Injustice: Gods Among Us Mobile explains almost none of its own vocabulary. Shards arrive with no note on which kind they are. Breakpoints are never mentioned despite deciding most of your gear value. Players talk about gates, tag-ins, and Metal tiers as though everyone was issued the same dictionary.
This is that dictionary. Every term is defined plainly and then followed by the part that actually matters — the practical consequence, which is the half a glossary usually leaves out.
Currencies
Power Credits. The soft currency. Pays for levelling characters, levelling and fusing gear, and most standard store purchases. Consequence: it is abundant, and that abundance is exactly why it is rarely your bottleneck. If Power Credits are piling up, your problem is somewhere they cannot reach. Full detail in the Power Credits guide.
Nth Metal. The premium currency. Pays for chests, promotions, and gear rerolls. Consequence: it accumulates slowly by design, which makes trickle-spending it the most expensive habit in the game. See the Nth Metal guide.
Alliance Coins. Earned through alliance activity, spent only in the alliance store. Consequence: the one currency whose value is set by other people. In a dead alliance it is worth nothing at any price. See the Alliance Coins guide.
Energy. Your allowance of attempts. Regenerates up to a cap and then stops. Consequence: it caps your income from every other system, so hours spent at the cap are earnings that never arrived. Nothing tells you it happened. See the Energy guide.
Materials and shards
Gear shards. Components fused to obtain a gear piece. This is acquisition. Come in colours, and different pieces call for different ones.
Gear upgrade shards. Components that improve a piece you already own. This is progression. Consequence: these two are constantly confused, and buying acquisition shards when your real problem is upgrades produces more inventory rather than more performance. The gear shards guide separates them properly.
Promotion shards. Materials that raise a character's star tier, appropriate to the character in question.
Metal shards. Promotion material for Metal-tier characters specifically, sourced from Phantom Zone and challenge rewards. Consequence: these come from named, limited routes rather than general play, which is why promotion gates accounts that levelling never did.
Colour (Green, Blue, Red, Purple). The four gear shard colours. Consequence: having plenty of shards is not the same as having the right ones. Shards for a piece you have no route to are dead weight.
Progression
Levelling. Raising a character within their current star tier, paid for with Power Credits. Consequence: smooth, continuous, always available, and the thing that stops being the answer at a certain point without announcing it.
Promotion. Raising the star tier itself, paid for with shards plus Nth Metal. Consequence: discrete rather than smooth — it pays nothing until the jump completes. This is the wall most accounts stall at. See the promotion guide.
Star tier. A character's rarity band, which sets their ceiling. Consequence: a ceiling is not current performance. A maxed character at a low tier is a finished project with a low roof.
Gold and Metal. The two rarity tiers that matter in practice, Metal being the top. Consequence: a properly levelled and geared Gold beats an untouched Metal every time. Build the Metal before you switch to it, not after.
Breakpoint. A threshold where accumulated gear upgrades produce a meaningful stat jump. Consequence: between thresholds you are banking, not gaining. One upgrade short is functionally close to nothing, which is why "I upgraded and felt no difference" is so common — usually nothing had happened yet.
Fusion. Combining shards to produce or improve a piece.
Reroll. Spending premium currency to change a gear piece's properties. Consequence: the visible instant change makes it feel more productive than it is. Reroll gear on your working team; leave the bench alone.
Modes and content
Battles. Standard fights. The general-purpose farming content and the main Power Credits source.
Dailies. Daily missions. Consequence: the highest return per Energy point in the game and the main free source of both currencies. When time is short, these are what everything else competes with, not the thing you cut.
Survivor. A run where health carries between fights. Consequence: sustain outranks burst, and a run whose health curve has collapsed is already lost — ending it costs the same Energy as pushing it. See the Survivor guide.
Multiplayer (online battle). Player-versus-player content, run in seasons. Consequence: the mode where swap timing outpaces raw roster strength, and the only one where a team plays without you. See the multiplayer guide.
Season. A time-boxed multiplayer cycle with its own rewards.
