The UEFN Creator's Field Guide to In-Game Economies

Why most UEFN economies break in week two

The thing that kills creator maps isn't bad combat or weak art. It's an economy that feels great in playtest with five people and collapses the second a thousand strangers play it for an hour. By session three, the top players have hoarded so much currency that nothing in your shop matters. By day five, new players see the gap, bounce off, and the map's retention curve quietly flatlines.

Economies break for boring, reproducible reasons: the faucet rate outpaces the sink rate, the time-to-progress curve flattens too fast, or the secondary currency never finds a real role and becomes inert. The good news is that all three are measurable, and all three can be tuned before launch if you treat your economy as a system instead of a vibe.

This guide walks through the model we use when we build for UEFN: how to lay out faucets and sinks with real numbers, how to layer currencies so each one earns its keep, how to detect inflation before it strangles your map, and how to validate the whole thing in the Mapwright simulator before live players ever touch it.

The core loop, stated as math

A UEFN economy is just a directed graph of resources. Players perform an action, the action emits a resource into their wallet, and the wallet drains when the player exchanges that resource for an upgrade, cosmetic, consumable, or unlock. Tighten that into one sentence:

A healthy economy emits resources at a rate that lets a median player feel meaningful progress every session, while draining those resources fast enough that the wallet never trivializes the next decision.

Two numbers control everything: the emission rate (E, currency per minute of play) and the drain rate (D, currency per minute that the player chooses to spend). When E > D for too long, you have inflation. When D > E, you have a frustration spiral. The interesting design space is the gap between them and how it changes with player tenure.

Concretely, a session-one player should see something like E ≈ 1.2 × D_short, where D_short is the price of the cheapest meaningful upgrade. By session ten, that ratio should be closer to 1.05 × D_long, with D_long being a long-arc goal like a prestige tier or a top-shelf cosmetic. The exact numbers depend on your mode, but the shape matters: emission and drain should converge as players advance, not diverge.

Faucets: where currency comes from

A faucet (also called a source) is any rule that mints currency into a player's wallet. Most maps over-rely on one or two faucets, which is what causes the median-vs-top-player divergence. The fix is to spread emission across faucet types that fire at different cadences and require different inputs.

Useful faucet categories:

Activity faucets reward in-the-moment actions: completing a round, scoring a goal, surviving a wave. They emit fast and reward skill or focus. These dominate session-one earnings and should make up roughly 50–65% of total emission for a new player.

Progress faucets reward longer arcs: clearing a chapter, hitting a leaderboard tier, finishing a daily set. They emit slower but in chunkier amounts, and they're the lever you use to pull medium-tenure players forward.

Cadence faucets reward presence: a daily login bonus, a returning-session multiplier, a weekly streak. They flatten the gap between casual and core players, and they're disproportionately important for D7 retention.

Social faucets reward bringing or keeping other people in the map: a small bonus for a full party, a referral assist, a team-objective payout. They cost you almost nothing to add and do real work for organic discovery.

A common mistake is to make faucets purely additive. The result is that a no-life player earns 10x what a casual player earns and the economy bifurcates. Better is to give each faucet a soft cap per session so that the eighth round of the day pays a fraction of the first. Players still feel the reward, but the per-minute emission for a marathon session compresses toward the median.

Sinks: where currency goes to die

A sink is any rule that removes currency from the economy. Sinks are the unsexy half of the design and they are almost always under-built. If you only have one sink (an upgrade store), every player will eventually max out, the store will go inert, and you've created a wallet with nothing to do.

Layer your sinks so that wallet pressure stays alive across the whole tenure curve:

Functional sinks unlock or improve player capability: weapons, gear, abilities, vehicle skins that affect handling. These dominate early spend and tie directly into the moment-to-moment loop.

Cosmetic sinks are pure self-expression: skins, emotes, name colors, banner trails. They don't gate gameplay so they don't risk pay-to-win perception, but they're the workhorse of long-tenure spend because they never run out of new variants to ship.

Consumable sinks drain currency permanently and on a per-attempt basis: a one-shot revive, a temporary multiplier, a gambling-adjacent loot pull. Consumables are the strongest lever you have against hoarding, and they should make up at least 20–30% of total drain for active players.

