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v1.0 · checked 2026-09-18
Luxury resources
The short answer
Luxury resources exist, they are collected from tiles on the map, and they are spent on boosters — empire-wide effects you activate by paying a quantity of a given luxury. They also convert readily into cash: the most consistent piece of community advice about them is that they are an excellent way to raise Dust when you need it.
The reason this page exists at all is that the cost side of that system changed during Early Access and was not documented publicly afterwards.
Luxury versus strategic
| Luxury resources | Strategic resources | |
|---|---|---|
| What they are | A resource class you collect from map tiles and spend on empire-wide boosters | A second resource class the stores explicitly name alongside luxuries |
| Where they turn up | On tiles, in regions you control or want | Same map layer, different resource sites |
| How you find them | Strategic map view shows resource sites as their own icons; the camp focus view highlights buildable resource tiles specifically | Same interface problem, same views |
Community players have found the interface for both classes harder to read than it should be, and the notes they share are interface notes rather than mechanics notes: the city district view does not visually separate resource tiles from ordinary buildable tiles, the camp focus view does, the strategic map does give resource sites their own icons, and luxury icons in particular are faint enough to miss against some terrain. That is a usability description from players, not an official one.
What actually happened to booster costs
This is the part that makes online advice unreliable, so it is worth setting out carefully and with the limits marked.
- The old model, as players describe it: activating a booster cost a flat 10 of the relevant luxury, per city, regardless of the city's size. Under that model a player with a broad stock could keep several boosters running more or less continuously.
- The new model, as players describe it: the cost is calculated differently, and it scales upward to the point where a player holding 100–200 of the early-game luxuries and double-digit amounts of the later ones still faced an activation cost in the hundreds. In one widely-read report from January 2026 the displayed activation cost was 455, against a stock the player considered ample, and the same player had been able to activate a booster only once — at the very start, with a single city.
- Why it may have changed, as players theorise: the flat per-city cost interacted oddly with a faction that can only ever hold one city, because that faction could keep boosters permanently active. Players suspect this is the reason for the change, and they also report that the replacement was not balanced against the wider roster.
- What the studio said, officially: a developer responded in that same thread that the team is taking notes for the balancing of luxury resources and will look at the city-cap question, adding that it would be nice if the cap could vary with map size but that this may not be feasible. That is an acknowledgement, not a specification. No replacement cost formula has been published.
Everything in the three bullets above is a player report from the Early Access period, and it is graded Community and marked superseded. The only first-party statement in the whole matter is the acknowledgement that balancing is being looked at.
So what should you actually do?
Given that no official formula exists, the honest guidance is about method rather than numbers:
- Treat any specific activation cost you read online as obsolete, including the numbers on this page. They are attached to a build and a faction and a date.
- Check your own activation cost in-game before committing stock to it, because that is the only authoritative number for your situation.
- Keep a Dust reserve in mind as the alternative use. Selling luxury stock for Dust is the use players describe as consistently worth it, and it does not depend on the booster formula at all.
- If you are playing the single-city faction, read your own city-cap and booster interaction first, since that interaction is the one players believe drove the change.
- Do not plan an economy around boosters until you have seen your own numbers, because the current cost is a moving target while the studio balances it.
What is not published
The current booster cost formula, the per-resource thresholds, whether the cost scales with city count or city size, and whether it varies by game speed. All four are unstated as of the check date.
Sources read for this page
Every source this page was written from, checked 2026-09-18.
- Steam discussion — luxury resources / booster cost
- Reddit — is there a way to see luxuries and strategic resources
- PlayStation Store listing
- Xbox Store listing