@dhairya You can sell pixels to get your starting fund. To get pixels for free, you can generate them by using your cpu bucket. (https://docs.screeps.com/api/#Game.cpu.generatePixel)

The tick duration seems to have returned to normal

The avg tick duration of shard3 was around 3s yesterday, but then reached 11s within a day. I wonder if there has been some problem with the server or the activity of shard3 just rised a lot today?