Gems

Gems


Gems are found in the Treasure section of the Market. They are used to speed up the time it takes to construct buildings, clear obstacles, hatch eggs, breed, upgrade your nursery to hold more eggs at a time, grow treats, build decorations and anything else that involves time  except  the Colosseum (which in un-speedable). The most important use of Gems is probably the upgrading of your Nursery as the ability to hatch more than one egg can be priceless (you can hatch a 24 hour egg and keep hatching 2 hour air dragon eggs to make DragonCash ). One Gem is equal to whatever time is left  up to  an hour. What that means is if you have 02:03:00 (hh:mm:ss) left to hatch or breed, it will cost you 3 Gems to finish it up (2 for the hours + 1 for the 3 minutes). However, if you wait 5 minutes until 01:58:00 it will cost you 2 Gems. This works as a double edged sword though because if you have something that takes 30:00 to do, it will cost you a full Gem to speed it up or you just have to wait out the thirty minutes.

There are two primary ways of receiving Gems in DragonVale.



Paid Gems


Gems can be purchased as Treasure through the Market screen for real money. The images above show howmany Gems you can buy per USDollar. Like Treats and DragonCash, you are offered more "incentive" Gems when you spend a larger sum of money at one time. It is one of the staples of the In-App Purchase system and without it, the studio or game publisher wouldn't generate any revenue from the game.
 *  Example : Unlike Treats and DragonCash, the lowest price of a Gem purchase is $1.99 (£1.49) rather than $0.99 (£0.69) this is likely because they are much more useful and valuable than their counterparts. So 50 gems is equal to $1.99 (£1.49), the next step up is 130 Gems for $4.99 (£2.99). This gives you 5 extra "incentive" Gems. The step up from that is $9.99 (£6.99) for 275 Gems which gives you 25 extra "incentive" Gems. This continues to increase as the prices increase. $24.99 (£17.49) gives you 700 Gems which is 75 extra Gems (based on 50 Gems equaling $1.99 (£1.49), $49.99 (£34.99) gives you 1,500 Gems which is 250 extra Gems and the most expensive purchase in the game... $99.99 (£69.99) Gives you 3,750 Gems which is 1,750 extra gems from the base price.



Now unlike Treats or DragonCash, Gems are probably the only thing worth buying in DragonVale. Treats are easily grown and the rate at which you grow them seems to keep up with the rate of your dragon production and leveling. DragonCash can be eaily obtained after level 14 by breeding the air dragon which takes 2 hours to breed and 2 hours to hatch and sells for 500,000 DragonCash (so you don't need to worry about that anymore). So if you have the inclination to purchase anything in the game, we'd advise purchasing Gems.

Free Gems
Gems can also be obtained for free by friends gifting them to you. You can receive an infinite amount of Gems a day (assuming you had an infinite amount of friends willing to send them to you) but you can only send out 3 Gems a day to people on your friends list. The Strategies page lists a very useful strategy in which you create a circle of 4 friends. You only gift your 3 Gems a day to the other 3 people in the group (4 including you) and they do the same, that way you are all guaranteed to get 3 Gems per day no matter what. It's very effective as you can essentially take 3 hours off of a breeding time or hatch time per day or build up a stockpile of Gems and do very rapid breeding in succession.

Note: you can also get gems for free by winning in the Colosseum. For bronze medal you get none, for silver you get 2 and for gold you get 5. If you only want gems for your nursery, you just need 2 golds, so you dont have to pay.