What the Vault Is
The Vault is the permanent storage surface inside your Rig. Every item you move here before recalling or dying is safe. Every item you carry into the dive when you die is gone.
This split — vault versus carry — is the defining tension of each dive. Every time you pick up something valuable, you make a decision: push deeper and risk losing it, or recall to the Nexus and secure it in the Vault. There is no right answer; it depends on what you are carrying, how deep you are, and what you believe the next room holds.
What Survives Permadeath
The Vault belongs to the account, not the character. When a character dies:
- Gear carried in the dive: lost
- Gear stored in the Vault: safe
- Tokens (currency): safe (account-level balance)
- The Rig itself: safe
- The Companion: safe (account-bound, never lost)
- Exaltation / Imprint progress: safe (account-level stat track)
- Skill tree picks: lost with the character (run-layer investment)
This is the Hades split: the dive risks everything you carried in; the base layer is never on the table.
Slot Count and Tabs
The Vault starts with a bounded number of storage slots. Additional tabs — extra pages of storage — are purchased with Tokens at a meaningful cost. This is a Token sink built into the progression loop, not a paywall.
Carry capacity in the dive is similarly bounded. A rare droppable backpack item doubles your inventory slots while diving. The backpack itself is a loot drop, never a cash purchase.
Vault capacity is never monetized for real money. This is a hard rule: selling storage space is on Godmaw’s explicit avoid list, learned from other games’ mistakes.
The Bank-or-Push Decision
The Vault exists to make one question matter: do I have enough room, and is what I am carrying worth the risk of going further?
Inventory management is intentional friction. When your carry slots fill up, you must choose: drop something valuable to make room, recall and store it, or push on overloaded and hope for a fast recall path.
Instant recall to the Nexus is always available. A quick return path to your last unlocked biome band means banking is not a slog — it is a brief interruption, and the cost is time, not a long walk.
Shared Across Characters
Every character you create on your account shares the same Vault. A dead character’s stored loot stays in the Vault for the next character to use. This is intentional: the economy and account-layer wealth survive across the permadeath loop, so each new character is a fresh dive, not a fresh start from zero.
Items in the Vault can be freely moved to the Auction House for sale, transferred between a player’s own characters, or held indefinitely. There is no vault decay or expiry.
Relationship to the Workbench
The Vault and the Workbench share the same Rig space. Surplus items sitting in the Vault can be crushed at the Workbench into Compute Scrap for upgrades, or listed on the Auction House if they have value on the market. The Vault is not a dead-end — it is the sorting table between every dive and the economy.