SINGLE CURRENCY
One money for everything — gold as the universal denominator for shops, upgrades, repairs, bribes, and fast travel, with no parallel token economies.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN RPG · SOULSLIKE · LIFE-SIM · ACTION-ADVENTURE
The classic default: Zelda's rupees, Mario's coins, Stardew Valley's gold (one number funding seeds, buildings, and dreams alike), Souls games radicalize it — souls are simultaneously currency AND experience, making every purchase a level not taken and every death a wallet dropped — and Recettear or tycoon games make the single balance the game's entire scoreboard. Designers choose one currency for the clarity compound it pays: a single denominator prices everything against everything (the sword costs three upgrades, the house costs a season of crops — players do this arithmetic instinctively, and the arithmetic is the strategy), every income source and sink shares one legible pipeline, and the balance itself becomes a progress bar the player emotionally tracks in a way no six-token wallet ever achieves. The Souls insight sharpens it further: merging currency with XP makes spending decisions existential, and losing the balance on death converts money into tension itself. The trade-off is the firewall problem multiple currencies exist to solve — with one currency, all activities pour into one pool, so the most farmable source funds everything (fishing money buys the raid gear), and designers must balance faucets against each other or watch one activity's economy flood the rest. Key decisions: sink architecture (with one currency, sinks are the entire inflation defense — repair costs, taxes, consumables, and escalating prices carry the whole burden), income-rate parity across activities players are meant to choose freely, and hoarding counterpressure — the single balance accumulates unless something (death risk, decay, opportunity cost) makes sitting on gold itself a choice. Pitfall: late-game currency irrelevance — the single number that thrilled at hour two ('finally, the shield!') reads as noise at hour forty when income outruns every remaining sink; without late sinks that scale (prestige purchases, endgame economies), the unified currency's clarity curdles into a solved number, and with it every price tag in the game stops being a decision.