📖 Player Guide

*Everything you need to know to play Embervale, from your first click to the endgame. If it's in the game, it's in this guide.*

Embervale is a browser-based, point-and-click 2D fantasy RPG built on Solana. You play one of the Emberborn — souls the world refused to let die — pushing back the Gloom one region at a time. The heart of the game is a living player economy: kill, loot, upgrade, trade, and grow richer and stronger. You can start playing in seconds, and the crypto layer deepens the game without ever paywalling the fun.

This guide is long on purpose. Use the table of contents to jump around.

1. Getting started
2. The three tokens (and gold)
3. Tiers: Wanderers vs. holders
4. The world & how to move
5. Combat
6. Skills (all nine)
7. Your character: stats, HP, and death
8. Gear: equipping, durability, repair, tempering
9. Gathering & crafting
10. Quests
11. Monsters & bosses
12. Raids (world bosses)
13. Arena
14. Duels (PvP)
15. Pets
16. Guilds
17. Seasons & leaderboards
18. Mail
19. Mystery boxes

19a. The Ember Shrine

1. The Ember Exchange

20a. The Godsforge (godly shards)

1. The marketplace
2. Daily income: dailies, bounties, staking, referrals
3. Achievements & feats
4. The endgame: level 99 and Paragon
5. Ways to earn $EMBER (summary)
6. Ways to spend $EMBER (summary)
7. Ways your $HP is used (summary)
8. Economy health & fair play
9. Quick-start checklist

1. Open the game in your browser. No download, no install.
2. Connect a Solana wallet (e.g. Phantom). You sign a one-time message to prove the wallet is yours — this is *Sign-In With Solana* (SIWS). It is a signature, not a transaction: it costs nothing and moves no funds. Your wallet address is your identity.
3. You're in. You spawn in Emberhold Vale (the Starter Vale), the safe onboarding region. Pick up the first quest and start clicking.

Signing in creates (or loads) your hero. Your session lasts 7 days before you sign in again. Nothing about signing in spends money.

Embervale runs on a three-token economy plus a soft in-game currency. Knowing what each one does is the key to the whole game.

$HP — the key to the door. This is your *access and power* token. You hold it; you don't farm it. Holding $HP lets you log in when the gate is on, raises your maximum HP (capped per tier), and unlocks deeper regions and gated quests. More $HP = a higher tier = more of the game open to you. See section 3.

$EMBER — the currency you earn. This is the in-game money you earn by playing. You still spend it directly on the marketplace, on arena and duel wagers, and on guild donations. Most shop-style purchases, though — mystery boxes, the Exchange, the Shrine, pets, repairs, tempering, respec, renames, and passes — are now charged from your wallet in SOL at the item's $EMBER value (about $3 per 1,000,000 $EMBER); see "How you pay" just below. $EMBER is designed to trade as a sub-penny token, so in-game numbers are deliberately large (prices and rewards are all scaled ×1000). A "25,000 $EMBER" daily reward is normal — the token itself is worth a tiny fraction of a cent.

How you pay — SOL vs $EMBER. Two things you spend. Everything you earn in the world (drops, quests, dailies, staking, boss and season rewards) is $EMBER, and you still cash it out to your wallet as real $EMBER. But most in-game purchases are now paid from your wallet in SOL, priced at the item's $EMBER value: mystery boxes, the Ember Exchange, the Ember Shrine, pets, gear repair, tempering, attribute respec, hero rename, ascension, the Staking & Vault passes, and world-boss raid strikes. What still costs $EMBER: marketplace listings, arena and duel wagers, and guild donations. Every screen shows the price in the currency you'll actually pay, so the real cost is always on the button before you confirm.

$AGS — the studio token. Used to buy the premium Founder's Cache box. $AGS funds the studio — development, community airdrops, and marketing (and possibly treasury buybacks) — and never pays into the player reward pool; it's a completely separate ledger. You never need $AGS to play or to earn.

Gold — the soft currency. Earned mainly by selling items to vendors. Gold soaks up grind without inflating $EMBER. It's off-chain and in-game only.

