GUIDES / ECONOMY
Economy
Every war in Aether Ascent is won at the refinery first. This is how the money actually moves.
Two kinds of wealth
Credits are global — one wallet across every world you operate on. Resources are local — regolith, metals, water, and helium-3 belong to the theater they were mined in and never teleport. Moving stock between worlds takes a rocket, a cargo pod, and fuel. That asymmetry is the whole off-world game: credits flow home easily, hardware doesn't.
The harvest loop
- Harvesters load at deposits and dump at refineries. Distance is the enemy: a refinery placed beside its deposit cluster completes cycles several times faster than one across the map.
- Deposits are finite. When one runs dry, trucks retarget on their own, but a new refinery at the next cluster beats a long commute every time.
- More trucks help until they crowd the same pile; spread across deposit faces before you stack a fourth harvester on one.
What each resource is for
- Regolith — cheap local bulk. Defensive structures take it as a construction cost, and off-world converters can refine it.
- Metals — hardware. Tanks, MCVs, turrets, rockets and advanced buildings all draw theater metals on top of credits.
- Water — life and fuel-stock. The Fuel Plant electrolyzes it into propellant; on airless worlds it's ice, and it rides cargo pods well.
- Helium-3 — the Moon's prize and the reason to be there: premium trade good, Tier-2 rocket fuel, and superweapon ammunition.
- Propellant (shown as FUEL) — never mined, never sold. Made from water, burned by every launch, scaled by the world's gravity. See the tables for exact bills.
Selling — and the reserve that protects you
Trade Hubs automatically sell surplus stock for credits, but only above a per-resource reserve, so the metals your next rocket needs can't be strip-sold by your own automation. Hoarding instead? Stock caps are real — Storage Silos raise them, a raided silo loses what it stored, and a warehouse sitting at capacity wastes every delivery that arrives into it (the game warns you when that happens). Wealth in stock is wealth someone can burn.
Power
- Every structure draws power; solar plants supply it. Run short and the whole base slows — production, radar, superweapon charging.
- Sunlight is not equal: vacuum noon on the Moon out-produces Earth's sky, and Mars' dusty light under-delivers — Mars compensates with the Solar Farm, a bigger field built for its dimmer sky. Budget your power per world, not per habit.
Repairs are an economy too
Repairing a building costs a share of its credit and regolith price — never its metals, which is why repairing almost always beats rebuilding. The Repair Depot does the same for vehicles parked nearby, automatically, for a fee. A repaired army is an army you didn't pay full price for twice.
The one rule
If you're ever unsure what to do next: add income. A second refinery, a better-placed one, another harvester, a converter running. Armies are rebuilt from economies; economies are not rebuilt from armies.
REFERENCE GENERATED FROM LIVE GAME DATA — BALANCE v102 · 2026-08-27 · NUMBERS UPDATE WITH EVERY RELEASE