Learn

We start with the tab everyone checks first, and no wonder - it is the money tab, called Balances, and it is your wallet. Open it and you see every kind of money you currently hold, each sitting on its own line with its amount beside it. Where a single physical wallet might hold a few notes and a handful of coins, your in-game wallet is a little more interesting: it can hold several different currencies at once, and they are not all worth the same. That last point is the one that trips newcomers up, so it is the very first thing we will sort out. There is no maths to dread here and nothing to memorise; the whole job of this lesson is simply to let you glance at this tab and know, calmly, which money is which and roughly what it is worth.

Your money splits into three kinds, and each behaves a little differently from the others. Once you can tell them apart at a glance, you will read this tab with real confidence, and the page that looked like a jumble of numbers will resolve into a clear little summary of your wealth.

The three kinds of money

• Gold: the premium, gold-backed currency. It is scarce and valuable, earned slowly, and spent on land, deposits and high-value trades. Treat it as the precious metal in your wallet.
• Your local currency: the everyday money of the country your town sits in. This is the ordinary cash you earn and spend in bulk, and most ordinary trading happens in it.
• Foreign currencies: money from other countries that you have picked up by trading abroad. You may have none of these on day one, and that is perfectly normal.

A simple way to hold it in your head: gold is the rare, heavy coin you guard carefully and only part with for something important; your local currency is the stack of everyday notes you spend without thinking twice; and foreign currency is the handful of holiday money left over from a trip to another country, useful but not your day-to-day cash. All three are real money that you genuinely own - they are just different in how plentiful they are and how valuable each unit is. None of them is "fake" or "lesser"; they simply play different roles, and a comfortable player keeps all three in mind without fuss.

Reading the values

Now for the genuinely useful part of this tab. Because you can hold several currencies at once, the game helps you compare them. Next to each non-gold balance, the page shows what it is worth in gold at the current exchange rate. So a pile of local currency is not just shown as its own number; you also see "and that is worth this much gold." Gold itself is shown the other way round - alongside its value in your local currency. In other words, every line tells you both what it is and roughly what it is worth in the other unit, so you never have to do the conversion in your head.

Why does this matter so much to a new player? Because it gives you one honest yardstick for the question that really counts: am I actually getting richer? Local currency is plentiful and easy to come by, so a growing pile of it can flatter you. Gold is scarce, and almost everything in the game has a gold value attached. That makes gold the cleanest measuring stick for your true net worth. If your total worth measured in gold is climbing week over week, you are genuinely growing - regardless of how many local notes happen to be sloshing around.

Let us walk through reading the tab so it feels familiar. Picture opening Balances and seeing a line for your local currency with a large amount on it, and beside it a much smaller figure - that smaller figure is what all that local money is worth in gold right now. Then a line for gold itself shows a modest amount, and beside it the larger figure is what that gold is worth in your local currency. Same idea both times, just pointing in opposite directions: every line tells you what it is, and right next to it, what it would be worth if you swapped it into the other unit. You never have to reach for a calculator.

A reassuring note for brand-new players: it is completely normal to open this tab and see only two lines - some local currency and a little gold - with no foreign currencies at all. Foreign money only appears once you start trading across borders, so an empty foreign section is not a problem or a missing feature; it simply means you have not picked any up yet. As you trade more widely, those lines will fill in on their own, and each will come with its own little "worth this much in gold" tag, just like the rest.

Why lean on gold as your yardstick rather than the headline local number? Because the local figure can swell for the dullest of reasons - that money is simply plentiful, so a fat stack of it does not necessarily mean you are doing well. Gold is scarce, and since almost everything in the game has a gold value attached, measuring your worth in gold strips away the noise. If your total worth in gold is drifting up week after week, you really are growing, and you can take quiet satisfaction in that no matter what the local notes are doing.

That is the whole money tab, and it is a friendlier place than it first appears: three kinds of money, each shown with its worth in the other unit so you never have to convert anything yourself, and gold standing quietly as your truest measure of progress. You do not need to do anything clever with this knowledge today - simply knowing how to read your own wallet, and which number is the honest one to watch, already puts you ahead of many newcomers who fixate on the biggest figure on the screen. Where gold actually comes from, and how its price against your local currency is set, is a longer story we save for the Gold chapter; there is no need to chase those details now. Here, the only goal was to make you comfortable opening Balances and understanding what you see. With your money clear in your mind, let us walk over to the next tab - the pantry of raw materials that your buildings quietly feed on.