Active Matter's Four Currencies Explained: Credits, CAM, Monolith Tokens and Chronotraces

Active Matter runs on four wallet currencies, and they mostly don't convert into each other. The one exception is Crystallised Active Matter, which can stand in for two of the others. Knowing which one gates the thing you want saves a lot of pointless raids. Here's what each one buys, every way the game hands it out, and which ones survive a wipe.

A word on the numbers. They're from the early version (update 0.4.0.84, 12 September 2026) and Gaijin has been re-tuning the economy every few days on the way to launch: that one patch alone repriced the shop and changed how Credits and Chronotraces are paid out. Treat the figures as a guide to scale, not gospel.

Credits

The everyday currency: "the Agency's universal currency", in the game's own words. It's what you'll be short of in the first ten hours and swimming in once you can extract reliably.

What Credits are for

• The shop. Weapons, armour plates, helmets, ammunition, meds and consumables: the kit you burn through every raid. Only items you've unlocked in the Monolith are on sale, so a fat Credit balance doesn't buy a gun you haven't reached yet.
• Repairs. Fixing up gear that made it out.

Prices moved on 12 September: uncommon gear bought with Credits now costs roughly twice what it did, and rare gear two to three times. Standard kit is where Credits go furthest, which is also the kit you can afford to lose.

How to get Credits

1. The Refiner. Dismantle anything you extract and you get Credits plus Chronotraces. Since 12 September the payout scales with the item's market price rather than its volume, so a rare rifle is worth far more broken down than a backpack of junk. Enriched items pay fewer Credits than clean ones.
2. Quick Refine for the junk you scoop up, the fastest path from a full backpack to a number in your wallet.
3. Objectives. Every Primary and Secondary objective pays Credits alongside its Monolith Tokens. Repeating the same objective at the same location on the same day pays half.
4. Harvested active matter. The units you collect from clusters and AM-transformed creatures during a raid convert to Credits when you extract (100 Credits per unit in the early version).
5. Your edition. Standard starts you with 25,000 Credits, Advanced 60,000, Deluxe and Elite Squad 185,000.
6. Crystallised Active Matter. In the early version the store also sold Credits for CAM. It's almost never worth it; see below.

What happens on a wipe

Credits go. A self-sacrifice (the personal reset at the top of the Monolith) clears your Credits along with your stash and Monolith progress.

Crystallised Active Matter (CAM)

The premium-shaped currency, except it isn't sold. "An extremely rare and exceptionally valuable resource awarded by the Agency for special merits", per the in-game description, and the only currency that survives a wipe.

What CAM is for

• The Special tab of the shop. The things Credits can't buy: the small safe container that keeps a few items through a death, the beacon, the Tactical Beacon, and two exchanges (10,000 Credits for Ȼ100, 5,000 Monolith Tokens for Ȼ500). Despite what some wikis say, it does not sell Isolated raid passes; there are none in the game as of build 0.4.0.156.
• Skipping a Monolith level. Every access level can be opened with CAM instead of Monolith Tokens. In the early version the whole ladder was 119,950 tokens or 7,970 CAM. You won't have that, so this is for the one level standing between you and a specific unlock, not a general strategy.
• Buying Credits. Possible, and the worst use of it: Credits come back every raid; CAM doesn't.

How to get CAM

• Your edition, once. Standard 300, Advanced 1,300, Deluxe and Elite Squad 5,500. Gaijin has been explicit since September 2025 that edition CAM is "granted only once" and is "not reissued after each wipe": upgrading to a higher edition adds the difference, buying again doesn't refill it.
• The Special Daily. Each day one of your Secondary objectives is flagged as the Special Daily and pays 50 CAM on top of its normal reward. It's the only renewable source, and it's 50 a day.
• Story tasks. 31 of them, 20 CAM each, available at the start of a new game and again after each Monolith reset. That's 620 CAM per run of the ladder, and a fresh timeline is the one time the balance actually grows.

There is no real-money top-up. In Gaijin's words, CAM "cannot be bought with real money, but can be earned by completing special daily raid objectives." If a site is selling it, it's selling access to your account.

What happens on a wipe

Nothing. Unspent CAM and anything you bought with it carry through a self-sacrifice, which is exactly why so many players burned theirs on Monolith levels in the first playtest, assuming it would come back. The advice hasn't changed: safe container first, beacon second, and nothing you could have bought with Credits.

Monolith Tokens

The progression currency. Twelve access levels, Alpha through Mu, and every one of them, plus most of the rewards inside them, is paid for in tokens.

What Monolith Tokens are for

• Access levels. Each level opens more raids, harder contracts, better gear and new recipes. Alpha cost 100 tokens in the early version and the full ladder about 120,000.
• Nodes within a level. Weapon and gear unlocks with their blueprints (20–30 tokens each on the early levels), shelter upgrades such as storage extensions (500), Refiner fuse recipes (50), Body Sleeves. You don't have to buy everything on a level to move up: climb for the access, come back for the nodes you actually want.
• Merits. A full ascent also pays out the Harmonization Cycle currency; see below.

