You have done the work, and you should feel proud of it. You staffed your mine, you paid the materials, time and energy, you waited out the run, and now you are reaching in to collect your gold at last. Before that gold lands fully and finally in your balance, a few small cuts come off the top. This is completely normal, every game economy in the world has its taxes, and the cuts here are genuinely modest. But it is so much better to understand them now, while you are calm and curious, than to be quietly surprised later by a balance that came out a touch smaller than the round number you were expecting. Surprise breeds worry; understanding breeds confidence.
The first thing to know is reassuring, so let us lead with it. These cuts apply only to gold. They do not touch your ordinary goods at all. When you collect bread or tools or any other product from any other building, none of these particular taxes apply to that harvest in the slightest. It is only when the thing you are reaching in to collect is gold itself that the percentages below come quietly into play. So this is strictly a gold-mining concern, a single corner of your operation, and not something you need to fret about across your whole busy town.
The cuts, one at a time
There are up to two small percentage cuts, and each one is easy to understand on its own once you slow down. Let us take them in turn, one at a time and unhurried, so that neither of them ever feels like a hidden trap waiting to catch you out.
- The game fund takes a flat 10%. This is not money vanishing into a void; it funds the rewards the game pays back out to players, including the share dividends you will meet in a couple of lessons. In a sense you get some of it back later.
- If your town is currently occupied by another player, that occupier takes a 10% war tribute. This only applies while your town is under occupation, so for most peaceful new players it simply will not come up.
Let us make that concrete so the idea really sticks rather than floating away. Picture yourself collecting a gram of gold from a finished run. The game fund takes its flat 10% off the top first, and that one is always present for everyone. If, on top of that, your town happens to be occupied at the time, the occupier claims their 10% tribute too. The leftover, after these small slices have been taken, is what finally settles into your balance as yours to keep and use. Neither slice is large on its own, but together they are well worth knowing about, especially that first one, which never goes away.
The game calls this the production tax
You will sometimes see these cuts described together as the production tax, and that name has a sensible reason behind it. The very same cuts apply to gold whether you mined it from the ground or produced it some other way. What stays perfectly consistent is that they are levied on gold, never on ordinary goods. Ordinary products are simply not taxed into the game fund in this manner at all; only gold carries the production tax on its back. So whenever you hear the phrase production tax thrown around by other players, you can quietly translate it in your head as the small slices that come off gold, and you will always know exactly what they mean.
It is worth being honest about why these cuts exist at all, because once you truly see the purpose behind them, they stop feeling like a loss and start feeling like your fair part of a working community. The game fund is the shared pool that pays rewards back out to players across the game. When you collect a gram and 10% of it goes to that fund, you are quietly contributing to the very pot that funds, among other good things, the share dividends you yourself can earn and enjoy. So a slice of every miner's gold flows around the system and helps pay every shareholder, including you. Seen that way, it is far less a tax taken away from you and far more a small contribution into a shared engine that you also get to draw from.
The war tribute works on a different logic, and it is one you will rarely meet as a peaceful player. It only ever applies while your town is actually under occupation by another country in war, something that simply does not happen to most new players going quietly about their business. If it never happens to you, that 10% never comes up at all. And even when a town is occupied, the slice is the occupier's reward for holding it, not a permanent feature of mining - the moment the occupation ends, so does the tribute. For the vast majority of your mining life, then, the only cut that matters is that first flat 10% to the game fund.
Premium miners keep every gram
There is one clean and simple way to sidestep these cuts entirely. Citizens with an active premium membership are fully exempt from the production tax and keep every single gram they mine, with no slices taken off the top at all. For a player who mines heavily and often, that exemption alone can be worth more than the membership itself costs, effectively paying for itself out of the very gold it quietly saves you. If you find yourself mining a great deal and loving it, it is a calculation that is well worth sitting down and doing for yourself.