A note on where balances live: gameplay balances ($EMBER, gold) are tracked in the game's ledger, and your on-chain $HP holdings are read to set your tier. $EMBER and $HP also trade on-chain as real tokens. You can cash out earned $EMBER to your wallet (section 22) — the amount you can withdraw in any rolling 24-hour window scales with how much $HP you hold, each cash-out carries a flat 0.004 SOL claim fee paid from your wallet (it covers the payout transaction and the game's backend hosting costs, and fights multi-accounting), and most in-game purchases (boxes, the Exchange, the Shrine, pets, repairs, tempering, respec, renames, passes) are paid directly from your wallet in SOL as real on-chain transactions at the item's $EMBER value — each also carries a small SOL network fee. The reward pool is still credited the full $EMBER-equivalent of every such purchase, so player rewards stay funded exactly as before.

Your $HP holdings place you on a tier ladder. Each tier raises your max-HP cap and opens new regions and quests.

| Tier | Name | $HP required | What it opens |

|---|---|---|---|

| 0 | Wanderer | 0 | Emberhold Vale — below the sign-in floor, so this tier is not playable |

| 1 | Kindled | 10,000 | Gloomwood, Gloomfang's Den, the Frostmere |

| 2 | Emberborn | 50,000 | The Cinderpeaks |

| 3 | Blazeheart | 100,000 | The Great Forge — this is also the sign-in floor, so every player starts here |

| 4 | Infernal | 2,500,000 | The Shattered Spire |

| 5 | Ascendant | 2,500,000 | The Sunken Mire |

| 6 | Celestial | 2,500,000 | The Astral Reach — also needs 2,500,000 $EMBER held |

| 7 | Emberwrought | 2,500,000 | The Emberdeep — also needs 5,000,000 $EMBER held |

| 8 | Voidtouched | 5,000,000 | The Voidscar — also needs 5,000,000 $EMBER held |

One purchase opens four regions. Tiers 4 through 7 all sit at the same 2,500,000 $HP, so crossing that line takes you straight from Blazeheart to Emberwrought and opens the Shattered Spire, the Sunken Mire, the Astral Reach and the Emberdeep in a single step. The last two still need $EMBER held on top. Only the Voidscar costs more $HP, at 5,000,000.

The world is holder-gated. To sign in you must hold at least 100,000 $HP *and* at least 1,000,000 $EMBER in your wallet (a separate holding floor that puts a price under $EMBER). Non-holders can't log in, play, or earn — but the public /guide pages (this guide, the Item Compendium, and the full Bestiary) are open to everyone with no login, so anyone can read up on the whole game before they hold a single token.

Higher tier = more of the world. Each tier unlocks the next region and its gated quests. Holding $HP also raises your max HP above your equipment's base, on a diminishing-returns curve that reaches its full +500 at 100,000 $HP — so from the sign-in floor upward, more $HP buys you more of the world rather than more hit points.

Your $HP is read when you sign in and cached for your session. If you buy or sell $HP, sign in again to refresh your tier.

Embervale is a set of point-and-click regions, each a live map you share with other players — you'll see others moving around in real time.

• Click the ground to walk there.
• Click a monster to engage it in combat.
• Click a resource node (ore vein, herb, etc.) to gather from it.
• Click a crafting station (furnace, anvil) to craft there.
• A minimap and on-screen HUD show your position, HP, and nearby activity. There's also proximity chat so nearby players can talk.

Regions, in order of depth:

