Seven currencies, and only one of them can ruin your account
Seven currencies, doing three jobs. Summoning: Gems and Universal Gems. In-run economy: Gold. Progression and shops: Zeny, Etherealization Shards, event fragments, raid currency.
Only one of them is genuinely unforgiving. Etherealization Shards are permanent once spent. Everything else either refills, resets at the end of a run, or is tied to a shop you can come back to.
Three jobs, seven currencies
Once you see the jobs, the list stops being confusing.
Seven currencies sounds like a lot until you group them by what they are for. Two get you units. One runs inside a match and then disappears. The remaining four buy progression through various shops and systems. That is the whole map.
| Currency | Job | Permanent loss risk |
|---|---|---|
| Gems | Summon | Low. They refill through codes, quests and events |
| Universal Gems | Summon, separate stock | Low, but confusing it with Gems costs you banners |
| Gold | In-run tower economy | None. It resets when the run ends |
| Zeny | Progression | Unmapped. We have not traced every sink |
| Etherealization Shards | Etherealize | High. Spending is permanent and there is no refund |
| Event fragments | Event shops | High in a different way. They rot when the event closes |
| Raid currency | Raid shop | Low. The shop is still there tomorrow |
Gems and Universal Gems
The one naming collision that actually costs people units.
Both are summoning currencies. They are not the same stock. A player who checks their Gem balance, sees a healthy number and plans a ten-pull can find that the banner in front of them wants the other one.
This is the most avoidable resource mistake in the game, and it is avoidable with one habit: before you plan any pull, look at what the banner takes, then look at the balance for that currency. Two seconds, and it removes an entire category of disappointment.
Gold never leaves the match
Which makes it the only currency you cannot misplay long-term.
Gold is earned inside a run and spent inside that run, on placing and upgrading towers. When the run ends, it is gone. There is no bank, no carry-over, and no reason to finish a match holding a pile of it.
That last part is worth saying twice, because new players hoard it out of instinct. Unspent Gold at the end of a wave is wasted damage. If you are holding Gold while a wave leaks, you are not being careful, you are losing. Spend it.
Shards are the bottleneck
The only currency where a bad call follows you around.
Etherealization Shards feed the Etherealize layer, and they are the one resource in this game with no undo. No refund, no strip, no reclaim. Once they are in a unit, they are that unit's forever.
Everything else on this page recovers. Gems come back from codes and quests. Gold resets. Raid currency accumulates. Shards are the exception, and that makes them the only currency worth being genuinely slow about. The decision rules live on the Etherealize page, and they reduce to one idea: do not spend a permanent currency on a temporary opinion.
Zeny, and the honest answer
It exists. That is roughly where our certainty stops.
Not verified yet. Zeny is confirmed as a currency in Universal Tower Defense Z. We have not mapped every sink it feeds or every source that pays it out, so we are not publishing a Zeny spending guide. Sites that have one should be asked where they got it, because we could not find a source and we looked.
Event fragments rot
Burning, Frozen, Summer. Different events, same expiry logic.
Events issue their own fragment currency, and the game has run at least Burning, Frozen and Summer variants. Fragments buy things from that event's shop.
The practical rule is short. Clear the shop before the event ends. Fragments are not a store of value, they are a countdown. A stack of Summer fragments after the Summer event closes is a souvenir. Players who hoard them waiting for a better deal in the shop are choosing nothing over something.
Raid currency has its own shop
A closed loop, and the reason the currency list is as long as it is.
Raids pay out a currency that spends in the Raid shop and nowhere else. It is a self-contained loop: play the mode, earn the currency, buy from the shop attached to it.
Unlike event fragments, this one is not on a countdown, so there is no urgency to spend it badly. Unlike shards, it is not permanent in any painful sense, because you can farm more by playing the mode again. It is the most relaxed currency in the game, and the mode behind it is covered on the Raids page.
Not verified yet. We have not recorded the Raid shop stock list or its prices, and we have not measured the payout rate per raid. Those two tables are what would turn this section into a farming plan, and we would rather leave it short than invent them.
Last updated 2026-07-14 · Currency list re-checked against Update 4.0