Aetherium Crystals - Black Ops Cold War Zombies

Black Ops Cold War Zombies comes with a new currency known as Aetherium Crystals that are basically the new micro transactions. Behaving in a similar way to Liquid Divinium in Black Ops 3, Aetherium Crystals have a variety of uses including allowing players to upgrade their perks and weapons.

If you remember back to Black Ops 3, the currency was used solely to purchase new Gobblegums from the Dr Monty machine. There was no guarantee that spinning the slot machine was going to offer a particular Gobblegum, but the more currency you had for each spin, the greater your chances of earning extremely rare gums.

How do we know this information about Aetherium Crystals? Thanks to a leak from the Cold War Beta we have a dump of code strings with references to particular names. We don't have full access to the code of course, but the strings themselves contain massive clues to their meaning. Contained in the list of Maxis intel (zm_intel_stat_list_maxis), there were several references to round milestones and rewards for reaching those rounds.

How do you get Aetherium Crystals

Aetherium Crystals are a reward for achieving certain feats in Cold War Zombies. These can include reaching certain round milestones e.g. reaching round 10, round 20, round 50. Other challenges also reward Aetherium Crystals such as using a particular weapon type (MG, Assault Rifle, Shotgun) to get kills. There are also Calling Cards, Intel and Daily Challenges in Cold War Zombies that give players rewards for completing challenges in a variety of ways.

Since the currency is also a micro transaction, players can also buy Aetherium Crystals using real money through their platform of choice. Buying crystals is a shortcut to upgrading to the best weapons and perks in the game.

Flawless Aetherium Crystals

What's also particularly interesting from the leak is that crystals come in two varieties; Raw Aetherium Crystals and Flawless Aetherium Crystals. Given the name, it's clear that the Flawless variety are rewards for reaching particular round milestones without going down and having to be self revived or revived by one of your teammates.

Whilst SOLO players can purchase the Quick Revive perk to auto revive, and whilst playing in a group gives you the added benefit of other players covering your back, the flawless crystals are reserved for the perfectionists. Reaching the highest rounds without going down is going to require good skill and knowledge of the map.

Flawless crystals also offer certain benefits over the regular varieties with some purchases requiring the Flawless variety instead of Raw.

What can you buy with Aetherium Crystals

We know that players have a lot more upgrade options in Cold War Zombies. This includes upgrading your weapons and even perks. In combination with Salvage (another collectible item), Aetherium Crystals are the currency to upgrade your weapons to higher tiered versions.

As you may know, weapons come in different tiers in Cold War Zombies, meaning that certain varieties are better than others. Each weapon has a colour coding and tier name, with the higher tiers offering the best stats, attachments and features. Just think about other modern FPS games, even Fortnite that lets players collect weapons of different varieties. In Cold War, these weapons, and their upgraded stats, will stay with you permanently rather than requiring you to collect them again each game.