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Gold (ooh shiny!) is the primary currency in the world of Sryth.

How to earn gold[]

Quest rewards
A number of quests, such as the Phantom Assassin quest, provide significant amounts of gold as part of the quest reward. See Quests for Gold for more information.
Drops
You will often find gold lying around after winning a battle, which your character will pick up automatically. This is usually up to 10 gold, however certain enemies and encounters provide richer bounties.
The main source of gold in the long run is to sell items that you pick up after battle (see also grinding) or during quests. Be careful not to sell off something unique that you may need later.
Adventurer Tokens
If you are very desperate for gold, you can trade in your Adventurer Tokens for gold at the small windowless building with a blue door. You get 400 gold for 1 AT. Be warned, there is no way to reverse this process, and AT are a lot more valuable than gold is. For a less radical version of using AT to increase your gold flow, see Owlnook Tavern

Where to spend gold[]

Purchasing items
The most common use for gold is to buy weapons, armour, or other knick-knacks from one of the stores in Tysa's many towns and villages. This is specially true at the beginning of your adventurer career, and thus for that part of the game you'll be a little gold-hungry.
Special purchases
Apart from items, you can occasionally make 'big-ticket' purchases, such as a dwelling (and its upgrades), a mount, or a quickstone. A notable very high cost item is Zorliarn's Ring of Arcana, for 250K gold (which is probably still preferable to its substantial AT or BM cost)
Quests
Some quests offer the option of buying instead of fighting your way through.
Sages
If you don't have the skill of Arcana at a level of 30 or above, you can pay a sage to identify any unidentified items you may have.
Inns and taverns
Most inns and taverns around the land allow you to purchase a drink, a meal, and possibly a room at very reasonable rates. These purchases will often lead to an adventure.
Blessings of Protection
Blessings of Protection will likely be one of your major expenses if you battle tough opponents.
Tending your mount
Taking care of your mount can be another draw on your coffers, depending on how much you travel around, and how high your skill of Horsemanship is.
Returning Tallys's merchandise
You'll be charged 7 * <AT Cost of returned items> in gold for returning items to him.

Gold cap[]

In September 2009, the GM fulfilled his promise (in game updates August 2008) to implement a gold cap. The gold cap was set at 1,000,000 gold tokens. Characters with more gold were able to retain it, but can't gain anymore. As side effects:

  • The ability to store gold in your dwellings was removed from the game
  • The first time you came into any of your dwellings that had gold stored on it, the gold jumped to your inventory. This allowed for a certain mischievous behaviour, consisting in NOT visiting the dwelling with gold on it, thus allowing yourself to continue earning gold (to the cap). This behaviour is available to few (since you had to have stored gold previously and have less than a million on you) and low-impact (since in the worst case you could gain an extra million), and is not known if the GM is planning to take any other measure(s) to prevent it.
  • The cost in gold to train skills and powers was removed (see below for the history of gold in Sryth).

Reasons for the gold cap[]

The reasons given for the GM were simple: "This change will help to restore a more realistic and workable economy for the game.". It's still unknown what economy he was referring to, since Sryth is (still) a basically single-player game, and the uses of gold are relatively few after a certain level, way below the current cap. There has been a lot of speculation on the forum about this.

The only bit that is clear is that gold was becoming an increasingly meaningless stat as older and dedicated grinders kept accumulating millions. The all-times richest player in Sryth's history reached over 50 million in gold, however this was done with the aid of an automated script, and before the GM stated that this was not a right way to play the game. The second richest player (although officially ranked first, owing to the previous character being voluntarily off the lists of the Hall of Champions) was the almighty Magical (from Havoc) with more than 33 million manually collected gold tokens.

Given the obvious difference it makes on gameplay to have such differences in economic power between older and newer characters, this is (yet) the most valid reason for the gold cap.


Bypassing the gold cap[]

There's a way to bypass the gold cap - storing items (ideally, valuable items) on your special residence. As you are not limited in the number of identical items you can store there, you can grind gold to the cap and after that store everything you get in order to sell it later, after you've made some purchases.

History of Gold in Sryth[]

Old times of yore[]

This was the first part of the game, before Replayable Scenarios were invented. Gold was a strictly closed measure, and there was no way to earn more than it was available at the quests.

The first random encounters, namely explore the realms at random and The Murk, changed this. Grinding had started!. Although these were the only options for non-AG players, for AG members the other classical replayables (Axepath Cemetery and The Ruins of Yir-Tanon) made it much easier.

Thieves and pickpockets[]

Although they were removed before 2008, you could have encounters while you traveled, such as bandits (see Old Quests) for details). The rugged brigands were later updated and put back in the new Travel interface (a long time after mounts were introduced).

However, there were some worse encounters. You could get pickpocketed in certain locations, and end up losing up to 40% of your gold. Also, dying would cost 1/4 of the gold and xp that you had on you. As an answer, you could store your wealth in your dwelling - you could do it much after the thieves had disappeared, until the gold cap was in place. There was a hard limit in place - 224-1 gold tokens, that is, 16,777,215 gold in any one dwelling. Only a handful of players ever bumped into this, of course.

Replayables and inflation[]

Although there is no real inflation in Sryth - owing to the fact there is no player-to-player commerce - as soon as grinding was introduced some players started to accumulate wealth. In order to prevent this, the GM added a cost to to train skills and powers. Until September 2009, whenever you trained a skill or a power at a SAFE location, you needed gold in addition to XP to train. The amount started being 5% of the XP amount, escalating to 10% to train level 40s and 50s, and 20% to train 60s and up. You didn't need to pay gold to train powers at the Grey Circle. At low levels, you could also come across the occasional trainer who can train a specific skill of yours for only a gold cost, no XP.

The cost in gold to train was removed when the gold cap come into place.

The selling limits[]

Shops in Sryth do buy items, but they do it at a much lower value than the item has. Before the shop interface improvement, you had to try to sell an item to know its real value, and this only in certain cases. In those times, the prices were generally lower than today, and the maximum gold a non-AG player could get was 100 gold per item, on Talinus markets, and an AG member could get up to 2,000 gold for the best pieces. See the Item Selling Guide for details on current limits for items and the old wiki for some historical values.

One of the great advantages of the Festival of Blades residences was a private peddler that paid more for items than any other shop in the game.

The Gold Hall of Champions[]

Until the gold cap was in effect, the Hall of Champions had a section for gold, and the amount of gold one had actually weighed for the adventurer ranking.

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