Mechanics

Black Ops 3 keeps three separate scorecards, and nothing you earn on one of them can be spent on another. Round points open doors and buy perks but vanish the moment the match ends. Liquid Divinium buys GobbleGums and survives between matches but cannot be farmed at will. Multiplayer XP unlocks guns and gear permanently but has nothing to say about Zombies at all.

Understanding which of the three a given problem belongs to is most of the work. If a wall is closed, that is a points problem. If you keep dying at round twenty with the wrong tools, that may be a Divinium problem. If the gun you want does not appear in the loadout menu, only rank fixes it. This guide takes each currency in turn.

Points, and the fastest way to print them

Points are the currency the whole Zombies mode is priced in, and the pricing is remarkably stable. Perk machines charge the same on every map. The Pack-a-Punch charges 5,000 to upgrade and 2,500 to re-pack. The Mystery Box charges 950 a spin wherever it lands. Only doors and traps are priced per map, and those are the numbers that decide how long your opening minutes take.

The important detail is that damage pays, not just kills. Shooting a zombie two or three times in the torso and then finishing it with your knife pays out considerably more than dropping it with bullets alone, because you collect for every hit and then again for the melee kill. That single habit is the difference between reaching the power switch on round five and reaching it on round eight, and our Zombies perks guide covers it alongside the shortcut that skips the whole economy.

Doors are where maps differ. Kino der Toten asks 4,250 across four doors to reach its lever and Der Eisendrache asks 4,500, while The Giant gets you to its generators for two doors at 700 and a thousand points of debris. Those figures are in the individual map guides, and they are worth checking before you pick a map for a short session.

Liquid Divinium, the currency you cannot rush

Divinium is the odd one out because it is the only currency in the mode you carry between matches, and the only one the game deliberately refuses to hand over on demand. It exists to feed Dr. Monty's Factory, which spins out GobbleGums, and the Mega GobbleGums it produces are strong enough to rewrite a run: one hands you a Pack-a-Punched gun straight off the wall, another can drop a full perk bar in your lap.

There are several ways to acquire vials. You can buy them outright with COD Points, earn them from daily challenges, or pull them at random from the machines and boxes you interact with during a match. Every one of those routes is real, and every one of them has a drop rate low enough to be frustrating. Our Liquid Divinium guide is built around the fastest of them, a solo Zetsubou No Shima loop that returns a vial roughly every five to seven minutes, which works out at about one every seven rounds.

Two rules make that loop work. Do not open doors, because keeping the map small keeps the zombies coming to you, and save your points rather than spending them, because the method depends on repeated machine interactions rather than firepower. It is dull, and it is still the most reliable Divinium income in the game.

XP, the only currency with a ceiling

Multiplayer runs on a fixed ladder of 55 ranks, after which Prestige resets you to the bottom. Level 1 is unusually generous and unlocks four Specialists, three scorestreaks, ten weapons and nine perks in one go, which means your first match already offers most of the shapes a loadout can take. Everything after that arrives one piece at a time.

The XP steps are worth knowing because they are not linear. Early ranks cost a few thousand points each, then the requirement climbs in bands that hold steady for several levels at a time before stepping up again. The level unlocks guide has the full ladder; the table below is the part people usually want, which is when the notable gear turns up.

Where the three economies touch

Strictly speaking they never convert, but two of them lean on each other. GobbleGums are bought with Divinium and spend themselves in points terms, since Perkaholic hands you the entire perk bar you would otherwise have paid tens of thousands of points for, and On the House drops a single free bottle. That is the closest thing to an exchange rate the game has, and it runs one way only.

The other crossover is cosmetic. Kills earned in Zombies unlock their own camo set that you then wear in multiplayer, which is the one place progress made against the undead follows you into a competitive lobby. That set and the rest of the unlock ladder are covered in the camos guide, and the gear you eventually assemble from all this rank progress belongs in the loadouts guide.