Service sinks charge currency for resets, retries, or convenience: re-rolling a build, fast-forwarding a cooldown, paying for an off-cycle round. They're the safety valve when emission unexpectedly outpaces functional and cosmetic spend.

Two design rules for sinks that are easy to miss:

The cheapest meaningful sink should always be roughly one session of play away. If a new player sees no purchase that feels reachable in their first 15 minutes, the wallet stops being motivating and becomes a number on the screen.

The most expensive sink should be visible but not yet purchasable. Aspirational items keep mid-tenure players engaged in a way that "everything is buyable today" never can. The aspirational item is the lighthouse, not the dock.

Dual-currency design done right

Most polished UEFN maps run on at least two currencies, and good ones use that split deliberately. The classic pattern is a soft currency earned through play and a hard currency that's either rare, gated, or buyable. Each currency should have a clear job.

A model that works well in practice:

Soft currency funds the moment-to-moment loop. It's high-emission, high-drain, and most of the player's session-to-session decision-making lives here. Functional upgrades, consumables, and service sinks should accept soft currency.

Hard currency funds identity and aspiration. It's low-emission, slow-drain, and reserved for cosmetics, prestige, and gated unlocks. Players should always feel slightly short of a hard-currency goal, because the gap is where motivation lives.

Where this goes wrong: when soft and hard currency become freely convertible at a static exchange rate. The instant a player can grind soft currency into hard currency, the hard tier collapses into a tax on time and the entire identity layer flattens. If you want a conversion path, make it one-way (hard buys soft, never the reverse), gated (a weekly cap on conversions), or expensive enough that it's a last resort, not a strategy.

A second subtle failure: hard currency that's only purchasable. That signals pay-to-win to a Fortnite audience that is unusually allergic to it. Always emit a small drip of hard currency through play (a chapter completion, a top-3 weekly leaderboard, a rare drop) so the player knows it's earnable, even if most of it gets purchased.

Inflation: the silent map killer

Inflation in a UEFN economy looks like this: the median wallet balance grows session over session faster than the most expensive sink. After a while, the most expensive sink isn't expensive anymore. After a little longer, every sink feels trivial and the player has nothing left to want.

Three signals that inflation is starting:

Median wallet trending up across sessions when it should plateau. Healthy wallets oscillate around a steady-state value as players earn and spend in roughly equal measure. A monotonic upward trend means emission is outpacing drain.

Top-decile players completing the cosmetic tier in under a week. If the players who play most are also the players with nothing left to buy, your cosmetic ladder is too short or too cheap relative to your faucet rates.

Returning-session spend dropping while session count rises. A returning player who used to spend on every login and now spends on one in five is telling you the wallet has lost its narrative pull.

Anti-inflation tactics, in roughly the order you should reach for them:

Tighten the soft cap on activity faucets. This is the cheapest and least disruptive lever because it only affects marathon players.

Add a recurring sink. A weekly seasonal bundle, a cosmetic rotation, or a consumable players want to top up creates ongoing drain without changing the pricing of existing items.

Introduce a rare drop with a hard-currency unlock. This puts the burn back on hard currency without requiring a price increase elsewhere.

Re-price the top of the catalog. This is a last resort because it feels punitive to existing holders. If you do it, only re-price new items and keep historical purchases stable.

What to almost never do: a global currency wipe or a retroactive price increase. Both feel like theft to players, and both will show up immediately in your D1 retention as a step function down.

The pacing curve: making session N feel different from session 1

A flat economy is a boring economy. A player whose tenth session feels exactly like their first will churn around session twelve, because there's no narrative of progress. The pacing curve is the deliberate shape of how quickly currency, capability, and aspirations grow over tenure.

Think of pacing in three bands:

Sessions 1–3 (onboarding): Emission is generous, sinks are abundant and cheap, and the player should be making a meaningful purchase every session. Goal: install the loop and prove the wallet matters.

Sessions 4–12 (early mastery): Emission tightens, sinks get more expensive and more diverse, and the player starts to choose between competing purchases. Goal: introduce trade-offs and reveal the second-tier cosmetics.

Sessions 13+ (mastery): Emission flattens, sinks lean into prestige and identity, and aspirational purchases dominate. Goal: keep the lighthouse visible without ever quite letting the player reach the last island.

