Cash & The Economy
Cash is the scoreboard that matters, and almost everyone misreads how it works. Start here.
One wallet, and it carries
You have a single balance. It carries across lives, across matches and across sessions. Money you earn is yours the moment it lands, even if you quit right after, and money you spend is gone the same way.
The $10,000 everyone quotes is a one-time grant when you first start playing. It is not a per-life stipend. Spend ten thousand on a kit, die, and log off, and tomorrow you open the game with what was left, which may be nothing. Budget like it is a bank account, because it is one.
One thing does end it. At the close of a season the balance converts into Gold Bars and the ledger starts again, which is covered in Classes & Progression. Inside a season, the money is simply yours.
The HUD shows two numbers and they are easy to misread. Account is everything you own. Profit is what this life has earned you so far, and the death recap calls the same figure This Life. Only the first one is money. The second is a running tally of how the current life is going, and it resets when you die. There is no banked column and nothing held back until the match ends.
What the zone pays
The Control Zone pays rent every score tick, once every 22 seconds. Standing in the Hot Zone pays double the outer circle, on top of counting double toward the point itself, and every tick you stay in there adds a little more:
Holding the zone changes nothing about the rate. Contested, yours or the enemy's, presence pays the same, so there is no reason to wait for a safer moment to walk in.
Both entry payments are scored inside the Control Zone and outside the Hot Zone. Park the spawn vehicle in the outer ring rather than driving it into the middle. That $3,000 is the single biggest objective payout in the game and most players never collect it.
Fewer players, smaller payouts
Every reward, cash and XP alike, is multiplied by a factor set by the head count on the server. Under ten players nothing pays at all. The full rate needs sixty.
So a quiet server is a poor place to farm anything. Every figure in this chapter is the full rate, and the cash & XP calculator has a slider that scales all of them to the server you are on.
What a kill is worth
A kill starts at $300, and a headshot at $350. Then it gets multiplied by where the fight happened, and that is the part that matters: ×5 in the Control Zone and ×10 in the Hot Zone. The multiplier is split in half, one half scored on where you stand and the other on where they fall, so shooting into the circle from outside it still collects half the bonus. Fighting in the circle is worth ten times fighting outside it.
Several things stack on top. A kill streak adds $50 for every kill after the first, up to $250. A revenge kill on the player who last killed you pays double, and ending someone's streak pays half again. A long-range rifle kill scales with distance on its own curve, which is where the huge numbers come from:
Put those together and a single long shot into the Hot Zone at 400 metres pays $6,000. Land it as a headshot, from further out, and it climbs well past that. Distance only counts for rifle and artillery kills, and for those the multiplier follows the target's position alone, since the shooter is nowhere near the circle.
Three rules quietly take it back. Killing the same player over and over pays about a quarter less each time, four deep, so farming one opponent stops working. If their team revives them, your kill keeps one percent of its value. And a kill from a crewed vehicle is shared, with a fifth coming off for every extra crew member aboard. A body nobody could reach is worth a hundred times one that went down beside a medic.
Friendly fire runs hard the other way. A teamkill costs you three times what the kill would have paid, so one wipes out several good ones. Wrecking your own faction's structures and vehicles costs too. Check your fire.
What everything else pays
Medics read that table and realise their job pays. A revive is scored entirely on where the downed player is lying, so the messiest ones pay best, and it puts a whole body back on the tick count, which killing someone only half does.
One squadmate who keeps going down is worth less each time you pick them up. The second revive on the same player pays about three quarters of the first, and it keeps sliding from there, so a defib that opened at $1,200 comes back closer to $900. Spread your attention around the squad.
Vehicle kills split their multiplier between your position and the target's, which is why a launcher fired from inside the circle at something over the circle pays several times the base. One thing to check before you spend a rocket: a vehicle nobody bought pays nothing to destroy.
Transport has its own ledger. You are paid per passenger delivered, scored on where they get out and climbing with every passenger you have delivered before, and paid again when you return to the safe zone with survivors aboard. Assists pay separately, and so do the crates and pallets you drop inside the circle.
All of it, every event and every switch, is in the cash & XP calculator, which prints the arithmetic behind each number.
The end of the match
Three factions fight a match, so every one of them places, and placing pays twice. There is a flat amount for the position, and a bonus cut of everything you earned during the match, counted up to $100,000.
A first-place finish on a $30,000 match hands you $10,000 at the whistle. XP gets its own bonus on the same ladder: what you earned in the match, up to 2,500, times two for first, one and three quarters for second and one and a half for third.
XP is on the same ledger
Every action that pays cash pays role XP beside it, in the track of the item or vehicle behind it. A kill is 250 XP, a headshot 275, and it goes where the weapon points: rifles and pistols to Assault, SMGs to Medic, LMGs, shotguns and launchers to Support, marksman and sniper rifles to Recon. A revive is 200, or 250 with a defibrillator, and a bandage is 80, all Medic. Delivering a passenger is 25 by air for Pilot and 250 from a truck for Driver, and driving the spawn vehicle into the zone is 500. Capturing a drill tower, firing the drill and hacking a FOB have no item behind them, and all of those pay Assault.
The XP figures scale with the server the same way the cash does, and the calculator shows both numbers for every event. What the levels unlock is in Classes & Progression and on the progression board.
The refund nobody uses
If the match ends while you are alive and kitted, you get 90% of what you paid for that loadout back. The kit you are standing in is not sunk cost, it is a deposit.
So a match in its dying minutes is exactly the wrong time to play cheap. Buy the kit you actually want, because most of that money is coming home. Ammunition and magazines are the one thing you eat.
What it buys
Spending splits three ways:
- The kit, every life. Weapons, attachments, armor and meds are priced per life. Your faction's recruit rifle is free, every time, forever.
- Unlocks, once. Gear behind a level gate takes a one-time payment to open, then still costs its per-life price. More in Classes & Progression.
- Logistics. Vehicles, crates and pallets for the faction. Price a whole supply run in the cargo planner before you leave the HQ.
Every per-life price in the game is in the armory database, and the planner totals a kit before you buy it.