Gold Nugget

Verified against the spelunky.ai port v0.1.10 on 27 October 2026.

It's the bigger of the two loose pieces of gold, five times a Gold Chunk's worth and as much as a Gold Bar. Many come out of rock: a rich gold vein, broken open by a Bomb, a Mattock or a boulder, spills three chunks and one nugget. The player collects one by touching it.

A nugget's base value is $500, and it's worth a quarter of that more for each area past the Mines, the code counting Olmec's Lair as an area of its own ^{[6] [7]}:

• Rich gold veins. Each block of rock in the Mines, the Jungle, the Ice Caves and the Temple (and Olmec's Lair) is a gold vein 19 times in 100 and a rich one, with more gold showing, 10 times in 100 ^{[8] [9] [10] [11]}. Destroyed, a rich vein lets out three Gold Chunks and a nugget; a plain vein only the chunks ^[12].
• The City of Gold: its blocks are gold, and each one destroyed lets out three chunks and a nugget ^{[4] [13]}.
• Jars: a broken Jar holds one 1 in 6 times, once its 1 in 3 roll for a Gold Chunk fails ^[14].
• Graves. On a Jungle graveyard level (the Restless Dead), a grave that isn't the ash grave, with no treasure under it already, has a 1 in 2 chance of a nugget buried in the block beneath it ^[15].
• A Shopkeeper's death: one who dies leaves one to four nuggets, except in the Stars room, a bonus room off the high-score room ^[16].
• A Monkey clinging to the player sometimes takes a nugget's worth of his money and throws it out as a nugget, which can't be collected for its first 20 steps ^{[17] [18] [19]}.

The level editor has no tile for one, and its blocks hold no gold: it sets each block's look back to plain rock after the block has rolled for its vein ^[20].

The player collects a nugget by touching it while he isn't stunned or dead; the one he takes is the treasure nearest him ^[21]. Its value shows as "+500" under his money and, after a short pause, is counted into it a hundred dollars a step ^{[22] [23]}; whatever is left is counted at once when he leaves the level ^[24]. Gold plays the coin sound, where a gem plays its own ^[25], and the screen between levels shows each nugget collected on the level ^[26].

In the clip, a Bomb the player set down kills a Shopkeeper, who leaves four nuggets; the player walks over two of them and his money counts up by $1,000 ^[27].

A loose nugget falls and comes to rest like other treasure, moving only while it's on the screen, and lava it sinks into destroys it ^[28].

• The gold veins' code has an object for a nugget-and-chunks lump of gold in the rock, oGoldBig, but nothing in the game makes one ^{[29] [30]}.
• A nugget's own create event makes it collectable at once; its alarm, which does the same, only matters for the Monkey's, which turns that off for 20 steps ^{[31] [19]}.