Challenge mode. A limited-time event awarding an exclusive character for completing it. Consequence: the only content with a deadline, which inverts the usual advice to be patient. See the challenge mode guide.
Gate. An entry requirement on a fight — a specific character, a class, sometimes a star tier. Consequence: gates ask who you own, not how strong they are. A broad roster of mediocre characters clears gates a narrow roster of excellent ones cannot.
Phantom Zone. The on-demand, premium route to promotion shards. Consequence: the most flexible shard source and the most expensive. See the Phantom Zone guide.
Alliance. The player group you join, and the source of Alliance Coins and store access. Consequence: most alliances are dead, and nothing notifies you when yours became one. See the alliance guide.
Alliance store. The inventory Alliance Coins buy from, separate from the standard and premium stores.
Events. Limited-time content awarding currency, shards, or gear on the game's schedule rather than yours.
Team and combat
Passive. An effect that operates without you doing anything. Consequence: the most predictive thing on a character card and the least compared. Read passives before stats — the best characters guide explains why.
Special. An activated move consuming power.
Power. The meter that specials draw from. Consequence: gear and passives that generate power are worth more in short fights than their stat lines suggest.
Tag-in. Swapping the active character mid-fight. Consequence: the core skill layer of multiplayer, and the reason some gear is oriented around what happens at the moment of a swap.
Defence team. The team that fights on your behalf when you are not playing. Consequence: it plays itself, so anything requiring good piloting is worth much less. Your best offence characters are frequently mediocre here. See the team building guide.
Carry. The character a team is built around.
Bench. Characters you own but do not field. Consequence: bench characters should receive no investment — but do not dispose of them either, because they are often your only challenge gate keys.
Account and services
WBID. The Warner Bros. account the game uses to store and sync progress. Consequence: it is the difference between a roster you can recover and one a broken phone can end. See the WBID guide.
Account-side. Work applied to the state of your account, with nothing installed on your device. Consequence: survives game updates, works identically on Android and iOS, and leaves the app exactly as it came from the store. See how Injustice mods work.
Client-side. Work that alters the app on your device. Consequence: the highest-risk category, the easiest thing for a game to detect, and it breaks with every update.
APK. The Android application package format. Consequence: it does not exist on iOS at all, so any site offering an "Injustice mod APK for iPhone" is telling you something about itself. See the mod APK guide and the iOS guide.
Sideloading. Installing an application from outside the official store. Consequence: the mechanism behind modified clients on Android, and impractical on iOS — which structurally protects iPhone players from the worst option.
Modded client. A tampered version of the game. Consequence: checksums do not match, detection is straightforward, and it breaks on every update. Nothing we sell is in this category.
Player shorthand
Terms you will see in alliance chat and on forums rather than in the game.
| Term | Means | Worth knowing because |
|---|---|---|
| F2P | Free to play, no spending | Progress is time-gated, so F2P is slower rather than capped |
| Meta | The currently effective set of characters and tactics | Moves with patches, which is why old tier lists mislead |
| Roster | Every character you own | Breadth here decides challenge eligibility |
| Stale | Advice written for an older patch | The most common problem with published Injustice content |
| Whale | A very heavy spender | Their advice assumes resources you do not have |
| Gate key | A character owned purely to unlock content | Not a combat judgement — an eligibility one |
The five that matter most
If you read nothing else on this page:
- Breakpoint — because it explains why your gear investment felt like nothing.
- Promotion versus levelling — because it explains why your account stopped progressing.
- Gate — because it explains why you cannot enter content you are strong enough for.
- Energy cap — because it explains why frequency beats session length.
- Account-side versus client-side — because it is the difference between the two kinds of mod, and one of them is far riskier than the other.
Four of those five are about thresholds and constraints rather than power, which is the real lesson of the vocabulary: this game is not primarily about strength. How the Injustice economy is designed is the guide that puts them all in one picture.
Where to go next
- How the Injustice economy is designed — the system all of these terms belong to
- Beginner guide — the first month, in order
- Injustice gear shards — breakpoints and colours in full
- Injustice daily routine — turning the Energy cap into a habit
- Browse the Injustice shop — currency, gear and characters, listed by what they solve