Tridents — a currency you cannot grind
XP is a good measure of how much you have flown. It is a poor measure of what you have done, because enough hours will get anyone there. We wanted something that could not be reached by grinding, so that the things it buys mean something when you see them on someone.
That is Tridents 🔱.
Only firsts
Tridents pay out for a short, deliberate list:
| What | 🔱 |
|---|---|
| First catch of a legend from the curated list | +5 |
| World first — nobody on the planet had photographed that legend before | +25 |
| Platinum-tier achievement unlocked | +10 |
| Tier-III achievement unlocked | +3 |
| Completing an achievement category outright | +15 |
| A brand-new 300 m+ leviathan card | +1 |
| Outright world record on a race track | +15 |
| First gold on each track | +3 |
| Top 3 in the weekly season table | +20 / +10 / +5 |
Every line is either a first — checked server-side against the same counters that already track "first flag", "first vessel type" — or something that cannot be farmed at all: a world record, a world first, a platinum.
Repeats pay nothing. Which is why Tridents need no daily caps and no anti-farming rules: there is nothing to farm. An active player will pile up tens of thousands of XP in a month and single-digit-to-low-double-digit Tridents. That ratio is the whole design.
What they buy
Cosmetics. Only cosmetics. Zero power, now or later — a currency that buys advantage stops being a trophy and starts being a grind, which is exactly what we were avoiding.
The Trident Exchange opens from the album header. The opening catalogue:
- Profile frames — bronze, silver, gold, legendary (10 / 25 / 60 / 150)
- Titles appended to your name — Legend Hunter, Record Breaker, Tall-Ship Master (15)
- Name colour and effect in chat and on in-world nameplates (30)
- Gull and drone liveries with matching trails (40–120)
Frames and titles are live first because they are text and CSS. The aircraft liveries need actual art, so they land when that is ready rather than as placeholders.
Why a second currency at all
We could have made the rare things cost a lot of XP. We did not, because that says "this is a big grind" rather than "this cannot be ground", and those are different messages to send to somebody looking at your profile frame.
Earning a Trident gets its own toast — gold, separate from the XP one — because a thing that happens a handful of times a month should not slide past in the same grey box as +40 XP.