GETTING STARTED & THE EMPIRE ECONOMY

Welcome to QuantumRift — an Empire-vs-player-factions survival MMO set on an arid custom world. Each season runs roughly 8–10 months and takes you through a 7-tier progression of gear, tech, and base upgrades. When a season ends, most of your in-world progress resets — but your Imperial Tokens, cosmetics, and rank carry over, so anything you build in the premium economy is a permanent investment across seasons.

This page covers the two currencies you’ll use from your very first minute in the game — Imperial Credits (earned) and Imperial Tokens (premium) — and the rank ladder tokens unlock.

1. Imperial Credits — Your Everyday Currency

Imperial Credits are the free currency you earn just by playing. In-game they’re shown with a “cr” suffix (e.g. 123.000 cr).

• Starting balance: every new player begins with 20 credits, granted automatically the first time your wallet is created.
• Precision: credits track down to 3 decimal places (smallest unit 0.001 cr), so don’t be surprised to see prices like 0.050 cr or 1234.567 cr. Shop and listing screens trim trailing zeros for readability — 100.000 shows as 100, 1.500 shows as 1.5.
• No balance cap: there’s no maximum wallet size by default.
• Payments: you can send credits to other players, subject to a short 5-second cooldown between transfers.

Credit Commands

/pay will refuse the transfer with a clear message if you don’t have enough funds, the amount isn’t positive, you’re still on cooldown, you try to pay yourself, or the target player can’t be found — so don’t worry about losing credits to a bad command.

Admin-only credit tools (granting, taking, or setting balances) exist for staff under /empire credits, but you won’t need or have access to those as a player.

How You Earn Credits

• Getting paid by other players (/pay)
• Selling on the Imperial Market or the Flea Market (flea sales are collected from the Imperial City auctioneer)
• Opening the Diamond Market
• Completing empire, team, and player missions — including bandit camp missions
• Quest rewards
• Your team’s treasury payout when a team disbands

How You Spend Credits

Credits fund almost everything you build:

• Buying on the Flea Market or Imperial Market (plus listing fees)
• Mission donations and reroll fees
• Team base upgrades and claim purchases
• Machinery and automation purchases
• Siege equipment — cannons, cannonballs, explosives
• Base defenses — sentries, defense blocks, traps, shield activation
• Mounts — purchase and upgrades
• NPC repair fees
• Quest pay-steps
• Buying Imperial Tokens (see below) — this conversion is one-way; tokens never convert back into credits.

2. Imperial Tokens — The Premium Currency

Imperial Tokens are QuantumRift’s premium currency: a separate, whole-number balance (no decimals) that persists across seasons, unlike most other game progress. Tokens cannot be traded between players — the only ways to get them are earning through play or buying with credits.

Earning Tokens

• Playtime drip: you earn 1 token per 10 minutes of active play. You need to actually be doing something — idling doesn’t count — though there’s a 10-minute grace period so a short AFK break won’t cut you off.
• Buying with credits: the only credits → tokens path, and it’s one-directional.
  • The starting/base rate is 25 credits per token.
  • Once the market has run for a while, the price floats between 10 and 75 credits per token, recalculated every 15 minutes from the last 48 hours of trading activity — so watch the rate before a big purchase, it moves with demand.
  • You can swap 1 to 100 tokens at a time.
  • Prices are quoted, then double-checked at the moment you confirm — if the market moved more than 5% in between, the swap is refused rather than charging you a stale price.

Token Commands

Spending Tokens

Tokens are your gateway to rank eggs (see below), crate keys, cosmetics, perks, and store items.

Crate Keys

Crate keys are a token sink you’ll see in the Store — each key opens a crate for cosmetic, credit, or token rewards (the exact odds aren’t covered here, but the keys themselves are:

3. The Rank Ladder

Ranks are a status ladder purchased with Imperial Tokens (you buy tokens with credits, then spend tokens on a rank). Everyone starts as Citizen — free, automatic, no purchase required. From there, the ladder runs:

Citizen → Hero → Mercenary → Aurora → Legend → Imperial

Ranks are cumulative — buying a higher rank never costs you perks from a lower one you already own, and your chat tag always shows your highest held rank.

Rank Prices

What Each Rank Unlocks

Numeric perks max-fold: if you own Hero and later buy Aurora, you keep the best of everything you’ve unlocked, not a stacked total.

Research XP bonus applies to your personal research contributions — credit injections and resource donations toward team tech.

Bank Vault Slots by Rank

Your personal item storage vault (separate from your inventory) scales with rank, in increments of 9 up to a double-chest-sized 54:

If you ever hold more items than your current cap allows (e.g. after a rank change), the extra slots stay visible and withdrawable — you just can’t place new items into them until you’re back under cap.

Flea Market Perks by Rank

Selling on the player-run Flea Market gets cheaper and roomier as you rank up:

Exclusive Cosmetics

Legend and Imperial ranks each unlock their own exclusive cosmetics set, obtainable no other way. Also keep an eye on the referral program — reaching a referral milestone unlocks a separate one-off exclusive cosmetic of its own.

How to Get a Rank — Rank Eggs

You don’t just spend tokens and instantly rank up. Instead:

1. Buy a Rank Egg from the token Store, the dedicated Rank Menu, or a shopfront NPC out in the world — each rank (Hero, Mercenary, Aurora, Legend, Imperial) has its own NPC you can visit to browse and buy.
2. Right-click the egg to claim your rank. Each egg is a unique, serial-numbered item — once redeemed, that serial is burned and can never be redeemed again, even if the item is somehow duplicated.
3. On success, you immediately receive the rank’s full perk package — bank vault slots, flea market tier, research bonus, and (for Legend/Imperial) the exclusive-cosmetics unlock. The egg is consumed.

The system is designed so you never lose tokens or an egg to a failure mid-claim: either your egg is preserved so you can try again, or in the rare case something goes wrong partway through, you’ll be told to contact staff with your serial number.

4. Quick Command Reference

A cheat sheet for the commands covered above:

5. Beyond the Economy

Credits and tokens don’t exist in a vacuum — they’re the fuel for everything else you’ll do in QuantumRift. Credits fund your team’s base upgrades, claims, and machinery; tokens and ranks shape your long-term progression across seasons. As you get further into the game you’ll run into teams, claims, tech trees, and base-building systems that all draw on the wallet you’re building up right now — so it pays to get comfortable with /balance, /pay, and /tokens early.