Nowhere to spend gold? Ten gem boxes a day is 400,000

✍️ Alice・愛麗沙

Update 9/14: Taiwan’s 9/9 update log (thread 3541097) added new gold sinks and reshaped the gem chain. New sinks: Lisa’s / Stewart’s magic classroom sell 強化秘藥乳化劑 for 7,500 gold (20 per account per week = 150,000/week); in Bangor, 珍妮佛的酒館 sells 白蘿蔔 10,000, 辣椒粉 3,000, 清淡的肉 400, 吉爾摩的雜貨店 sells 最高級生皮 / 最高級蜘蛛網 900 each and 精巧道具部件 9,600 (Life Power 7,000+), 康格的奉獻所 sells 傷痕花 900 / 傷痕花粉末 1,200 / 增幅蘑菇 900 / 增幅蘑菇汁液 900 — all 30 per character per week. The gem box itself is unchanged at 40,000 × 10 per day. The chain: gem alchemy was reworked so that “only Starlight Prism synthesis remains; all other combos are deleted”; the seven rough-S single-colour gems “are used only to make Rough Starlight Prism S” (3 colours + Obsidian + Diamond); plain Rough Starlight Prism now only comes from leftover Rough Darklight Stone / Triple Quartz; Elite-and-above gems other than Starlight Prism go through the new “item conversion” button for rough / rough-S gems plus gold. Read the article’s “shards → Rough Starlight Prism → Starlight Prism” as “shards → rough → rough S → Rough Starlight Prism S → Starlight Prism”; the endpoint and the conclusion do not change.

Gold here is a flow, not a savings account

One structural point first, because everything below follows from it.

Gold cannot be traded between players. The exchange only handles Deka. So gold has no secondary market, no rate against anything, and nobody who will ever buy it from you. Its only meaning is what you personally convert it into. A currency you cannot hand to anyone else has a hoarding value of zero — unless you are hoarding against one specific known expense.

And the expense side looks like this: engraving-enhancement fees, skill modification (2,500 / 5,000 / 10,000 per attempt), alchemy fees, equipment repair, cooking ingredients, cat merchant draws, level-up reward card re-rolls, holy water at 1,500 a bottle, and the subject of this article — the gem box on the cash shop’s gold tab.

Exactly one item on that list resets every day and is larger than you can finish.

40,000 × 10 = 400,000, and why that number matters

The gem box sells for 40,000 gold on the cash shop’s gold tab, capped at ten a day. Buying out is 400,000 gold per day, 2.8 million per week.

Against income:

• Korea’s Season 1 endgame benchmark for a player clearing every weekly is 2.0–2.5 million gold per week (a Korean player tally, medium confidence, including roughly 200,000 from membership-only part-time work and 20,000 a day from login).
• So the daily cap runs at 112%–140% of that income.

A player clearing Korea’s hardest content still cannot fill this one slot. That is not “a bit expensive.” That is a slot designed never to be filled — a pressure valve the game bolted onto gold to keep it permanently scarce.

One number here deserves a flag rather than a clean total. The 2.0–2.5M benchmark is not settled. A second tally from the same community adds “abyss holes, roughly 200,000 a day” and lands at 3.29 million, three to six tenths above the benchmark itself. The two figures were not measured by the same person in the same week, and they contradict each other. We do not pick a winner, because picking wrong would hand you a fake budget. In practice: plan against 2.0–2.5M as the conservative figure and treat hole income as upside, not as budget. Either way the direction of the conclusion above is unchanged — only its severity moves.

Taiwan’s current income sits below Korea’s Season 1 level, since the harder raid and abyss tiers have not all opened there, so the ratio there is steeper still. Which is why the complaint “I have too much gold” usually does not mean surplus. It means the gold tab has not been opened.

