FAQ — Non-Obvious Mechanics

When you get a PassiveUpgrade from a chest, the displayed stat increase is: multiplier × base_per_pick × 100%.

The multiplier formula depends on loot level:

• Levels 1–4: multiplier = loot_level (linear)
• Levels 5–12: multiplier = loot_level² (quadratic)

A level 12 chest gives a ×144 multiplier. For a passive with base_per_pick = 5%, that's a +720% bonus from a single chest.

It multiplies the wet bonus. Wet tiles already take 2× damage before any passives. The Wet Damage passive scales that multiplier rather than adding a flat amount on top.

For example, if you have a single +4% Wet Damage passive, wet tiles take 2.08× damage — not 2.04×. The 4% is applied to the 2× base: 2 × 1.04 = 2.08.

In practice this means each 1% of Wet Damage is worth roughly 2% of total damage improvement, because every point scales the already-doubled base. The base per-pick is +1%, the lowest of all passives, but the compounding effect means it adds up quickly with deep-biome chests that carry large multipliers.

No. Employee Miner Speed increases the walking and flying movement speed of employee miners — how fast they travel between ore targets. It has zero effect on pickaxe swing speed once a miner is actively attacking a block.

Swing speed is fixed by the employee's tier. It controls swings per second and cannot be upgraded via passives.

The passive Employee Miner Damage does increase per-swing damage and stacks. If you want miners to mine faster, hire higher-tier employees.

Additionally, movement speed itself is hard-capped at +900%. Picks past that point are completely wasted — see Which passives have a hard cap?

Yes. You can fire any employee from the employee management screen (the org chart) and receive 50% of their hiring cost back in gold.

Each employee tier shows a green $$ button next to the hire button. It only appears when you own at least one employee of that type.

• Left-click the $$ button — fire 1 employee
• Right-click the $$ button — fire a custom amount

Hovering the button shows a tooltip with the exact gold payout before you confirm. The refund is 50% regardless of tier, so there's no penalty for swapping employee types mid-run if your strategy changes.

The swing rate is capped at +2400%. Below that, this passive directly increases DPS: more Mining Speed means more swings per second, and more swings per second means more damage per second. But the pickaxe can swing at most 25× its base rate, and you reach that ceiling at a total of +2400%. Past that point, additional Mining Speed does not make you swing any faster. This was pointed out by YouTuber Dex and verified in testing.

Here's the key point most players miss: hitting the cap costs you no damage at all. Every point of Mining Speed past +2400% is converted one-for-one into extra per-strike damage, so your total DPS keeps rising along the exact same straight line — there is no kink, no slow-down, and no penalty at the cap. A 1% point that used to buy a faster swing now buys a bigger hit worth the same DPS. In other words, the cap is really just an animation limit on how fast the pickaxe can visibly swing, not a gameplay nerf to the passive.

So what should you actually do with it? Don't avoid Mining Speed picks just because you've passed the cap — past the cap a point of Mining Speed adds damage output just as efficiently as a point of Mining Damage. (Mining Damage simply has no cap of its own, but that no longer makes it the better buy.) Your total mining DPS scales as (1 + Mining Speed) × (1 + Mining Damage) — the two multiply together, so the most damage per pick comes from keeping them roughly balanced: whenever you get the choice, take whichever of the two you currently have less of. (Below the cap, Mining Speed even has a slight edge, because faster swings also clear low-HP blocks you already one-shot — something extra damage can't do.)

Three passives have a ceiling imposed by the game where further picks do nothing at all. Unlike Player Pickaxe Mining Speed — which converts excess speed into equivalent damage — these passives simply stop scaling once the cap is reached:

What to do instead: once you hit the cap on any of these, redirect further picks toward the corresponding damage passive. For miners, stack Employee Miner Damage. For collectors, stack Employee Collector Capacity. For orbs, stack Orb Damage. None of those have a cap.

No — it increases recoil, increasing a knockback effect opposite the direction of fire. The passive name describes what it does to the stat, even if you might not find it beneficial.

However, players deliberately stack Gun Recoil to gain extra jump height: firing a gun downward while jumping launches you higher due to the knockback. With enough stacks, this dramatically extends vertical mobility. Base per-pick: +10%.

