Stardust
A rare second currency, worth 100,000 gold apiece. You cannot grind it reliably — it falls from elites, bosses, huge combos and mastery ranks — and it quietly evaporates while you are not playing.
What it is worth
One Stardust is pegged at 100,000 gold. It has its own pale-blue readout in the upper left, beside your coins, and a +N Stardust float whenever one drops.
100,000 gold. It has its own pale-blue readout in the upper left, beside your coins, and a +N Stardust float whenever one drops.That peg is what makes it feel rare rather than fiddly: a single drop is worth more than most things you can buy outright, and a run that produces two or three of them was a genuinely good run.
Where it comes from
| Source | Chance | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Boss kill | 5% | The most dependable source, since a full run has twenty bosses in it. |
| Elite kill | 2% | Elites are about 4% of wave spawns from wave 4, so this is the slow trickle. |
| Song-end combo | Guaranteed | End a song on a 120+ beat combo and it pays exactly 1. Nothing below 120 pays anything. |
| Mastery rank | Guaranteed | 3 per rank gained on any ship — 18 for taking one from Rookie to Master, which happens inside its first full run. |
The Elite Hunt challenge modifier doubles both the boss and elite chances, to 10% and 4%, on top of putting far more elites in the arena. It is the only way to deliberately farm Stardust.
Drops are rolled per enemy in a way that is identical for every player in a co-op room, so nobody sees a different arena.
It decays while you are away
Stardust drains at 1 per hour while you are not playing. The clock runs on your idle time, not the wall clock of the game — playing keeps it topped up, and closing the app for two days costs you 48.
This is the one currency in PewBeat you can lose by doing nothing. Since it is also the one that buys premium ships, the right move is to spend it as it arrives rather than saving toward something distant — a 6-Stardust ship bought today is worth more than nine banked Stardust next week.
Spending it
Stardust is an alternative way to unlock premium ships in the Shop. A ship’s Stardust price is simply its gold price converted at the standard rate:
ceil(gold price ÷ 100,000), never less than 1.
Because premium ship prices escalate as you buy more of them, so does the Stardust price — the two currencies stay in step rather than one becoming a shortcut around the other.