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 170 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 170 total, 13 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): 6 tied to Legend rank, 6 tied to Imperial rank, and 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, 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).
• Crate loot: Cosmetics can also drop from crates.
• Rank rewards: Reaching Legend or Imperial rank instantly grants you the entire matching exclusive set — 6 items, one per category — the moment you hold that rank.
• 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.

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 45 tags in the catalog. 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).

Unlike cosmetics, tags are not tradeable items — they’re tied permanently to your account rather than existing as a voucher you could sell or gift.

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 15 don’t have an automatic counter behind them — they come from staff grants, seasonal events, faction standing, crate luck, or a direct Tag Merchant purchase.

The five credit-priced tags above (Paper Trail through Starlit Sigil) are the Tag Merchant’s direct-purchase vanity line — right-click the paper item 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.

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:

Reaching Legend or Imperial is worth chasing for cosmetics collectors specifically: each rank auto-grants its own full 6-piece exclusive set (one item per category) the moment you hold it. These are separate grants, so holding Imperial doesn’t also hand you the Legend set — you’d need to have qualified for Legend separately to own both.