you spend it. Tap it in the hangar to open the Your purse sheet, which says what each currency buys and where it comes from.

What earns each

Achievements pay both currencies at once, in amounts that match the feat. Lighting an engine for the first time pays 50 credits and 2 discovery; your first launch from Earth pays 200 credits and 5 discovery; going supersonic and opening a parachute in flight each pay 100 credits and 3 discovery. Harder feats pay more of both. Contracts are paid jobs from companies. Most pay credits; research contracts and the missions of the Programme pay discovery too, and research work comes back as often as you fly it. Readings pay twice over: the first time you measure a place — a world, a band of altitude and, on the ground, a biome — you are paid for the place itself, and there are reading achievements on top, worth more with a scientist aboard. The survey is the steady discovery income and the reason to fly an instrument everywhere; see Science and readings. Points of interest — named places on a world, from the launch pad to a canyon a hundred kilometres wide — pay both currencies once, the first time a ship of yours reaches each; see Points of interest. Recovering a ship pays back credits, covered below.

When discovery runs short

Discovery comes in lumps — an achievement, a new place measured, a mission done — so there will be times a tech node costs more than you hold and it is not obvious what to fly next. The tech tree answers that itself: select a node you cannot afford and its card offers Where to earn … more discovery, a list of every source still open to you with what each pays. The steps are in Find more discovery.

What a launch costs

Standing on the pad is free. What you pay for is lighting the first stage: the moment it fires, the game adds up every part's own cost and charges you that whole sum in credits. Two ships built from the same parts always cost the same to launch, so the readout in the hangar already tells you the bill before you fly. A flight you resume from orbit was already paid for the day it left the pad, so there is no second charge for continuing it.

Recovery pays back what came home

A landed ship standing still can be recovered from the flight menu: it comes home to the hangar and every part still aboard is refunded in credits. A stage you dropped along the way is not aboard, so nothing from it comes back. A ship that crashes pays back nothing at all: whatever survived a crash was not enough to fly again. This is why an attempt that reaches orbit and comes home whole costs you far less than its sticker price, and a bad flight can cost you all of it.

Trading with other players

Credits also change hands between players. The owner of a station that shares its resources can price each one: a player who docks and takes fuel pays the owner for it, and a player who brings fuel in is paid. The one who asks for the move pays a fee of 5% of the load's value on top, and that fee goes to nobody: it leaves the game. A depot is worth most where fuel is hard to bring, far from Earth, because a full tank there saves a visitor the whole trip. Discovery is never traded. See Put prices on your station.

Gems

Gems are a third balance, and a rare one. Every new player is given 100 to start with; the rest are bought in the Store, in packs, and all of them are spent on what credits cannot buy. No contract or achievement pays them, and they never pass between players: no trade, no reward and no transfer moves a gem from one programme to another. They are kept for good, and starting over from Settings leaves them exactly where they are: it takes none away and adds none, so a new player's 100 come only once. Like credits, they are spent only in the shared world, so a sandbox shows none.

What gems buy: an autoburn, a burn the world flies for you at its time while you are away (Let the world fly a burn), paid when you mark it and given back if it is not flown; and a cloak, a ship no other player ever sees, meets or touches, paid once and kept for good (Cloak a ship); and a tech tree reset, every node and building level given back as discovery to spend again, once a week (Reset the tech tree).

They sit on the purse beside your discovery, next to a cut stone in violet, the only violet thing on screen. Tap the purse in the hangar to see how many you hold.

Starting out

A new pilot begins with 5,000 credits, 100 gems and no discovery at all. That purse is there to carry you through a few early crashes while you learn to fly, not to buy your way up the ladder. Discovery for the tech tree still has to be earned.

If the crashes win and your credits fall under 1,000, the contract board offers a Fresh Start Grant that tops you back up to 1,000, enough for another starter rocket, at most once every 48 hours. See When the credits run out.

Climbing the ladder

The game is built around a ladder of feats: a short hop off the pad, a stable orbit, a landing on the Moon, then Mars, then further out still. Each rung asks for a rocket the one before it could not have built, and reaching a rung pays enough in credits and discovery to cover most, but never all, of what the next one needs. You always have to add something of your own, a better engine, a heavier tank, or a new tech node, to take the next step up.