Map currencies: twenty wallet lines, and what to spend

Open your wallet after a month of playing and you will find two dozen lines with names you do not remember. Magic, contracts, crystals, airship parts.

This is not clutter. Every expansion and every season brought its own economy, and none of the old ones were thrown away. The game keeps them, because of how it treats your time: what you earned in 2017 is still worth something.

The cost of that is a newcomer staring at the list with no idea where to start.

The general currencies

These work everywhere and accumulate constantly.

Karma drops from nearly everything and is spent at vendors across the world.

Spirit Shards are what surplus experience becomes once your masteries are done. They feed the Mystic Forge and the legendary vendors.

Laurels come from daily activity and go to laurel merchants.

Astral Acclaim is the Wizard’s Vault currency.

Research Notes come from salvaging crafted items and matter in late crafting.

Season currencies

Unbound Magic comes from Living World Season 3 maps: Bloodstone Fen, Ember Bay, Bitterfrost Frontier, Lake Doric, Draconis Mons, Siren’s Landing.

Volatile Magic comes from Season 4 maps: Domain of Istan, Sandswept Isles, Domain of Kourna, Jahai Bluffs, Thunderhead Peaks, Dragonfall.

Both are spent with local vendors on bags of materials. This is probably the most underrated way of turning farm into gold: the bags are cheap and often hold things that sell for more on the market (what else works).

Expansion map currencies

Airship Parts, Verdant Brink, Itzel vendors. Lumps of Aurillium, Auric Basin, Exalted vendors. Ley Line Crystals, Tangled Depths, Nuhoch vendors.

Three Heart of Thorns maps, three separate currencies, three separate vendors. That was the era when the game enjoyed making things complicated, and it has not gone anywhere.

Trade Contracts come from the Crystal Desert maps: Crystal Oasis, Desert Highlands, Elon Riverlands, The Desolation, Domain of Vabbi.

Jade Slivers come from the Recycler module in the Jade Bot, End of Dragons.

The wallet is shared, with two exceptions.

Something worth knowing before you plan any farm: the wallet belongs to the account, not the character.

Anything one character earns, every other character can spend, instantly, with no transfer and no bank trip. Farm map currency on the character who happens to be parked there, buy with the one who needs it.

There are exactly two things that break this rule, and both of them are stored per character: hero points (why that hurts) and supply in World versus World. Everything else in that panel is pooled.

For the record, the game now carries well over a hundred distinct currencies. Nobody at ArenaNet planned that in 2012. It accumulated, one map at a time, the way these things do.

Why hoarding them is wrong.

This next part runs against the instinct of anyone who plays MMOs.

Saving these currencies achieves nothing. They do not appreciate, they do not convert into each other, and they count toward nothing outside their own narrow shop. Three thousand Unbound Magic sits in your wallet as dead weight until you walk to a vendor.

The design logic is transparent: a map currency exists to keep you on the map. It has value only where it is earned, and that is on purpose.

So the rule is short: earn it, spend it. Not “I will save up for something big”, but “walked to the vendor, bought bags, moved on”.

What your wallet says about you

Open the currency panel on an account that is a few years old and scroll slowly.

There will be twelve thousand of something from a map you have not loaded since 2018. A pile of season currency from a story you barely remember finishing. Four hundred of a thing that only ever bought one item, which you bought, after which you kept collecting it anyway out of habit.

The wallet is the most honest record of what you played and when you stopped.

There is a practical lesson underneath the nostalgia, and it is the one thing to take from this article. A quiet map does not shrink your pile, it stops you adding to it. Currency from a map that people still run has a future. Currency from a map that emptied out is finished growing, and the only question left is whether you spend it or let it sit there being a souvenir.

Spend it. The vendors are still standing, the goods are still there, and nothing in the game rewards you for the size of a number nobody else can see.

What a newcomer should do

First and most important: do not worry about the wallet. It looks alarming, and 90% of those lines will not matter to you for a long time.

Watch three of them:

• Karma, which you should spend on recipes and gear, because it piles up faster than you can use it
• Spirit Shards, which you should keep, because legendaries need them
• Astral Acclaim, which you should spend weekly, because it burns off above the cap

The rest arrives on its own once you reach the maps that produce it. And there, standing on the spot, the right vendor is obvious: they are usually ten paces from wherever the currency dropped.