Gold, Scraps & Gems

Railwake runs on three currencies, and they don't work the same way. The rule that matters most:

Gold is for this run. Scraps are forever.

A run ending — by finishing the line or by your train being destroyed — banks everything you earned. But gold you haven't spent by then doesn't come home with you as gold: it's converted into Scraps at a poor rate, so holding gold at the end of a run is always worse than spending it in the Depot while you still can. Gold spent on a Depot level was a live upgrade for the rest of that ride; gold left in your pocket is worth only a fraction of a single Scraps.

There is no gold between runs at all — your run's opening purse is handed over when you Depart. The Armory deals only in Scraps and gems, and nothing bought there is ever at risk. That's what a "grade" is: the permanent, Scraps-bought version of a Depot stat, and it's also what a Depot level resets to rather than to zero when your run ends. Guns work the same way: a gun bought at the Armory is on your train every run, and a gun bought at the dock is this run's only. See The Depot and The Armory for the two shops in full.

Where gold comes from

Kills pay a bounty, but they are not the only source — the game pays for how you fight, not only for damage:

• Kill bounty. Every kill, scaled by the line's danger.
• Checkpoints. A payout at each tenth of the line, growing as you go — a run that dies halfway has still banked five of them.
• Armour. Every hit your armour blunts pays a little for the damage it prevented. No armour, nothing paid.
• Afflictions. A kill on an enemy that was burning, poisoned, frozen, slowed, stunned, shredded or marked pays more, per affliction, up to a cap — and more again for every other enemy afflicted at that moment, so a field that controls a crowd is paid for the crowd.
• Burn and poison. Each tick pays part of the eventual bounty up front; the kill pays the rest. A damage-over-time build is paid earlier, never more.
• Ramming. A kill by contact at speed pays a bonus on its bounty. The train has to be moving.

Gems

Gems are a separate, rarer currency, earned as an occasional drop in combat — more dangerous fights are more likely to drop one. Unlike gold, gems are never lost, run or no run. They're what you spend to research and level up Cores. Beating a boss for the first time is a reliable source of them; the rest come as luck in a fight.

Every purchase makes every future purchase pricier

Each of the three shops — the Depot, the Armory, and Cores — has its own running tally of how many levels you've ever bought in it. Every single purchase, on any stat in that shop, nudges the whole shop's prices up a little, not just the price of the thing you just bought. So the cheapest card on the board right now isn't the same card for long — the more you buy of anything, the faster everything in that shop climbs.

That's deliberate, and it's why breadth stops being an automatic win: buying a little of everything used to always beat specialising, because your first level in an untouched stat was always the cheapest thing on the board. Now the board's price floor rises with every buy regardless of where it landed, so spreading your gold thin no longer dodges the climb — it just buys into it from every direction at once. Picking a handful of stats to lean on, and riding them, is where the value is.

A few things that follow from this:

• The three tallies never mix. Buying ten Depot levels this run does nothing to how much your next Armory grade costs — gold, Scraps and gems each keep their own count, forever separate.
• Gems climb the fastest. Owning and maxing every Core is meant to be a long haul, not a wall — reachable, but the kind of goal a gem-store boost is there to shorten.
• Selling something back doesn't undo its share of the climb. The tally only ever counts up — see The Depot for why a sell-then-rebuy always loses you something.
• The Depot's tally resets with the run. Every fresh Depart starts that shop's climb over from nothing, which is what keeps the in-run shop feeling generous even late into a long career.

Buying in bulk

Every list of upgrades — the Depot dock included — carries a ×1 / ×10 / ×100 switch. It changes what a single Buy press does to any upgrade that has levels (stat upgrades, carriages, gun mounts, grades, game speed):

• The button always shows a price, not a discount — it's the plain sum of however many individual levels you're about to buy, and buying in bulk never costs more or less per level than buying one at a time.
• It only greys out, never shrinks. A card prices the whole batch and greys out until you can afford all of it — exactly like a single purchase greys out when you're short, it just checks a bigger number.
• The last batch on a track is sized to fit. If a track only has a few levels left before its cap, buying at ×10 or ×100 buys exactly what's left, not more.
• A batch purchase is one purchase — one confirmation, one save.
• Purchases with no levels — like unlocking a new gun rarity, or a one-off research node — ignore the multiplier; there's nothing to batch.

See Also

• Getting Started
• The Track Ladder — why upgrade prices are built to outpace an easy line's income
• The Depot / The Armory