Gear is not decoration - it makes your energy come back faster

I want to explain one system that I ignored for too long because I thought it was only cosmetic: clothes and jewelry. They are not cosmetic. They are an efficiency tool, and once you understand them correctly they save you a lot of waiting. First, the key distinction. Food and drink give you a burst - a chunk of energy all at once, and then it is gone. Clothes and jewelry are the opposite. They are durable goods. You do not spend them. While you wear them, they raise the RATE at which your energy regenerates. Think of food as a one-time cash payment and gear as a small raise to your hourly wage. Every hour from now on pays a little more. The exact mechanism: your energy returns at a base of 1 point per hour. Each wearable item lists a daily energy value, and that value is spread across the day and added on top of your hourly regeneration. So you do not see a jump when you put something on. What you see is that, from then on, the bar climbs a bit faster than before. Wear several good pieces at once and the slices add together, and the gap between your actions becomes noticeably shorter. One important limit, so you have correct expectations: gear makes energy come back FASTER, not HIGHER. The 1000 energy cap still applies. No coat and no ring will let you store more than 1000. What changes is the journey to the top - you refill sooner, so you wait less between the things you actually want to do. The reward is a shorter wait, not a taller bar. To equip something: open Inventory, go to the Products tab, and use the clothing or jewelry item the same way you would eat a food item. The difference is that it does not disappear. It is marked "in use" and your regeneration rate goes up. To remove it, find it under Clothes or Jewelry and press Take off. Nothing is lost - it goes back to being ordinary stock you can sell or wear again. Wearing never consumes the item, so you may swap freely. Now the most important practical detail, and the reason I lost some items before I understood it. Clothes expire. Every garment wears out 30 days after you acquire it, whether you wear it or not. When the month is up it is removed and a note appears in your feed. The clock runs even if the item sits unworn in storage, so do not hoard clothes - wear them for the bonus, or sell them, before they age out. Jewelry is the opposite. Because every piece is made from real gold, it NEVER expires. A ring or a watch keeps paying its daily bonus for as long as you own it, with no clock at all. There is one more detail worth knowing: if a citizen passes away, their jewelry is inherited by the player who referred them. That is why jewelry is treated as a real long-term investment and clothes as consumables with a longer life. My routine now is simple. Keep good gear equipped at all times for the steady trickle. Keep food in reserve for the moments I need a burst. The two do not compete - use both, each for what it is good at.