Coins

Copper, silver, gold and platinum, each worth a hundred of the one below it. They have nothing to do with the ores they are named after and cannot be crafted from bars. Money arrives from enemy kills, selling to NPCs, chests, pots and the occasional shaken tree.

Copper, silver and gold cap at 100 per stack, the only stack limit in the game that is not 9999. Platinum stacks normally, so the moment you convert upward your storage problem disappears.

Coins picked up off the ground, or shift clicked out of a chest, roll up into higher denominations automatically. Ninety five silver in your slots plus fifteen more picked up leaves you holding one gold and ten silver. Drag coins into storage by hand and they will not combine, so partial stacks accumulate until you convert them yourself, either by crafting or by dropping them and picking them up again.

Quick Stack moves coins only into banks, never into ordinary chests, and combines them on the way in. Deposit All in any storage item runs the combine pass too, even if you deposit nothing else. Restock ignores coins entirely.

In Classic you drop half your coins, and more of them on harsher world difficulties, rounded up to the whole coin. Mediumcore and Hardcore drop the lot regardless of cause. There are exceptions worth memorizing: dying to a player wielded weapon costs you nothing in Classic, and that includes blowing yourself up with your own explosives. Fall damage and Chaos State do cost you, as does dying to your own projectile after something reflected it back at you.

In Expert, enemies pick dropped coins up off the ground. If one is carrying at least ten silver when it despawns, the location is marked on your map with a coin icon showing the amount, and the enemy respawns when you go back for it. Worth checking before you write off a bad death.

Money in a bank is safe from death and still spendable. Shop purchases draw straight from a piggy bank, money trough, safe, defender's forge or Eye Bone inventory, and the shop window shows you the balance held there, so there is no reason to walk around with your savings in your pockets.

The piggy bank, money trough and eye bone all open one shared inventory, so which of the three you carry is purely convenience: the trough deploys anywhere, the piggy bank needs a flat surface to sit on. The safe and the forge each hold a separate inventory of their own, which is four independent storages if you want them.

• The Coin Gun fires them as ammunition, hitting harder the higher the denomination. They cannot sit in ammo slots, so it feeds from the main inventory.
• Thrown into Shimmer, coins vanish and charge coin luck instead. One platinum coin fills the counter outright, which is a short burst of maximum luck rather than anything lasting.
• Thrown into water while you stand in a desert, a platinum coin disappears the same way and leaves a vanity set behind.
• Pots have a small chance to open a Coin Portal when broken, which is why the Underworld and its pot density is a decent place to go smashing.
• The Rubblemaker converts copper, silver and gold into placeable decoration, and coins can be laid down as coin piles like the ones in underground campsites.

In an enemy farm, copper coins are a liability rather than income. Every stack counts against the world's loose item limit of roughly 400, and past that the oldest drops begin disappearing, so a farm churning out copper will quietly delete your rare loot. The standard fix is a shallow lava layer tuned deep enough to burn copper and nothing taller.

Coins have no sell value, so there is no trick to be found in shuffling them through a vendor. In Journey Mode, researching gold or platinum bars and selling them in full stacks reaches large numbers far faster than trying to research coins one denomination at a time.