Money, cases, and farming: how the STALCRAFT: X economy works

Is the ruble in STALCRAFT: X actually subject to inflation? Will the open world become more profitable? And what’s the real issue behind equipment cases? In this article, Prometey breaks down the key aspects of the in-game economy and answers the most common questions.

About the open world

• What level of income in rubles per hour is considered optimal, taking open world rewards into account? What factors are considered, such as barter resources, items for sale, and rare drops like tools or safe keys? And how does a map’s difficulty affect overall earnings?

It’s highly individual. You can look at casual players who stick to their home locations, or experienced players who roam wild areas like they own the place. Even on the same location, a player’s income can vary greatly depending on their skill. For a northern player, an optimal income might range anywhere from around 50k to 500k rubles per hour. Key factors include:

1. The time it takes to reach the location

2. How PvP-heavy the area is, meaning overall survivability

3. The difficulty of specific events and the time required to clear them

The type of rewards given. For example, getting a safe key doesn’t guarantee a player will be able to use it. If a player gets resources worth 100k rubles, it doesn’t mean they’ll extract with all of them — weight limits might get in the way, or they may be saving space for more valuable loot In reality, there are a lot of variables, enough for an entire lecture. The core rule for us is simple: higher risk should mean higher reward. Those who put in more effort and invest more resources should earn more.

• Why weren’t the costs of data in exchange coins adjusted when the prices of data fragments and data blocks were changed?

Because a resource’s value in exchange coins is determined solely by its value within the barter system.

• Are there plans to make the open world more profitable? Right now, players have little incentive to farm it beyond three well-known activities, which makes the gameplay feel repetitive and leaves a large portion of the content overlooked.

We’re aiming to diversify farming methods, but I can’t say exactly what or how we’ll change things just yet. Some events definitely need reward adjustments, and we plan to address that.

• Why do NPC patrols in the South drop boosters, ammo, and medkits, while in the North they don’t?

This will soon be fixed on the Wild North. Hopefully, we’ll also get around to updating it for the regular North afterward.

• Are there plans to rebalance the weight of filler items from spots? The same goes for Gamma — its price was reduced, but its weight stayed the same.

I’ve been wanting to go over all sellable items for a while now. We recently tested a draft version of changes on Wild North items. Hopefully, we’ll have time soon to review the rest of the open world as well. Barter item weight is a separate issue that we still need to think through.

• What’s the deal with Marxont’s thought experiment? Was this idea actually discussed by the economists, or was it just a developer joke?

The idea was discussed a bit, but personally I didn’t like it. Current filler items aren’t perfect and need systematization and further work, which we do plan to tackle, but they have more potential to create interesting gameplay in the long run.

• Why are outpost rewards so low? The cost of consumables often exceeds