A useful rule of thumb: by session 12, a median player should have unlocked roughly 60–70% of the functional catalog and 20–30% of the cosmetic catalog. The remaining 70–80% of cosmetic depth is what carries them past session 30.

Dailies, weeklies, and the shape of attention

Dailies and weeklies are not really economy mechanics. They are attention mechanics that route currency. The currency they emit is a side effect of the real job, which is to give the player a reason to come back tomorrow.

What makes a daily set work:

Three to five tasks, completable in 15–25 minutes. More than that and the daily becomes a chore; fewer and it doesn't feel like a session.

One easy, one medium, one stretch. The easy one guarantees the dopamine hit, the medium one makes the session feel substantive, and the stretch one creates a pull toward your skill systems.

A small bonus for completing the full set. A modest "all clear" payout converts a satisfying session into a habitual one.

Weeklies should pay roughly 4–6x a single daily and almost always emit a small amount of hard currency. They are also the right place to introduce seasonal narrative: a weekly that ties into a current event, a limited-time mode, or a story beat keeps the map feeling alive without requiring permanent content additions.

A pattern to avoid: weeklies that can be 100% completed by a single high-skill burst on day one. The point of a weekly is to spread engagement across the week, so structure tasks that require different sessions (for example, "play five different rounds" or "complete on three different days") rather than a single grind.

Pressure-testing the economy before you publish

The hardest thing about economy design is that you can't really feel it from a single playtest. Five friends playing for 20 minutes will not surface the inflation you'd see at session 50 with a thousand players. The only way to find those failures cheaply is to simulate.

A useful simulation does three things:

Generates synthetic player profiles along the tenure curve: a session-one player, a session-five, a session-twenty, with realistic differences in skill, time-on-task, and purchase preferences.

Replays your faucet and sink rules against those profiles for hundreds of synthetic sessions, tracking the wallet trajectory, the sink-completion curve, and the time-to-aspirational metric.

Surfaces the failure modes as plots: a divergent emission curve, a flattening sink curve, a gap between top-decile and median that grows past 3x.

This is exactly what Mapwright's economy simulator does. You declare your faucets, sinks, prices, and caps in your project, generate synthetic sessions, and read the resulting curves before you ship a single change. When the curves are wrong, you iterate on the rules, not on the live audience.

A practical workflow we recommend:

Define the faucet table, sink table, and pacing bands in your project file.

Run a 1,000-session simulation across three player archetypes.

Look first at the median wallet trajectory across sessions 1, 5, 12, and 20. If it's monotonically rising past session 10, tighten emission.

Then look at the sink completion curve. If the top decile clears the cosmetic catalog by session 8, the catalog is too short or too cheap.

Finally look at the time-to-first-purchase for your session-one profile. If it's longer than 12 minutes, your cheapest sink is too expensive or your activity faucet is too slow.

Iterate until the curves look right at the simulator level, then ship to a closed playtest, then ship public. Every loop you save in the simulator saves a hundred loops in the live data.

A short checklist before publish

Soft and hard currency each have a clearly stated job.

At least four faucet types are emitting, with soft caps on the activity faucet.

At least three sink categories are present (functional, cosmetic, consumable at minimum).

The cheapest meaningful sink is reachable in 12–15 minutes for a session-one player.

The most expensive sink is visible but takes 15+ sessions of focused play to reach.

Median wallet trajectory across simulated sessions plateaus, not climbs.

Top-decile sink completion is below 60% by session 8.

Daily and weekly tasks are structured to spread engagement across days, not bursts.

Hard currency is earnable in small amounts through play, not gated entirely behind purchase.

If you can tick those nine boxes and your simulator curves look healthy, you have an economy that will hold up past week two. Everything else in your map (combat, art, narrative, mechanics) gets to do its job without an inflation problem strangling it from underneath.

The economy is the spine. Build it deliberately and the rest of the map gets to breathe.

Related reading

New to UEFN entirely? Start with Day One: From empty editor to a playable island and the first Verse script walkthrough.

For the language used here (sources, sinks, currency, retention), the Mapwright glossary has plain-English definitions for every term.

Pair this with our retention engineering guide to design progression that compounds, and the Verse performance patterns so your economy code holds up under real player counts.

Pressure-test the model before you ship in the Mapwright economy simulator.