FAQ — Non-Obvious Mechanics

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 (DPS) is fixed by the employee's tier, stored in the mining_speed field of their EmployeeLevel resource. It controls animation playback speed (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.

It directly increases DPS. This passive increases the speed_scale on the player's mining AnimationPlayer, meaning more swing keyframes fire per second. More swings per second = more damage per second. Each pick gives +5% swing speed.

No — it increases recoil, making guns harder to control. The passive name describes what it does to the stat, not the benefit.

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

Some higher-value ores appear visually in early biomes — for example, silver and gold ore blocks in the clay biome — but their loot tables have probability 0.0 in loot_properties. These blocks can be broken but yield nothing.

In the Block Reference, these are marked "Visible — no drop". Their depth range is also −1, meaning they don't spawn via the normal depth system; they appear decoratively only.

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.

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.

Don't backtrack. Clay coal is the most efficient biome for quota filling by raw numbers, but the travel cost of ascending, farming, and descending almost always outweighs the gain. 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 a clay block.

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 (data page coming soon):

• NOCHESTS — no chests spawn in the mine
• ONLYCOAL — only coal ore blocks spawn
• COALISWORTHLESS — coal sells for $0
• NOBONUSCASH — no bonus cash rewards
• NOTIMEUPGRADES — time-based upgrades disabled
• ONLYCLAY — only clay biome blocks spawn