• Emberhold Vale (Starter Vale) — onboarding. Green Slimes, giant rats, the starting village with vendors and the market board.
• Gloomwood — goblins, dire wolves, forest spiders, gloom bats, corrupted treants.
• The Frostmere — a frozen lake north of Gloomwood (opens at the Kindled tier). Frostfang wolves, rimewisps, snow stalkers, rime golems, and its guardian boss, the Rime Warden. Home to frost crystals and frostpetals.
• Gloomfang's Den — the lair of Gloomfang, the Alpha (boss).
• The Cinderpeaks — ember sprites, cinder golems, magma hounds.
• The Cinderpeaks Forge (Great Forge) — forge wraiths and the Forgeborn Titan (boss).
• The Shattered Spire — rift region (opens at the Infernal tier, 2,500,000 $HP). Void stalkers, riftlings, and the Aether Wyrm / Cinderwyrm.
• The Sunken Mire — a drowned, poison swamp (opens at the Ascendant tier, 2,500,000 $HP). Bog lurkers, mire hags, venom drakes, drowned knights, plague beasts, and its guardian, the Mire Leviathan. Source of the Venomweave set.
• The Astral Reach — a celestial star-realm (opens at the Celestial tier, 2,500,000 $HP *and* 2,500,000 $EMBER held). Astral wisps, star seraphs, void colossi, fallen valkyr, cosmic horrors, and the Astral Sovereign. Source of the Astral Ascendant set.
• The Emberdeep — a molten abyss (opens at the Emberwrought tier, 2,500,000 $HP *and* 5,000,000 $EMBER held). Home to Magmaroth, the Molten Crown.
• The Voidscar — the deepest, endgame frontier (opens at the Voidtouched tier, 5,000,000 $HP *and* 5,000,000 $EMBER held). Home to Nihilarch, the Unmaker — the hardest boss in Embervale.

You travel between regions from the world screen; a region only opens once your $HP tier is high enough (section 3).

Combat is turn-based and resolved on the server, so results are fair and can't be faked by a modified client. Each round:

• Your damage = your Attack, reduced by the enemy's Defense, times a small random variance (roughly 0.85–1.15). The randomness is *seeded per round*, which means every fight is reproducible and auditable — no hidden dice.
• Enemy damage hits back the same way against your Defense.
• Rounds exchange until one side reaches 0 HP.

Combat is fast and fluid — swings flow one into the next with almost no dead time, and there's no awkward pause before the killing blow.

Critical hits, dodge, and lifesteal layer on top of every exchange: crits land for 1.6× damage, dodge lets you avoid a hit outright, and lifesteal heals you for a share of the damage you deal. See the Codex → Combat & Builds for how each one scales.

Drinking potions mid-fight. You can down a healing potion in the middle of a battle — but it costs you: you skip that swing and the enemy gets a free strike, so time it when you can afford the tempo hit. There's no free "rest to full" anymore; between fights you heal with potions or a blessing at the Ember Shrine (section 19a), which keeps healing a real part of the economy.

Broken-gear warning. If you walk into a fight with a broken (0-durability) piece equipped, you're warned up front and again the moment a piece breaks mid-fight, so you never grind with dead gear by accident.

On a kill, loot rolls from that monster's weighted drop table (server-side, seeded). You get items, gold, and often $EMBER, plus XP toward your combat skills.

Death sends you back to town. At launch there is no item loss on death — it's a setback, not a disaster.

Your effectiveness in combat comes from three things stacked together: your skills (section 6), your equipment (section 8), and your allocated attributes (section 7).

You have nine skills, each trained from level 1 to 99 on a classic RuneScape-style XP curve (level 99 = 13,034,431 XP — a genuine long-haul goal). You gain XP in a skill by doing the thing it governs.

Combat skills

• Melee — close-quarters weapon damage.
• Ranged — bow and thrown damage.
• Arcane — magic damage.
• Defense — damage mitigation.
• Vitality — raises your HP pool.

Economy skills

• Mining — gather ore from nodes.
• Smithing — smelt ore and forge gear at furnaces/anvils.
• Alchemy — brew potions and elixirs.
• Trading — lowers the fees you pay on the marketplace as it grows.

There are no hard classes. Your equipped weapon plus the skills you train define your playstyle — a melee bruiser, an archer, a mage, or a hybrid. Reaching 99 in a skill is a prestige milestone and feeds the endgame Paragon system (section 24).

Your three base stats are HP, Attack, and Defense. They grow from skills, equipment, and attributes.

Attributes. As you progress you earn attribute points to allocate:

• Might → Attack
• Guard → Defense
• Vigor → max HP

Spend them to shape your build. Changed your mind? Respec refunds all allocated points for a fee paid from your wallet in SOL (see section 26) so you can re-plan.

