COSMETICS & TAGS

Cosmetics and Tags are QuantumRift’s vanity and prestige systems. Neither one changes your combat stats, your economy, or your empire’s tech — they’re pure flair. Cosmetics dress up how you look and move in the world (pets, trails, auras, jump effects, hit effects, and kill effects), while Tags are chat titles that show off what you’ve accomplished or bought. Between the Cosmetics Merchant, crate drops, rank rewards, and the Tag Merchant, there’s a long road of things to collect and show off.

Cosmetics

Cosmetics are 100% visual — they don’t buff you, heal you, or affect combat in any way. There are 188 cosmetic entries across 6 categories, and every single one of them is purely cosmetic.

Categories

You can have one active cosmetic per category — except Pets, where your rank determines how many pets you can have out at once (see the table below).

Of the 188 total, 31 are Exclusive (they cost 0 tokens and never show up in the Merchant’s rotation or in crate loot — the only way to get them is through rank or referral rewards): a full 6-piece set, one per category, for each of the five paid ranks (Hero, Mercenary, Aurora, Legend and Imperial), plus 1 tied to a referral milestone.

How to get cosmetics

• Cosmetics Merchant (rotating shop): Non-exclusive cosmetics sell through a rotating stock — 6 new items appear every 24 hours, at 00:00 UTC (the Merchant shows a countdown to the next refresh), cycling round-robin through the categories so a whole category’s pool rotates through before repeating. Prices are in Imperial Tokens, and your rank gives you a purchase discount (see below).
• Crates: the Pets, Effects and Combat crates behind the Crate Master drop every non-exclusive cosmetic of their kind, each with the same chance (see the Crates page). A crate drop is a voucher, like a merchant purchase.
• Rank rewards: Every paid rank has its own exclusive set — 6 items, one per category — and you get it the moment you hold that rank. Ranks stack downward: holding a rank also gives you the sets of every rank below it, so an Imperial owns all five sets (30 items) even without ever buying the lower eggs.
• Referral reward: Bringing 50 people into the game through your referral link grants the exclusive Trail cosmetic “Vanguard Beacon” — “Awarded for bringing fifty settlers through the rift.”

The voucher item

Whatever cosmetic you’re carrying or trading, the physical item in your inventory is always an enchanted paper voucher — the flashy icon you see in the shop, owned, and locked menus (a spawn egg for a pet, a fire charge for a flame trail, and so on) is just cosmetic flavor for the menu itself. Right-clicking a voucher for something you already own does nothing; you keep the paper, so you can gift it or sell it on the Flea Market. Every voucher carries a serial number and can only be used once, so a copied voucher is worthless, and vouchers do not stack.

Pet cap by rank

Pets are the one category where you can run more than one at a time. How many depends on your rank:

Cosmetic purchase discount by rank

Buying cosmetics from the Merchant with tokens gets cheaper as you rank up. These discounts max-fold — if you hold multiple ranks, only the best one applies, they don’t stack.

Turning cosmetics off

There’s a “Cosmetics” master switch in your PDA menu. Flip it off and you stop seeing every cosmetic particle and pet in the game — including your own. It’s a personal viewer setting: it doesn’t hide your cosmetics from anyone else who still has theirs turned on, so equipping something still shows off to the rest of the server even if you’ve opted out yourself. It’s handy for low-end PCs or for a cleaner view during PvP.

One known quirk: the lightning-based kill emotes (Thunder, Stormcaller, and Tempest) use a real, world-visible lightning bolt effect, so they can still flash briefly even for players who’ve opted out.

Pet catalog (29)

Trail catalog (29)

Aura catalog (28)

Jump catalog (28)

Hit / Attack catalog (28)

Kill catalog (28)

Kill — Abyss Rift (290 tokens) is the single most expensive cosmetic you can actually buy — the ground swallows your kill whole. Kill — Cosmetic Boom looks like an explosion, but it’s purely visual: no damage, no block breaking.

Tags

Tags are chat titles. When equipped, your tag shows up in chat between your rank prefix and your name:

[Rank] <Tag> Name: message

There are 85 tags in the catalog, 40 of them from the Tags Crate. You can own as many as you unlock, but only one can be active at a time — equip it through the /tags menu (a full-screen cursor GUI when your client supports it, with an automatic fallback to a chest-style menu otherwise).

Once unlocked, a tag is tied permanently to your account. Before that, a tag voucher (from the Tag Merchant or the Tags Crate) is an item you can sell on the Flea Market or give away.

How tags are earned

Tags unlock through eight different trigger types:

A couple of the Admin-trigger unlocks have extra conditions layered on top, and both fail closed — meaning if the game can’t confirm you qualify, you simply don’t get the tag (never a silent auto-grant):

• Seasonal tags are tied to time windows (“launch” and the first Iron Banner event). Both windows are currently open-ended, so they aren’t time-limited yet in practice.
• Faction tags split players by their relationship to the Empire campaign: the Empire-loyalist tag needs 5,000+ lifetime contribution to the campaign, while the free-company tag needs the opposite — never having crossed that contribution threshold — plus at least 100 hours (360,000 seconds) of playtime, so brand-new players can’t immediately read as “independent.”

Kill tags

Wallet balance tags

These track how much you’ve had in your personal wallet at one time — not your team bank, not net worth.

POI visit tags

Tech tier tags

Tied to your empire’s tech tier, not a personal stat.

Playtime tags

Crate pull tags

Counts lifetime crate opens, of any crate type.

Tag Merchant loyalty tags

These unlock from how many tags you’ve bought from the Tag Merchant over your lifetime — not from the credits spent.

Special & event tags

These 14 don’t have an automatic counter behind them — they come from staff grants, seasonal events, faction standing, or a direct Tag Merchant purchase. The 40 Tags Crate tags are listed in their own section below.

The five credit-priced tags above (Paper Trail through Starlit Sigil) are the Tag Merchant’s direct-purchase vanity line — right-click the paper voucher you get from the NPC to redeem it instantly. They’re priced in plain credits, not tokens, and Starlit Sigil at 1,000 credits is the most expensive tag in the game.

Tags Crate tags

Forty tags you can only pull from the Tags Crate behind the Crate Master (25-token key). Each is equally likely, and each drops as a paper voucher you can redeem or sell on the Flea Market.

Ranks, in brief

Cosmetics and tags both interact with QuantumRift’s rank ladder — Citizen → Hero → Mercenary → Aurora → Legend → Imperial — bought with Imperial Tokens from Rank NPCs in the city via rank eggs:

Every paid rank is worth something to cosmetics collectors: each one auto-grants its own full 6-piece exclusive set (one item per category) the moment you hold it, and a rank also includes every lower rank’s set. So Hero gets 6 exclusives, Mercenary 12, Aurora 18, Legend 24 and Imperial all 30, whichever eggs you actually bought.