How to get Monolith Tokens

• Primary objectives, 100–200 tokens each. You choose which to accept, at least one has to be active, and some are mandatory: the extraction portal won't open until they're done. The same objective can be repeated in a day, at a reduced reward after the first.
• Secondary objectives, 50 each, accepted automatically and refreshed daily.
• Nexus Battles and Monolith synchronisation contracts.

In the early version a complete sweep of every location's objectives paid up to 14,300 tokens a day, or about 11,000 if you only ran Isolated raids. Nobody does that every day. The point is that the ladder is a weeks-long climb even for a full-time player, and a squad that clears objectives efficiently earns tokens several times faster than one that dies at the first anomaly.

What happens on a wipe

Tokens and your Monolith level reset with a self-sacrifice. That's the point of the reset, which pays a permanent reward in exchange. Pick that reward carefully: there's no undo, and players have already asked for one.

Chronotraces

The crafting currency, and the one that changed most in the run-up to launch. Since the 27 August "250 Shades of Liberty" update there are six kinds (metal, composite, fibre, chemicals, energy and idea), and an item's blueprint asks for the kinds its materials are made of. The old universal Chronotraces were converted into containers you can recycle into the new types.

What Chronotraces are for

• Charging blueprints in the Replicator. Extract an item once and its replication recipe unlocks immediately; to actually print copies you charge the blueprint with Chronotraces, and every blueprint has a replication limit that Chronotraces replenish. Armour plates get 10 charges regardless of rarity; some rare magazines get 5.
• Fusion recipes: instant crafting from components, which now lives on the Replicator rather than the Refiner, with some recipes costing specific chronotrace types.
• Restoring blueprints after a wipe.

How to get Chronotraces

• Dismantling in the Refiner. Anything dismantles, and the mix of types you get is tied to what the item is made of: a rifle pays metal and composite, fabric gear pays fibre. Since 12 September the amount scales with the item's market price, so valuable raid finds are where the real yield is.
• Using gear. In the early version the equipment you used paid a trickle of its own (kills with a weapon, damage soaked by armour), with diminishing returns for repeating the same action in one raid.
• Contracts that reward blueprint access.

Chronotraces get their own specialised stash with far more capacity than general storage, so there's no reason to hold back on refining.

What happens on a wipe

Blueprints and Chronogenes reset with a self-sacrifice; expect to rebuild your Chronotrace stock in the new timeline.

Merits

Not one of the four, but you'll see it in the Monolith: Merits are the Harmonization Cycle currency, spent on that cycle's limited-time offers. As of 12 September a full ascent through Monolith Access Levels 2–12 awards 15,000 Merits, up from 3,500, timed for Harmonization Cycle 2. Treat it as a seasonal bonus for climbing rather than something to farm.

Harvested active matter

The stuff the game is named after isn't a wallet currency. You collect it in the raid, from clusters, from AM-transformed creatures and from other players, and it sits on your watch until you extract, when it converts to Credits. Die with it and it's gone with everything else that wasn't in your safe container. The Scrapyard's "Collect Active Matter" objective asks for five units before you can leave.

Why none of them can be delivered

There is no marketplace or trade window in Active Matter. Gear can be dropped on the ground in a raid, but none of the four currencies ever enters one, so there is no way to hand them over; the only conversions are the two CAM ones above.

So when a site lists "500,000 Credits" the way it lists a stack of orbs in another game, it is describing a transfer the game does not support. There is no trade window to put Credits through. What is actually being sold, under a misleading label, is either somebody logging into your account and playing until the number goes up, or loot dropped to you in a raid that you still have to extract and refine yourself.

That is a real service and we sell it; we just call it what it is. Piloted Farming: our pro plays your account to the target you set. It is against Gaijin's terms, which say an account "may not be shared with or used by any other person" (§3.5), so there is a ban risk. We reduce it where we can (a single named pro, region-matched connection, no purchases, no chat, no friend-list activity, credentials deleted when the ticket closes) and we tell you the risk before you pay rather than after.

If you would rather not take that risk, Squad Carry gets you the same wallet growth more slowly with nobody logging in as you. Most people should start there.

Since launch there are two more shapes of the same play time, and neither is a currency delivery either. A raid clear is one raid on a map or variation you already have, run through and extracted on your account, self-play with our pro in your squad or piloted. An Account Level Boost moves your operative's level, up to 20, and is piloted only. In both cases the wallet moves because the raid happened: harvested Active Matter converts to Credits on extraction, objectives pay Credits and Tokens, and the loot refines. Nothing changes hands. Our boosting guide has the full rundown, including the risk line for the piloted versions.

Figures in this guide: update 0.4.0.84 and the 27 August major update notes; edition contents from Gaijin's store pages; objective and Monolith costs from the community wiki. All subject to change at launch.