Max HP is the sum of your base, your Vigor, your gear, and — importantly — a bonus from holding $HP, capped by your tier (section 3). Holding more $HP literally makes you tankier, up to your tier's cap.

Death returns you to town with no item loss at launch.

Equipping. Open your Inventory and equip weapons, armor, and accessories into their slots. Equipped gear adds its stats to yours. You can save gear sets as loadouts and swap between them (e.g. a tanky set vs. a damage set) in one click.

Rarity. Items range common → uncommon → rare → epic → legendary → mythic → godly. Godly is a tier of its own *above* mythic — the premium Godsforged, Founder's Grace, Fallen, and Fortune's Vanguard sets (Godsforged and Grace come from boxes, the Fallen set drops from the world boss, and Fortune's Vanguard is a legacy godly set). Only godly items are minted as compressed NFTs (cNFTs) — true on-chain ownership at a tiny fraction of a normal NFT's mint cost. Every rarity below godly stays in-database for speed.

Durability. Only epic and above has durability. Common, uncommon and rare gear never wears out, never breaks and never needs repairing — so you can level through the early game without a repair bill. From epic upward, equipped gear loses 1 durability per won fight; at 0 durability an item breaks and stops granting its stats until you repair it. You'll get a message when something breaks.

Repair. Fix gear in your Inventory:

• Paid repair is charged from your wallet in SOL, priced per durability point restored (the reward pool is credited the $EMBER-equivalent).
• Repair Kit — a craftable/buyable consumable that fully restores all your equipped gear with no coin spent. Craft them from ingots, or buy them at the Ember Exchange.

Tempering (+X gear). Permanently upgrade an item's main stat, +1 per temper level, up to +5. Each level is paid from your wallet in SOL plus gold plus a unit of Emberbloom. The price scales with the item's rarity as well as the level — a common piece costs a fraction of what a godly one does, so improving early gear is cheap. The exact price for the piece you have selected is always shown on the Temper button before you confirm. Tempered levels are permanent and make a favorite item stronger over time — a sticky SOL and materials sink (the reward pool is credited the $EMBER-equivalent).

Set bonuses. Wearing multiple pieces of the same set (weapon, helm, chest, hands, feet, offhand) triggers a set bonus that grows at 3, 5, and 6 pieces. Every set now has its own identity — some are tanky, some are glass cannons, some are sustain/lifesteal skirmishers — and bonuses can include crit, dodge, and lifesteal, not just attack, defense, and HP. Standout endgame sets: Venomweave (Sunken Mire — dodge & lifesteal), Astral Ascendant (Astral Reach — massive attack & crit), the world-boss Fallen set, and the box-exclusive Founder's Grace and Godsforged — with Godsforged the strongest set in the game (the power order among the godly sets is Godsforged > Founder's Grace > Fallen > Fortune's Vanguard). Only your single best-scoring set bonus applies at a time, so commit to one identity for the full effect.

The economy skills turn effort into goods.

Gathering. Walk up to a resource node (ore vein, herb) and click it to gather. Mining yields ore; herbs feed alchemy. Gathering trains the relevant skill and stocks your materials.

Crafting. At the right station:

• Smithing at a furnace/anvil smelts ore into ingots and forges weapons and armor.
• Alchemy brews potions (healing) and elixirs (buffs).

Recipes have a skill-level requirement, a station requirement, and material inputs. Higher-tier smithing recipes at a forge also burn coal as fuel per craft — so gathering coal ties directly into crafting. (Low-level recipes stay fuel-free so newcomers are never blocked.)

You can craft from the Workshop/Craft screen as well as out in the world at a station. Crafting is the backbone of the player economy: gather → refine → forge → equip or sell.

Quests are your guided path through the world. There are over 100 of them, from a starter chain that teaches the loop to full story chains for every endgame region, including the Sunken Mire and the Astral Reach.

Quest objectives come in three kinds: kill (defeat X of a monster), collect (gather X of an item), and reach (get to a place). Completing a quest pays rewards: gold, $EMBER, XP into specific skills, and sometimes a guaranteed item.

