Currencies

Two currencies, kept deliberately apart. One you earn by playing. One you trade. Neither turns into the other.

Status: Tallow live · $GLOAM at launch

The short version#

Tallow#

Tallow is the soft currency. It is literally rendered from what you bring up, which is why it is also what you burn — every torch and lamp in the game runs on the stuff.

You cannot buy Tallow, and you cannot sell it. That is on purpose. It means the grind can be generous without becoming a faucet anyone can drain, and it means a new delver with no money is not permanently behind one with money.

Carried versus banked. Tallow you just pried is carried. Carried Tallow is lost — most of it — when your torch goes out. Tallow you walked back to the Landing with is banked, and nothing can take it. This distinction is the whole tension of a run.

$GLOAM#

$GLOAM is the tradeable side, launched fairly on Pump.fun with no presale and no allocation. It is used where players trade with each other, and where the game needs a cost that cannot be farmed:

• Listing and buying at the Wick Market
• Premium company
• Tournament entry in the Gloam

Every in-game $GLOAM spend is split 50/50 between a burn and the treasury. See Burn & Reward System.

Why they never convert#

There is no exchange rate between Tallow and $GLOAM, in either direction, and there is not going to be one.

The moment you can turn play into tokens, the game stops being a game and becomes a job with worse hourly rates. Everything that is fun to grind gets farmed by scripts, everything that is fun to explore gets optimised away, and the people who actually wanted to play the thing are competing with a spreadsheet.

Keeping them apart means we can make Tallow rewards generous and constant without asking what that does to the chart.