They never stack, and it's not simply "last one wins" either. A block can only carry one active poison effect at a time, no matter how many times you spray it or how many sources you use. When a new poison lands on an already-poisoned block, the game compares damage-per-tick:

• New poison's damage per tick ≥ the current poison's: it fully replaces the old one. Damage-per-tick updates to the new value and the remaining tick count resets to the new poison's full duration — whatever ticks were left on the old poison are simply discarded.
• New poison's damage per tick is lower: the application is wasted. It doesn't queue up, doesn't add to the existing poison, and doesn't do anything at all. The stronger poison already on the block keeps ticking down completely unaffected.

Worked example: spray a block with a gold poison gun (15,000 dmg/tick, 5 ticks), then spray the same block with an iron poison gun (150 dmg/tick, 4 ticks). Since 150 < 15,000, the iron spray does nothing — the block just keeps taking 15,000 damage for the gold poison's remaining ticks, as if the iron gun had never fired. Reverse the order (iron first, then gold) and the result is different: gold's 15,000 dmg/tick beats whatever iron had going, so it overwrites immediately and the block ticks for a fresh 5 rounds of 15,000 damage, regardless of how many iron ticks were left.

This rule applies regardless of the source — your poison gun, your poison staff/bomb, and an Elementalist employee's poison spray all use the exact same replacement logic. There's no special-casing for who applied it; only the damage-per-tick number matters. So yes, an Elementalist's poison can overwrite your poison gun's poison, and vice versa — whichever hits harder per tick "owns" the block until its ticks run out or it gets replaced by something stronger.

One more wrinkle: the Poison Damage passive (+5% per pick) is factored in before the comparison happens, so it can tip a fight between two otherwise-similar poisons in your favor.

One item is drawn at random from the full loot pool. For chests at loot levels 1–4:

• 3 passive upgrade slots (60% total → 20% each)
• 1 gem slot (20%)
• 1 equipment scroll slot (20%)

At levels 5–12, there is no gem and no equipment scroll. The pool shrinks to 3 passive slots, so a passive is always the reward (each has a 33% chance of being shown, but which passives appear depends on your profession and equipped items).

See the Chest Loot page for the full level table.

Don't backtrack. Clay coal is the most efficient biome for quota filling by raw block HP per coal numbers, but the travel cost of ascending, farming, and descending almost always outweighs the gain. In addition, stronger weapons deal excess damage to clay blocks and that excess damage is "lost" in that it does not generate any extra coal. Fill your quota opportunistically from coal blocks you encounter at your current depth.

The reason clay looks appealing is the drop table: HP scales ×10 per biome but coal drops only scale ×5, so deeper coal blocks give you less coal per HP broken than shallower ones:

This gap is fixed in the drop tables — no weapon upgrade changes it. Whether you're swinging a starter pickaxe or a fully upgraded electric pickaxe, a fire coal block always requires 8× more total damage dealt to yield the same coal as the equivalent quantity of clay blocks.

What makes staying deep still correct: the quota coal you collect is a byproduct of progress you were making anyway. Every stone/ice/fire block you break to push deeper is work you'd do regardless. Any coal blocks in your path are free from a time-budget perspective. Backtracking to clay, farming deliberately, then descending again adds dead travel time that burns more total time than the efficiency gain is worth — especially as your target depth increases.

Practical rule: break every coal block you encounter while mining downward. Only consider a clay detour if you're very early in the mine and haven't yet broken a path to the stone layer.

Hard Modifiers are optional difficulty flags that change game rules. The known modifiers are:

• NOCHESTS — no chests spawn, so you can't accumulate any passives
• ONLYCOAL — only coal ore blocks spawn, so your only income is from the daily bonus cash and the cheapest ore
• COALISWORTHLESS — coal sells for 0g (but you still have a quota)
• NOBONUSCASH — no daily bonus cash; your only income is from mined ore
• NOTIMEUPGRADES — can't add time in the shop
• ONLYCLAY — only clay biome blocks spawn

See the Hard Modifiers page for strategy notes on each one.