Coin

Coins are the currency of Weyard, the setting of the Golden Sun series. These are individual units of gold that are amassed both by characters in the party and, evidently, by the enemies they fight. Like in most other RPGs, coins are used to buy items in the various vendors around the world, stay at Inns, receive the services of Healers at Sanctums, and other functions such as wagering coins in gambling minigames in the first two games only. In every Golden Sun game so far, the amount of coins the player can amass is capped at 999,999, though this is very difficult to reach even with endgame-stage grinding methods.

Obtaining coins

Some methods of getting coins are vastly more effective than others:

• Battle: All enemies and bosses in the series, except for the final bosses, drop coins when they are defeated, with larger coin yields occuring with stronger random enemies later in each game. This is the standard means by which the party's coin stockpile rises throughout a given game because random battles occur both unavoidably and without limit. Bosses naturally give much higher coin payouts to correspond with their difficulty.
• Selling items: The other "primary" means of amassing coins is to sell unneeded Equipment (or other items), which encompasses all non-key items. All items can be sold by the party for a rather generous 75% (3/4) of their assigned purchase values (rounded down to avoid decimals), meaning that finding high-value artifacts in dungeons indirectly adds a good deal to the party's "latent wealth." It also means that, in the long term, the player only actually "loses" one quarter of the coins they put up when purchasing equipment; when buying a 1000-coin Broad Sword early in any of the games, for example, it can be sold back for 750 coins once a better weapon is found to replace it, so it will only have truly "cost" 250 coins to use a Broad Sword during that stage of the game.
• Treasure chests: Most treasure chests scattered throughout dungeons and, in some cases, towns and settlements contain items or equipment that, like mentioned above, will sell highly once no longer needed. Some chests contain varying amounts of coins as well, though these are usually not very high amounts.
• Hidden in settlements: Both items and coins are hidden in the various boxes, jars, and crates scattered throughout many settlements. The Reveal Psynergy in the first two games shows sparkling graphics over any objects that hold something. These objects rarely contain valuable Artifacts and often contain either minor consumable items or small handfuls of coins.
• Scooping: In The Lost Age only, every time the Scoop Psynergy is cast on a tile of dirty, grassy, sandy, or snowy land that does not contain any predefined items, the player has a small chance of retrieving a very small handful of coins.
• Looking into shallow water: In The Lost Age only, when sailing over any piece of shallow (light blue) water on the world map, pressing A will cause a text box to appear that will rarely turn out to be a bounty of a few coins.
• Gambling: The Lucky Dice and Super Lucky Dice minigames in the first two titles allow for coins to be bet in environments where potentially vast coin payouts can rarely happen. The Lucky Medal Fountains in these same games, Tolbi Spring and Lemuria Spring, also offer a function where tossing in a single coin will sometimes win you 20 coins back, though this is usually ignored because the loads of Artifacts that can be won instead by tossing in Lucky Medals can be sold for vastly higher quantities of coins.

Uses for coins

• Buying Items and Equipment from vendors.
• Staying at an Inn.
• Using a Sanctum's services.
• Paying Sunshine to make items (The Lost Age only)
• Paying the Fortune Teller at Naribwe (The Lost Age only)
• Playing Lucky Dice or Super Lucky Dice (Golden Sun and The Lost Age only)