The opening chain — *A Rude Awakening → Goblin Trouble → Into Gloomwood → The Alpha* — walks you through movement, combat, and your first boss. Later quests branch into crafting mastery (*First Smelt, A Blade of Your Own, Master Smith, Dragonforged*), regional pushes (*Into the Cinderpeaks, Stoke the Forge*), and boss hunts (*The Cinderwyrm, Titan of the Forge*).

You take a quest once; you can't re-accept a quest you've already taken, and each quest's reward is claimed a single time.

Thirty-eight monsters populate the world, scaling from Emberhold Vale trash to Voidscar nightmares — each with its own custom art. Regular monsters respawn on timers and drop loot from weighted tables.

Bosses are the aspirational chase — HP-gated fights with rare drop tables that are the main source of top-end cNFT gear:

• Gloomfang, the Alpha (Gloomfang's Den)
• The Rime Warden (the Frostmere)
• The Forgeborn Titan (the Great Forge)
• The Aether Wyrm / Cinderwyrm (the Shattered Spire) — the rift dragon
• The Mire Leviathan (the Sunken Mire)
• The Astral Sovereign (the Astral Reach) — the celestial guardian
• Magmaroth, the Molten Crown (the Emberdeep)
• Nihilarch, the Unmaker (the Voidscar) — the hardest boss in Embervale

Endgame monsters (Gloom Hound, Ash Wraith, Molten Brute, Void Stalker, Riftling, and the Mire and Reach creatures) fill out the deepest regions. The in-game Bestiary (Codex → Full Bestiary) lists every creature with its live drop table and exact drop rates.

Beyond solo bosses, world bosses are shared community targets on the Raid screen. Everyone who joins deals damage to a single massive boss, and when it falls, the $EMBER reward pool pays out shares to participants based on contribution.

Deal at least 4,200 damage to a downed boss and you also earn 2 rolls on the raid loot table — home of the exclusive Fallen set, a godly set that drops only here (0.75% per piece per roll — roughly a 11.6% shot at some Fallen piece every kill), and of the gold stacks: 250,000 · 500,000 · 1,000,000 and a 10,000,000 jackpot, together landing on about 7.4% of kills. One catch worth knowing: the world boss is a $EMBER sink, but a gentle, predictable one. Your Mail reward on a kill is exactly what you spent striking the boss minus 75,000 $EMBER (floored at 0), so you always come out 75,000 behind no matter how few people fought — you can never profit, but you get most of your $EMBER back. You raid for the loot, the season points, and the fixed, known cost.

The Arena is a solo $EMBER wager against a shade scaled to your power. It's an honest coin flip: you win with a set probability (50% by default) and take a multiple (1.75×) of your stake when you do — a 1,000,000 bet returns 1,750,000 (750,000 profit). The house edge (12.5%) funds the treasury. Every fight is seeded, so the outcome is auditable. It's a fast way to gamble $EMBER — win some, lose some, with fair odds.

Challenge other players to wagered duels. The odds aren't a coin flip — they come from each fighter's combat score (Attack × HP × a Defense factor). The stronger fighter is favored, but odds are clamped so there's always an upset chance (roughly 10–90%), and equal fighters are a true 50/50 with no first-strike bias. The winner takes the pot minus a 25% duel tax (which sinks to the treasury). Create a duel or accept an open one from the Duels screen.

Pets are companions that grant passive bonuses (for example, a gold-find boost). Buy them from your wallet in SOL, then set one active to enjoy its bonus while you play. A light collection-and-buff layer on top of the core loop.

Found or join a guild for group identity and perks. Creating a guild is paid from your wallet in SOL (the reward pool is credited the $EMBER-equivalent), while guild donations are still paid in $EMBER from your in-game balance. Guilds have tiers that grow with contribution and can grant member-wide perks (such as bonus gold find). Guilds are the social and competitive backbone for the roadmap's co-op and seasonal competition.

Seasons auto-cycle every 4 days — no manual resets. When a season ends a new one starts on its own, and the Season page shows a live countdown to the next rollover.

