How important is gold?

On this site, I promote a method of "Industrial Farming" that can bring you "infinite gold," but how important is it?

It depends on where you're at and where the game is at.

Unless you want to spend all your time fishing, a little gold is always going to be necessary to feed your dragons, and more gold can help you buy a lot of stuff (farm and hideout decorations, etc) from the store. Beyond that, it depends on the availability and contents of coin chests. 

Early in my playing of the game, during Thawfest 2020, there were 1000-coin chests that could give you Thawfest chickens. I had industrial farming working pretty well by then, and was able to not only open every 1000-coin chest I encountered, but to go on chest hunts specifically to find more. I quickly accumulated enough Thawfest chickens (over 20 of them, all essentially for free!) to easily win the Thawfest dragon, which turned out to be so good at battle events, finishing in the gold category almost all the time, that I now have practically infinite gems as well.

During Thawfest 2020, and even after it ended for a time, those 1000-coin chests could also give you dragon eggs, as could battle events. So I also got lots of new dragons, which allowed me to do better at stable quests. Once I had lots of dragons at level 30 or over, I started winning titan runes from stable quests, and along with the runes I got from the Runestone Dragon Tactics levels, I was able to age up a number of titan dragons to do the stable quests that reward mystery egg chests, which seem to award a very wide range of possible eggs. (Maybe almost all the possible ones?)

So now I have over 30 types of dragons (only one or two of them bought from the store), many of them titans, and practically infinite gems, and it all began with the infinite gold I got through industrial farming. 

But that was then.

As I write this post, there are no 1000-coin chests. (And battle events only seem to be awarding gems or coins for finishing in the gold.) There are lower value ones, plus video chests, and they do offer chances at some eggs, but only a limited set of basic ones, and it seems like the odds of getting them are reduced. So you won't be able to duplicate my run of good fortune, at least right now. However, this can still be a way to get a basic set of half a dozen or so dragons if you're just starting out in the game, and having more dragons will help with stable quests, and who knows? Maybe the 1000-coin chests will reappear at some point, or maybe some future Event will have farm animals that can be bought with gold, or some other avenue will open up for you to take advantage of all your gold.

My Thawfest luck feels like an imbalance in the game that the developers eventually fixed, but at the time, the game was already several years old. If it was an imbalance, then you'd think they would already have figured that out and learned not to let it happen again. So I think it's possible that the real story is that the game and its rewards are inherently volatile, which means the days when gold can make a significant difference in your fortunes could return.

By earning infinite gold through industrial farming, you can be ready for those days.