Railborn Motes: Currency, Vaults and the Tech Tree

What motes are

Motes are the currency used to upgrade your technology tree. You can find some in the world, but the majority are harvested from plants you grow. As the game progresses, rarer plants produce more valued motes, which is why the developers frame motes as your reward for saving the ecosystem.

Mote vaults rebuild biomes

Depositing motes into the corresponding mote vault starts rebuilding that biome. The official example: collect Forest motes and your Forest biome grows, which unlocks technology items. Vaults tie the currency loop directly to the ecosystem-rebuilding theme of the game.

Biomes grow on your train

Motes come from biomes, and biomes are grown on train cars. Every biome starts with a simple plot. You sow mote-producing seeds found in the world, and other ecological elements influence the output and growth of your crops. As you add more crops of a specific biome, a natural train-car biome starts to emerge.

Plant synergies and the maturity system

What you put in a plot matters. The official example pairs four Common Lilly with a Coral Buff that speeds up overall mote growth by 10%. Most mote-producing plants also have maturity levels tied to bonus output: a higher-quality starred mote, or buffs such as a plot needing less water. Reaching higher maturity needs extra environment factors, like cover, a heater, or even a rock inside the plot. The Common Lilly needs cover to reach its second maturity level.

What is not confirmed yet

• Full plant list, mote values and vault counts in numbers.
• Whether biome types beyond named examples exist, and how many.
• How maturity interacts with weather or train systems.

Motes sit inside the farming loop covered on the plants page, and spending them shapes your build like the modules on the train building page. The system pairs naturally with the Nexus, and release timing lives on the release date page.