You earn season points by playing — boss kills (tiered by boss: +1 for Gloomfang up to +40 for Nihilarch, +30 Magmaroth, +25 Astral Sovereign, +10 Mire Leviathan…), arena wins (+5), duel wins (+5), bounties (+3), and achievements (+5). Your points only reset when the season actually ends, never mid-season.

The prize is dynamic: at season end 5% of the reward pool is paid out automatically via in-game mail — and only to the top 6, split by finishing place, not by how many points you piled up. 1st takes 35% of the pot, 2nd 23%, 3rd 15%, then 4th 10%, 5th 9% and 6th 8%. Finishing on the podium is worth a lot more than scraping in at 4th. Because it's a share of the live pool, the prize grows as the game earns — the Season page always shows the current pot.

Leaderboards rank players by wealth, skill levels, and boss kills, so there's always someone to chase.

Your in-game inbox. Season prizes, certain rewards, and system messages arrive here with attached $EMBER or items. Open a message and claim to collect. Claims are one-time and safe against double-claiming.

Boxes are a gamble for gear and loot, opened server-side with an auditable seed and logged.

• $EMBER boxes — Adventurer's Crate (160,000 $EMBER, 1 roll), Champion's Vault (500,000 $EMBER, 1 roll), Dragon Hoard (2,000,000 $EMBER + 125,000 $AGS, 2 rolls). The Dragon Hoard costs both tokens; the other two are pure $EMBER.
• Founder's Cache ($AGS) — the premium box, and the richest in the game. It grants TWO rolls and is the only box carrying all three godly sets — Fortune, the exclusive Founder's Grace, and Godsforged — alongside legendary Void, Celestial and Venom gear. It's the only source of the exclusive Founder's Grace set — each Grace piece is a rare ~0.5% pull — plus a shot at the mythic Founder's Sigil and a Spark of Insight (+25% XP). It costs 175,000 $AGS (to the studio) plus 500,000 $EMBER (to the Ember treasury) in one wallet purchase, plus a little SOL for gas.

Boxes are both a fun reveal and a sink. (As a loot-box mechanic they're subject to legal review before real-money launch.)

The Shrine is a quick, repeatable place to buy blessings, paid from your wallet in SOL:

• Sanctuary Rest — instantly restore your HP to full.
• Hearthstone — teleport home to Emberhold Vale.
• Temporary buffs — +attack, +crit, +dodge, +lifesteal, and an +XP blessing (Insight) that last for a stretch of play.

With the free "rest to full" gone, the Shrine's Sanctuary Rest is the fast heal-up between fights, and the buffs give a cheap, steady sink. Every purchase is a real wallet transaction in SOL (the reward pool is credited the $EMBER-equivalent), so the Shrine is both a convenience and an economy sink.

The Exchange is a straightforward supply store — no gamble, fixed prices — paid from your wallet in SOL. Stock includes health potions, Repair Kits, coal bundles, Emberbloom (for tempering), the Spark of Insight, and rarer tonics.

Two ways your $HP matters here:

• Holder discount. If you hold $HP (Kindled tier or above), you get 15% off every purchase, automatically.
• The Ascendant Shelf. The better goods are locked behind $HP tiers — Greater Health Potions and Emberbloom at tier 1, the Spark of Insight at tier 2, and the Elixir of the Aether at tier 3. Hold more $HP to unlock more of the shelf.

Every purchase at the Exchange is paid in SOL and credits the treasury (reward pool) the $EMBER-equivalent.

The Godsforge stands beside the town anvil, and it exists for one problem: you keep pulling godly-set pieces you don't need, and never the one you actually want.

Break down. Any Fortune, Grace, Fallen or Godsforged piece can be broken into godly shards. How *many* you get depends on which set you broke — a Fortune piece gives 9, a Fallen piece 36, a Grace piece 72, and a Godsforged piece 144.

*Which* shard you get is random. There are four kinds — Fortune, Grace, Fallen and Godsforged Shards — and each shard you receive has about a 40% chance of matching the set you broke, with the remaining 60% split evenly across the other three. So what you break only nudges what you get back.

