The Ultimate Challenge: Own the Drop Shop

I’ve written before about the need for more carrots in Zwift. One often-requested carrot is a new challenge to accompany the Ride California, Tour Italy, and Climb Mt. Everest challenges which many Zwifters completed years ago.

Here’s an idea for an unofficial, never-ending challenge: what if you worked to buy everything in the Drop Shop?

Drop Shop Intro

Zwift’s Drop Shop is the virtual store where you spend Drops, the virtual currency you accumulate as you ride or run in Zwift. You can only buy bike frames and wheels in the Drop Shop today, but in the future it may expand to include other virtual items.

To visit the Drop Shop in game click Menu>Garage, or just hit the “T” keyboard shortcut.

Got What It Takes?

If you tally up the price of all the wheels and all the frames you arrive at the big total: 44,174,500 Drops. (Of course, this number will increase as Zwift adds more items to the Drop Shop. This total is current as of April 13, 2020.)

You probably don’t have those Drops yet. Hardly anyone does. So what would it take to earn them?

While it’s fairly easy to understand the factors Zwift uses to calculate Drops, it’s impossible to estimate something like a “Drops per hour” accurately. That said, an estimate of 35,000 Drops per hour is close enough for our purposes here.

At that rate, it would take you 1262 hours (or 52 days, 14 hours) to accumulate the Drops needed to buy everything in the Drop Shop. Or look at it another way: that’s riding an hour a day, every day, for almost 3-1/2 years!

If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. I’ve ridden almost 18,000 miles in 4 years on Zwift, and I’ve only put in a little over 35 days of riding.

Overwhelmed? Break It Up.

A challenge this daunting may be a bit overwhelming. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Break the challenge up into manageable chunks: perhaps buying all the wheels or frames from a certain manufacturer first, then moving onto the next.

Or Be More Selective

Not a TT fan? Remove all the TT frames from the list and the total is reduced by 11 million Drops. Take the overpriced Zwift Safety Bike off and you’ll save another 3.5 million. A 36% reduction!

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Hope you take on the challenge and it inspires you to ride more. Now I’m off to earn some Drops!