In Anthem, there are two kinds of currency available to you: coins and shards. The former is the currency that you earn in-game by completing missions, whereas the latter serves as the game’s version of microtransactions. Luckily, shards can’t be used for anything other than cosmetic purchases, so while spending your hard-earned real-world cash might get you a flashy suit quicker than grinding contracts for hours on end, it won’t afford you any extra power. Everything behind Anthem’s paywall is purely aesthetic.
Some purchases in Anthem can be incredibly expensive, with certain suits costing upwards of 60,000 coins. To put this into perspective, you can expect to earn about 2,000 coins for completing a world event in Freeplay, and slightly more than that for completing missions as part of the game’s main campaign. So saving up for these upper echelon suits can prove to be quite an ordeal, especially given that you’ll want to be spending coins on components prior to each major mission. Luckily, earning coins in Anthem isn’t that difficult, and you can earn a fortune passively by just playing the game.
Campaign
Simply playing through Anthem’s campaign alone will pay you pretty well. For each mission you complete, you’ll receive a plethora of rewards, which will include a large sum of coins that you can spend back in Fort Tarsis and the Launch Bay.
Aside from the ostensible rewards you get at the end of each mission, you’ll likely be able to earn coins while you’re out exploring too. At the moment, bosses and chests can drop sums of up to 2,000 coins, although this has fluctuated somewhat over the course of Anthem’s various demos and the full game now. As it stands though, it seems that you can get monetary drops from bosses and chests, but while the chests respawn on later missions, they won’t contain coins a second time.
Challenges
You can also complete challenges while you’re on the job. Anthem has a whole range of in-game challenges that you can view from the menu, which encompass all kinds of feats for Freelancers to complete. You’ll be compensated well for your time completing challenges tied to weapons, exploration, javelins, and seven other challenge types. It’s probably a good idea to regularly check your challenge progress, as that way you can knock out the ones you’re close to completing every time you’re out on a mission.
Each challenge returns around 2,000 coins on average, so stockpiling near-completed challenges can be a good way of taking in large amounts of coin in one go. If you have several that are on the verge of being completed, you could be in for a major payday when you get back to Fort Tarsis.
Daily/weekly/monthly trials
Similar to challenges, but a little different. In Fort Tarsis, you’ll encounter an NPC named Lucky Jak, who hangs out by a table full of hourglasses. Here you can view daily, weekly, and monthly trials, all of which will reward you with varying degrees of coin based on difficulty, time to complete, and type of trial. Obviously daily trials offer the lowest rewards of the three, but they’re also the easiest to complete.
Weekly trials are more lucrative, but often take longer and are only refreshed on a weekly basis. While daily trials might only require you to accomplish a single feat, weekly ones can involve completing a series of consecutive missions. Monthly trials don’t actually return coins - so far, anyway - and reward you with rare materials instead. Aside from visiting Lucky Jak, you can also access these trials through the Challenges tab mentioned above by viewing the section titled “Path of Glory.”
Contracts
Although story missions pay you for your time, you can also take on optional contracts. Like contracts in many other games, these focus on side-quest style missions that will have you do something that isn’t central to the game’s plot, but helps with worldbuilding - and nets you some nice rewards to boot.
Contracts are short and sweet, and on lower difficulties they’re a breeze to complete.The payouts vary, but they often amount to several thousand coins. If you’re stuck for cash, collecting some contracts is definitely a good shout.
Alliance system
As a multiplayer game, Anthem really does reward cooperation. When you go out on missions, you’ll play with three other Freelancers, all of whom are working together towards the same goal as you - on a story mission, at least. Anthem wants you to befriend these players so that you can party up regularly, which is why the Alliance System was implemented.
The Alliance System will award you a certain amount of coins every week based on how much you and your top five friends have been playing, also taking your current Alliance levels into account. If you haven’t made any friends yet, don’t worry; instead, it will just take your top five recent players into account and you’ll still earn yourself some coins. The final multiplier applied to your earnings is your Friend Bonus, which is determined by the amount of time you and your friends have been putting into Anthem. This multiplier maxes out at 5x.
When you and your top five friends are all about Alliance level 10, you’ll be able to earn almost 4,000 coins a week completely passively. It might not seem like much, but given that it’s a surefire way of earning cash without spending any of your real-world money, it’s nothing to scoff at.
What do I even need coins for?
So, now you know how to make a few coins, you’ll probably need to know what you should be spending it on. To reiterate, microtransactions can only be spent on cosmetics, so you don’t need to worry about losing out on the best weapons because other people are pumping more real-world money into the game than you.
You can buy all sorts of customizables in Anthem, including suits, emotes, and all manner of other cosmetics, as well as components and materials necessary for crafting - provided you’ve got the blueprints for what you’re planning on making. You can also get some neat paints, armor packs, and vinyls, which is why you’ve likely seen stealth Interceptors flying around, all Iron Man-esque, in illuminous yellow suits. It’s very fun to experiment with how your Javelin looks.
How much can I expect to earn per week?
Finally, with everything above on board, it’s a good idea to break down what exactly you can earn in Anthem on a weekly basis. Bear in mind, this breakdown doesn’t include single-use challenges or story missions, opting instead to focus on the things that you can do to earn money every week.
From daily trials, you can expect about 1,500 coins per day, which amounts to 10,500 a week. Four weekly trials at 2,000 each amounts to 8,000, and the maximum Alliance System bonus caps out at about 3,625 coins. All in all, that’s 22,125 coins a week, not including contracts, challenges, story missions, or roaming Freeplay in search of world events and boss/chest drops. So you can earn a lot in Anthem, and it looks like you’re going to be able to keep doing so for the foreseeable future.
If that 60k suit is calling your name, don’t be a miser. Three weeks of vigilant freelancing and you’ll have enough for another one in no time!
