Credits & Cosmetics
Credits buy cosmetics and tools for managing an empire you already have. They never grant probes, production or combat strength.
What they buy
- Skins: animated looks for your planets, suns and swarms that everyone can see. Preview them live before buying.
- Particle effects: a modifier layered on top of any skin, changing how its individual particles look: glow or trail.
- Emotes: skull, brain and bomb, on top of the six free ones described below.
- Colour: recolor your empire (50 credits per change). The slider shows colours as they will look in your current Colour vision mode. Under a Colour vision mode other than Default, your colour is shown lighter by an amount that depends on its hue, on your own screen only.
- Reset upgrades: refund all energy spent on tech and reset it to level 0, from the Tech panel (500 credits).
- Command Center: select planets, suns, black holes and bases by condition and apply one action to all of them (150 credits for 30 days, or 10 for a single day).
- CPU regen boost: x2 Command Center CPU regen for 24 hours (20 credits), while the Command Center is rented.
Where they come from
You can buy them in the Customize panel (the palette icon), or earn them three ways:
- Hold a meteorite for its hour: 1 credit.
- Finish each of the five quests: 10 credits apiece, once.
- Invite a player who reaches 1,000 total energy: 100 credits.
Earning works on a guest account, and credits you earn as a guest follow you into the account you sign into. Spending them needs a verified email: on a guest account, buying, recolouring and resetting tech stay disabled, and the button says why.
Credit packs show their price in the currency of your browser's language and region, and in US dollars when there is no match. The pack that gives the most credits for the money carries a Best value tag. From time to time a bonus sale runs: every pack gives extra credits at its normal price, and the panel shows the bonus on each pack together with the time left. Sales start at irregular times and on fixed dates, such as Christmas from 24 December. While one runs, a popup with the same offers opens when you start a session.
Invite links
The Customize panel also holds your invite link, swarm-mmo.com/?ref=CODE. When somebody starts a new account through it and reaches 1,000 total energy, you get 100 credits. There is no limit on how many invites you can be paid for.
Energy comes from owned suns at 1 per sun per minute, so that bar is around 17 hours of holding one. The reward arrives long after the player signs up, and only if they stay. The same panel shows how many people you have invited and how many have paid out.
Emotes
An emote is a small glyph you pin on one of your own bodies: a planet, sun, base, meteorite or black hole. Everyone on the map sees it just above the body for 5 minutes, then it fades out and disappears.
Open the ring of your own planet, sun, base or black hole and choose Emote to pick one. Clicking your own meteorite opens the emote ring directly. The ring offers six free emotes (shield, crossed swords, angry face, laughing face, question mark, exclamation mark) plus any you have bought. A body carries at most one emote at a time; choosing another replaces it and restarts the timer, and Clear takes it off early. You can have up to 10 emotes showing across the map at once, and an emote disappears if the body it is on changes owner or leaves the map.
Three more, skull, brain and bomb, are sold for credits under Emotes in the Customize panel and join the ring once bought.
Naming
Open the ring of your own planet, sun, base or black hole and choose Rename to give it a name, up to 24 characters. Leave the field empty to remove the name. A name is unique across the whole world regardless of case, so "Vega" and "VEGA" can never both exist. Naming needs a verified email, the same as your username. A guest account has no Rename entry.
A name stays with the body when it changes hands by capture or by a gift to a clanmate; only the current owner can change it again. It shows under the body on the map, as a tooltip when the pointer is on it, in the middle of its ring, and in the Focus panel and Command Center lists. A black hole's name also names its galaxy, shown on the galaxy's disk at the most zoomed-out view (see Black Holes). The name disappears with the body: a collapsed galaxy loses every name in it, and a base loses its name when it disappears. Meteorites cannot be named.