Forge. Spend shards of a set to forge any piece of that set — all 34 of them, every slot, including the Godsforged staff and longbow. It costs 100 Fortune Shards + 100,000 $EMBER, 200 Grace Shards + 500,000 $EMBER, 350 Fallen Shards + 1,000,000 $EMBER, or 500 Godsforged Shards + 2,000,000 $EMBER. These are deep, deliberate grinds — a Godsforged piece is the most expensive thing you can make in Embervale.

What can't go in. The Emberheart amulet and signet and the Ascendant Key can never be broken down or forged. Neither can an Upgraded (U) piece — it took three copies plus its upgrade fee to make, so the forge won't take it. Equipped and market-listed gear is always kept safe.

Shards stack and are fully tradeable, so you can buy the last few on the marketplace instead of grinding them out.

The player-driven economy. List item instances for sale in $EMBER and buy what others list; the board updates in real time.

• A 25% marketplace tax applies to every sale — the primary $EMBER sink in the game — and the running total collected is shown so you can see the economy working.
• Your Trading skill lowers the fees you pay as it levels up.
• Common/uncommon items trade instantly in-database; rare+ carry their cNFT, which settles behind the match so ownership transfers on-chain.

Prices are set by players. Scarcity comes from drop rarity and effort; the studio tunes drop rates and sinks, never prices.

Direct player-to-player sending of $EMBER and items is disabled — all trading between players goes through the taxed marketplace, which keeps the economy honest and prevents laundering to alt accounts.

Ways to earn $EMBER that don't require killing anything (all paid from the reward pool; all require holding $HP when the gate is on):

• Daily reward — claim once per ~20 hours. The amount scales with your $HP tier and grows with your login streak (a bonus for each consecutive day, up to a 7-day streak). Keep your streak alive.
• Bounties — rotating daily objectives (kill/collect tasks) that pay $EMBER on completion.
• $HP staking (needs a Staking Pass) — hold-to-earn: while you hold an active 60-day Staking Pass, your $HP accrues $EMBER every hour, piling up to a 48-hour accrual cap even while you're offline. Claim it from the Rewards screen. The rate is an accelerating curve, not a straight line — every extra $HP you hold is worth *more* than the last. It tops out at 65,000,000 $HP = 175,000 $EMBER/hour (4,200,000 a day); half that stake, 32,500,000 $HP, pays 65,000/hour — well under half — and holding beyond 65,000,000 doesn't earn any more. No pass, no staking income. The pass is one SOL payment from your wallet on the Rewards page.
• Referrals — invite new players and earn 2,000,000 $EMBER per successful referral, paid automatically. A referral counts once the friend who used your code holds 1,000,000 $EMBER and 100,000 $HP in their wallet *and* has bought Ascension during their 72-hour sale window. That's the entire list — there's no holding period to wait out and nothing for either of you to confirm: the reward lands the moment the last requirement is met (normally the instant their Ascension purchase goes through). Both balances are read live on-chain at that moment, so they have to actually be holding. Up to 100 referrals.
• Cashing out — withdraw earned $EMBER to your wallet, subject to a rolling 24-hour daily cap that scales with your $HP: no $HP = can't cash out; 100,000 $HP = 400,000/day; 5,000,000+ = 3,000,000/day; 15,000,000+ = 10,000,000/day; 15,000,000+ $HP AND 20,000,000 $EMBER held = 20,000,000/day (top tier — both are required); 20,000,000 $HP AND 40,000,000 $EMBER held = no daily limit at all — the once-per-24h cash-out cooldown and the withdrawal minimum still apply, only the amount cap is lifted. A 400,000 $EMBER minimum applies per cashout. Cashouts are gated behind holding the required $HP and the anti-cheat checks below. Each cash-out also carries a flat 0.004 SOL claim fee, paid from your own wallet (on top of network gas). $EMBER trades at very low volume but the game is expensive to run, so this fee covers both the on-chain cost of sending your payout and the backend/data-hosting cost of a game this large. It also keeps the payout system honest against multi-accounting — every wallet that wants to extract $EMBER has to pay a real SOL fee to do it. Anyone caught shuffling funds between accounts to dodge the fee will be banned. You approve the fee in your wallet right before the payout; you're never charged unless the cash-out is actually going through.

