Money / Currency Poll
Added 2025-12-03 16:13:39 +0000 UTCHi!
In the game, there's a certain design dilemma for the upcoming content (especially after the early access), so I want to gather a little bit of feedback and opinions.
Basically topic is related to money / currency and like many of you know the game doesn't use money at the moment and everything is just based on bartering.
This bartering-only idea has worked quite well so far and it kind of makes sense related to the game lore, but in terms of upcoming content like Trader Services (after early access) you can for example do the following things with traders.
For example the Gunsmith trader can perform weapon repair and weapon upgrades, Doctor can do bunch healing related services, Generalist can repair boats and do shelter upgrades, Driver can smuggle you to certain maps, open you some hidden / locked paths and so on.
Most of these services are obviously going to be really expensive and they would be really straightforward to implement with money, so the bartering topic here makes this system a bit weird and convoluted.
Then when it comes to the core gameplay loop and looting, I think money is quite well "established" design choice for interacting with traders in-general and there's a solid argument that it would make the looting more enjoyable, when you could sell items and slowly gather money for some specific goal that you have in mind.
Another angle for this topic is that money could help with task rewards, since currently it's quite difficult to fill out all the trader tasks for early access with interesting item-based rewards, since now there's already 4 traders and if I decide to implement the new quest system as well, these would need a huge amount of interesting items as task rewards if money is not in-place.
Possible implementation for this money / currency would be item-based and when you stack that the item icon would dynamically change to larger pile etc. So money would not be just random numbers in the UI, this also means that you could lose it when you die with that money in your inventory.
If I would implement this the currency would be either Euro (€) or "legacy" currency that Finland used before euros which is Markka (MK).
So here's a poll about this topic, let me know what you think about money / currency for the game.
Disclaimer: This poll is just for general feedback, poll result will not determine whether I add the money / currency to the game at this point.
-Antti (Developer)
Comments
I feel like money makes sense realistically speaking. While the border zone is it's own thing, it still exists within outside world. I'm sure there would be services or goods that could only be obtained by interacting with the outside world, hence requiring money.
Matthew Davis
2025-12-16 16:37:43 +0000 UTCI use ammo for condensing and storing value. Need something from the merchant? Bring a couple full boxes of ammo, split it up as needed. Personally, I think this mechanic is way cooler than money or credits.
Philip Golobish
2025-12-08 05:32:57 +0000 UTC