Resources

There are four types of Resources in Clash of Clans. They are Gems, Elixir, Gold, and Dark Elixir.

Green Gems
Green Gems are the premium resource or currency of Clash of Clans.

You can purchase 500 Green Gems for $4.99, which makes one Gem's value about the same as the real world US cent, and 100 Gems is similar in value to the US dollar bill. However purchasing multiple packs of 500 Gems at once is not efficient. You can instead purchase larger packs of Gems for more money, and the larger packs have a better money to gem ratio, as shown in the table below.

Elixir
Elixir is the main resource that is used for creating and upgrading your army. It is also used to upgrade your Dark Elixir Storage and Dark Elixir Drills.

Dark Elixir


Dark Elixir is a special resource which you can store in the Dark Elixir Storage, which is unlocked at Town Hall level seven. Dark Elixir is more valuable than regular Elixir, as one unit of it costs the same amount of Gems as 100 Elixir. 10,000 Dark Elixir costs the same amount of Gems as one million Elixir, which amounts to 600 Gems.

However, Dark Elixir is not the same as regular Elixir, instead Dark Elixir is used for upgrading the Barbarian King and Archer Queen and to train and upgrade Dark Barracks troops.

Dark Elixir is hard to obtain, but if you farm properly you will steal large amounts of Dark Elixir in a few raids. To aid in obtaining enough of the rare resource you can purchase Dark Elixir Drills at Town Hall level seven or higher to generate your own Dark Elixir slowly. You can place one Drill at level seven, another at level eight, and a third at level ten. You can upgrade them to generate and store even more Dark Elixir. Upgrading it solves the problem of remembering to come back to Clash of Clans every five hours or have it jam up and wasting the Dark Elixir.