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Earning Gold
As you spend hours building, you earn gold. Gold is the only spendable currency: it lands in your balance when your project is reviewed and approved, and you spend it in the shop. How much gold per hour you earn depends on your project's complexity level.
Each project is also assigned a fruit based on its type (software or hardware) and level. Fruits aren't a separate currency, just a tier badge tied to the project. Your lifetime fruit count lives on the currency guide as a historical record of what you've built.
Gold per hour by level
| Level | Label | Gold per hour |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beginner | 40 |
| 2 | Intermediate | 45 |
| 3 | Advanced | 50 |
| 4 | Expert | 60 |
Harder projects earn slightly more per hour. The level is set when you create a project and a reviewer can adjust it at approval time if the complexity doesn't match.
Project fruits (decorative)
Eight fruits, split between software and hardware:
Software
| Fruit | Level |
|---|---|
| Mango | 1 |
| Pineapple | 2 |
| Papaya | 3 |
| Cocoa | 4 |
Hardware
| Fruit | Level |
|---|---|
| Guava | 1 |
| Coconut | 2 |
| Watermelon | 3 |
| Avocado | 4 |
The fruit doesn't change the gold you earn, it just tells you and the reviewer what tier the project sits at. Your Mango: 124 lifetime stat means "this account has earned the equivalent of 124 mangos" across every L1 software ship you've ever approved.
Starfruit and extra fruity ships
Some shop items are gated behind a one-time starfruit unlock. You can spot them by the small starfruit badge on the item card. They're items we'd otherwise pull from the shop, the kind people would farm by churning out low-effort projects, so we put them behind a quality wall instead.
Earning a starfruit
When a reviewer approves your ship, they can check a small "extra fruity" box above their justification. If they do, you get 1 starfruit in addition to your normal gold. The starfruit lands in your balance immediately, including for hardware projects (it's not part of the pending-fruit / build-complete mechanic).
The flag is per ship, not per project. Every ship you submit is its own opportunity, including update ships on a project you've already shipped. Reviewers only mark exceptional builds, so most ships won't earn one, and you'll never lose progress on the gold path for not getting one.
Once any ship on a project has been marked extra fruity, the project carries a public "Extra Fruity" badge on its page and the Explore card. The badge is sticky: a later non-extra-fruity ship doesn't clear it.
Spending a starfruit
Spending 1 starfruit on a locked shop item unlocks it for you. After the unlock the item works like any other: you still need the normal gold (or fruit) price to actually buy it. Unlocks are one-time per item, you don't pay starfruit again to re-buy that same item, and the unlock sticks even if the admin later edits the item.
Starfruit only does this one thing. You can't convert it to gold, you can't trade it, and you don't lose it if you don't spend it. It's just a token sitting on your account until you find a locked item worth opening up.
The streak system
Showing up consistently earns more than one big burst. Every project tracks its own project streak, the number of days in a row you've put real work into that specific plant.
What the streak does
Project streak drives the plant stage on your farm: seedling, sprout, leafy, fruiting.
Every project streak day adds +1% to the gold you earn when you ship. Ten days = 1.10×.
Plant growth
Each tile's plant stage comes straight from the project streak:
| Project streak | Stage |
|---|---|
| 1-2 days | Seedling |
| 3-5 days | Sprout |
| 6-9 days | Leafy |
| 10+ days | Fruiting |
The stage is cosmetic for now, but it's the fastest way to see at a glance which projects you've been consistent on.
Ship bonus
When you ship a project, its gold reward is multiplied by 1 + (project streak days × 0.01). A 10-day streak = 1.10× gold, a 30-day streak = 1.30× gold, and so on. The multiplier is snapshotted at ship time, so racking up a long streak before submitting is worth it.
Keeping it alive
Miss a day on a project and that project's streak resets to 1, dropping its plant back to stage 1. Other projects you keep working on are unaffected, each plant lives on its own clock.
Project streak (per-plant) ticks forward today when, on that specific project, your Hackatime time and your journal hours add up to at least 1 hour for the day. The two stack:
- Hackatime on this project counts. The time has to land on this project, not spread across others.
- The hours you log on journals posted today count too. When you post a journal you record how long you worked, and those hours add to your Hackatime for the day. So you can clear the hour with Hackatime alone, with journal hours alone, or a mix (for example: 30 min of Hackatime plus a journal logging 30 min). This is how hardware projects, or coding outside Hackatime, keep a streak alive.
A journal with 0 logged hours doesn't protect the streak on its own when you have under an hour of Hackatime that day. A streak day needs 1 hour total (Hackatime plus journal time).
Streak freezes (buy in the shop) auto-spend if you miss a day on a project, protecting that project's streak. One freeze covers one missed day on one project. You can stash up to 5 at a time.
A streak day runs midnight to midnight in your local time. Work logged after midnight counts toward the new streak day. Your reminder fires X hours before that local boundary (see your settings for the exact value). Travelers: update your timezone on your account settings if it changes, so the streak rolls when you expect it to.
Archiving a journal on the same day you created it counts as taking it back, and removes its logged hours from today's total. If that drops your combined Hackatime plus journal time on the project back under 1 hour, the streak ticks back down. Restoring it that same day re-extends the streak.
Each project's streak is "days in a row I worked on this plant." Two projects can sit at very different streak lengths even if you've shipped both, since each plant is counted independently.
Pending hardware gold
Hardware projects gate their gold reward behind a build-complete ship. When a non-build-complete hardware ship is approved, the gold is recorded but pending: it doesn't count toward your balance and you can't spend it. Submit a follow-up ship marked "build complete" on the same project and every pending row unlocks atomically. The pending amount shows on your profile so you know what's at stake.
Your project fruit is assigned automatically based on whether it's software or hardware and what level it's rated at. You don't get to pick your fruit, but harder projects earn more gold per hour.