The economy

How money works

What a round pays, what it takes back, and what happens to the loadout you were carrying when it ended. Read off the screen rather than reasoned from the trailers.

This page settles a question we had listed as open. Our cash economy explainer said Bulkhead had not published what happens to unspent cash on death, or whether any part of a loadout comes back. Both were visible on the Closed Alpha results screen, and both are below.

One player, one session, roughly one hour, one server. That is the whole sample. It is enough to show what the columns are and how they add up; it is not enough to tell you what a good round pays, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Data as of Alpha 1 · 7 Aug 2026

One round, line by line

End-of-round results, DEFEAT / MANTICORE WINS

Transcribed in the order the results screen printed them. This is a complete account of a round rather than a sample of one, which is why it is worth reading closely.

3rd Place Bonus	+$200
Match Contribution	$0
Cash Spent	−$575
Cash Earned	+$570
Purchase Refunded	+$517
Total Profit	+$712

The line items sum to the printed total — no hidden term

A placement bonus is paid to every faction, not only the winner. This player finished third of three and still collected $200.
Purchase Refunded recovered most of Cash Spent. Whether that ratio is fixed, condition-based, or simply what happened to survive the round is not something one sample can answer.
Match Contribution read $0 for a player who died repeatedly and captured nothing, which suggests it is scaled to performance rather than paid flat for turning up. Inferred, not stated.

The answer to the open question

You get most of your spend back. Purchase Refunded returned 90% of Cash Spent in this round — a separate, itemised line, not a rounding of the total. Whether that share is fixed, condition-based, or simply what survived the round, one round cannot say.

The bank carries

Four captures across the session, timestamped from the HUD. The round profit is added to the balance and the balance is not reset, which is the persistent economy the game is built on rather than a per-match wallet.

Time	Screen	This round	Balance
20:31 UTC	Equipment vendor	—	$10,000
20:37 UTC	Round results	$712	$10,712
20:46 UTC	Downed	$3,642	$14,354
21:35 UTC	Deployment board	—	$24,987

It opens at exactly $10,000, which corroborates Team17's stated seed as a real starting figure rather than marketing copy, and closes the session on $24,987 — a gain of $14,987 across roughly 64 minutes.

That is on the order of $14,000 an hour, and we mean order of magnitude literally. One player, one session, finishing third of three. It tells you roughly what scale of purchase a session buys. It is not an earn rate and should not be quoted as one.

$10,000 plus a $712 round profit reads $10,712 on the far side of the round boundary. The bank carries.
The two HUD figures are this round's running profit on the left and the persistent bank on the right. Consistent across all four captures, but inferred from that consistency rather than labelled on screen.
Treat the implied hourly figure as an order of magnitude and nothing finer. It is one player, in one session, on one server, playing badly enough to finish third — not a measured earn rate.

What the Control Zone pays

Cash is itemised per event in its own tab of the damage log, alongside Damage Dealt, Damage Received, Healing and Misc. The game shows you your income line by line, while you play it.

Control Zone Entered$250
Paid on entry. One-off, at least per entry.
Control Zone Presence$160
Paid three seconds after entry in this capture, so presence appears to tick rather than pay once.

A correction to our own earlier framing

We previously described the Hot Zone as paying double cash. The loading screen says something more specific: "The Hot Zone counts you as 2 players and rewards bonus cash for every teamplay action."

Two distinct effects, and neither is a flat cash multiplier: your body counts twice toward the capture, and teamplay actions pay a bonus on top.
The HUD carries a persistent distance-to-Hot-Zone readout, captured at 456 m.

You can bribe someone to revive you

The most distinctive thing in the entire capture, and the point at which the economy stops being a shop. Go down, and the bleedout screen offers a running pot you raise in $50 steps out of your own balance — money as a medium of exchange between players, mid-match, while you are bleeding out.

Key	Action
F1	BRIBE + $50Increments the pot in $50 steps.
E	CALL FOR HELP
F	GIVE UP
B	VIEW DAMAGE LOG

What we did not see, and will not guess at:

Whether the pot actually pays out on a revive.
Whether it is refunded if you bleed out instead.
Whether enemies can see the offer, or collect it.

What we still cannot tell you

Published as questions rather than quietly omitted, and doubling as the capture list for the Closed Beta on 21–23 August:

Is the refund ratio fixed, or does it depend on what survived the round? One round is one data point.
What does Match Contribution actually measure, and what does a good one pay?
Does the bribe pay out on revive, and can an enemy take it?
Does the placement bonus scale with finishing position, and what does first place pay?
Does the Control Zone presence payment tick at a fixed interval, and does it cap?

Every figure on this page was read off a screen in build CL-484909 on 7 August 2026. Where a reading is inferred from consistency rather than stated by the game, it says so. How we grade the difference is on the methodology page.