Converted into units you already use

400,000 is too large for intuition to handle. Convert it into things you actually do:

• One box (40,000) = 21 part-time jobs. The base rate is 1,900 gold per job, and the weekly supply of basic jobs is nowhere near ten times 21.
• One box = 26 bottles of holy water (1,500 each).
• One box = 4 skill modifications at the most expensive tier (10,000 each).

Turn that around: everything you earned from part-time work today buys about half a box to one box. Which is why “how many first” is a real decision, rather than “buy them all if you can afford it.”

One box, two prices

This is the slot actually worth memorising.

The same gem box sells at the cat merchant’s special shop for 5,000 nyan tokens, capped at ten a week and applied per character. It is also the cheapest thing in that shop — the dye base material next to it costs 80,000 nyan tokens.

The two prices cannot be compared directly. Nyan tokens and gold are different taps: nyan tokens come out of the cat merchant’s card-flip bounties, gold out of every fight you run. But the comparison hands you a genuinely useful rule: when nyan tokens have no higher-value exit, convert them into this box. It is the shortest path from that currency back into mainline progression. Conversely, if you are saving toward the dye base material, leave it alone.

Two prices for one item is the normal state of this game, not the exception. Getting into the habit of asking “what does this cost in the other shop” is worth more than memorising any single price.

Why gems, and not something else

Is 400,000 gold on a heap of shards worth it? That depends on where the chain leads.

Mostly KR player panel transcriptions; the stage-5 all-stats 36 / HP 320 match the Heliodor values Nexon Taiwan prints. Taiwan took Korea's 7/16 gem-alchemy rework on 9/9: mono gems can be crafted up to stage 4 (crude S), and from elite up only Star Prisms can be promoted — elite mono gems you already hold can be converted back into crude gems plus gold.

Shards stack up into a Crude Star Prism, and above that the Star Prism. And a prism is a two-field gem giving all stats and HP at once, which is not the same class of object as an ordinary single-value gem. The prism column on the table only begins at stage 3, and tag damage percentages only from stage 4. That is why low-tier shards mean nothing on their own: their value is entirely at the end of the fusion chain, not at the start.

There is a structural reason too. The cash shop does not sell gems. Fashion lucky boxes, pet lucky boxes, membership, passes — all there. Gems, not once. So this chain is built out of gold and time, and a paying player has to walk the same road. That 400,000-a-day cap is buying one of the few genuinely level slots in the game.

The two most common misreadings

One: “I am saving gold for enhancement.” Engraving enhancement does eat gold, and it eats hard. But no official gold cost table for engraving enhancement has ever been published on Taiwan — the fee table circulating in the community has sourcing problems and this site does not cite it. Hoarding an unknown amount against a cost you cannot even look up trades a certain loss (the shards you did not buy today) for an uncertain preparation. Buy the certain side first.

Two: “I have to fill all ten every day.” As computed above, this slot outruns even Korea’s endgame income. Treating it as a checklist box to tick will crowd out part-time work, holy water and repair costs. The practical approach is a daily floor — three boxes a day, say, and the rest of your gold spent living normally — rather than oscillating between “all ten” and “none.”

Our conclusion

This game does not lack places to spend gold. It lacks the patience to rank them. The gem box on the cash shop’s gold tab is the one expense that resets daily and exceeds your entire income, and it is simultaneously one of the most important combat-power sources available to a free-to-play player. The order is simple: check today’s unavoidable fixed costs first (repairs, holy water, cooking ingredients), then put everything left into gem boxes, however many that buys.

Safe to ignore: the gold holding cap (never published, and at this burn rate you will not reach it), and any advice to stockpile gold that cannot name a target with a price you can look up.

Two things would overturn this page:

• If the gem box’s unit price drops or the daily cap rises, every ratio above needs recomputing. What this article computes is a ratio, not an absolute, so what really breaks is the strength of the “you cannot fill it” conclusion, not its direction.
• If an official gold cost table for engraving enhancement is ever published, the first misreading section needs rewriting — at that point “saving for enhancement” stops being a belief with no denominator and becomes a trade-off you can calculate.