Long-running goals that pay $EMBER when you cross a threshold: total kills, bosses defeated, character power, and accumulated wealth. Achievements also grant season points. Check the Feats screen to see what you're close to.

Hitting level 99 in a skill is the classic milestone — but progression doesn't stop there. Once a skill is maxed, further XP in it spills into Paragon XP. Every chunk of Paragon XP grants a Paragon point, which you spend on account-wide permanent stat boosts:

• Might → +Attack
• Guard → +Defense
• Vigor → +max HP

Paragon is the infinite endgame treadmill — a reason to keep grinding maxed skills, with power that carries across your whole account.

Quest rewards · monster & boss drops · world-boss payouts · $EMBER mystery boxes (as loot) · the daily reward (+ tier + streak) · bounties · $HP staking · referrals · season prize pool · achievements · selling on the marketplace. *(When the gate is on, earning requires holding $HP — Wanderers can explore but not earn.)*

Paid in $EMBER (from your in-game balance): the marketplace (25% tax) · duel wagers (25% tax on the pot) · arena wagers (house edge) · guild donations.

Paid from your wallet in SOL (at the item's $EMBER value, ~$3 per 1,000,000 $EMBER): mystery boxes · the Ember Exchange (potions, kits, Emberbloom, Sparks, elixirs) · the Ember Shrine (heals + buffs) · hero rename · gear repair · gear tempering · attribute respec · guild founding · ascension · the Staking & Vault passes.

Every $EMBER sink, and the $EMBER-equivalent of every SOL purchase, flows into the Ember treasury, which pays back out only as player rewards — a closed loop (vendor gold aside).

$HP is your access-and-power token, and it's "used" in several places:

• Login gate — hold at least 100,000 $HP *and* 1,000,000 $EMBER in your wallet to log in and play when the gate is on.
• Tier ladder — unlocks regions (Gloomwood → Cinderpeaks → Forge → Shattered Spire) and gated quests.
• Max-HP boost — holding $HP raises your HP cap, tier by tier.
• Bigger daily reward — your tier adds to the daily amount.
• Better staking — the staking faucet pays a per-tier bonus.
• Ember Exchange — a 15% holder discount and the tier-gated Ascendant Shelf.
• Rename discount — holders pay a lower rename fee (charged from your wallet in SOL).

The more $HP you hold, the more of Embervale opens up and the better your rewards scale.

The Ember Treasury is the reward pool: every $EMBER sink credits it, and so does the $EMBER-equivalent of every SOL purchase, and it pays back out *only* as player rewards — it never funds the studio. Sinks (marketplace tax, repairs, tempering, boxes, guild costs, and more — now largely paid in SOL but still credited to the pool in $EMBER) and rewards are all tunable, and the studio tunes them so the economy stays healthy over years.

Fairness is built in. Combat, arena, duels, boxes, and loot all resolve on the server with seeded, auditable randomness — a modified client can't fake outcomes. Reward claims (dailies, bounties, staking, mail, season prizes, marketplace trades) are protected against double-claiming. The Economy dashboard and the Season "State of the Realm" show the treasury, the reward-pool health gauge, and the top sinks live, so you can see the economy working.

1. Connect your wallet and sign in (free — it's a signature, not a payment).
2. Take the first quest, *A Rude Awakening*, and follow the starter chain.
3. Click to move, click slimes and goblins to fight, grab the loot.
4. Level your combat skills; equip better gear as it drops.
5. Claim your daily reward and check bounties each day; keep your streak.
6. Try mining and smithing — gather ore, forge a blade of your own.
7. Sell spare gear on the marketplace; visit the Ember Exchange for potions and kits.
8. Hold $HP to raise your tier — unlock Gloomwood, then the Cinderpeaks and beyond, and turn on staking income and the holder discount.
9. Push the bosses for rare cNFT gear, join a guild, and climb the season leaderboard.
10. Grind toward 99 and into Paragon — Embervale is built to keep growing for years.

Welcome to Embervale. Light a spark against the Gloom. 🔥