Mining & Pickaxe Proficiency

In DYNASTIES, mining is a life skill, not a coin-flip. The more you mine, the better you get — and a
single dedicated miner out-earns a pile of throwaway alts.

How it works

• Equip a pickaxe (buy one from the Twin City Shopkeeper) and mine in a Mine (Copper / Silver
  / Gold). A pickaxe is a tool, not a weapon: while you hold one you cannot attack anything at all
  (the client treats it as mining mode) -- swap back to a weapon or bare hands to fight.
• Every swing trains your pickaxe proficiency. As it climbs, your gathering bonus rises — more
  ore and a higher chance at gems per swing.
• A fresh character mines at the base rate; a Master Miner pulls several times the ore + gems. The
  skill is per-character and earned by real mining — it can't be bought, traded, or rushed on an alt.

💡 Your pickaxe is also a melee weapon — it has a real attack (≈17–26) and 2-handed reach, so you
can dig and fight with the same tool. No swapping gear when a monster wanders into your mine.

What proficiency actually changes

Your pickaxe skill runs from 0 to 8, and every step of it feeds one number: your gathering
bonus, which climbs in a straight line from ×1 at skill 0 to ×4 at skill 8. Every roll a swing
makes is multiplied by it:

• Whether the swing finds anything at all. A fresh pickaxe turns up something on about 3 swings in
  10; an Expert on nearly all of them, a Master on every one.
• What grade of ore it is. The chance of the richer band of ore, and of a bonus grade on top, scales
  the same way — a Master's ore is high-grade nearly every time.
• The rarer families. Copper, silver and gold each have their own roll (and their own mines); the
  bonus lifts all of them.
• Gems. The gem roll sits inside the find roll, so both climb together: a Novice sees a gem about
  once in 200 swings, a Master about once in 17 — and double that in Flow.
• +N Stones (Expert and up) — the same multiplier again, on a much rarer roll.
• The road to Flow. Proficiency doesn't change what Flow pays; it changes how soon you get
  there. The ore in front of you thins faster in skilled hands, so a Master reaches Flow four times
  sooner than a Novice. (Details under Flow State below.)

Type /mining any time to see your rank, skill level and current gathering bonus. The table below
is generated from the live game, so it always shows what the server is actually doing:

"Swings that find something" is the find roll; "Gem / swing" is your real per-swing chance, find roll
included. "Ore left at 30 min" is how much of a fresh seam's ore rate remains after half an hour
without moving — Flow arrives when it falls to a quarter.

Ranks

Your proficiency carries a title that climbs as you train:

Novice → Apprentice → Journeyman → Expert → Master Miner

Ranks are cosmetic and honest: each one is a band of skill levels in the table above, and the bonus
climbs inside a rank too — a skill-6 Expert out-mines a skill-5 Expert.

Training it

Every swing pays the same proficiency XP, and each skill level needs more than the last. Your very
first swing already makes you a Novice; the top takes real commitment, which is the point — a
throwaway alt never gets there.

About 80 hours of actual swinging from a fresh pickaxe to the top, before any proficiency buff (a Whetstone Oil is +50%).

A Whetstone Oil (from the Token Merchant) speeds every proficiency, pickaxe included.

Rare finds — the +N Stone

At Expert proficiency and above, your swings can occasionally strike a rich vein and turn up a
+N Stone — a prized universal compose-fuel. Unlike type-locked materials, a +N Stone upgrades
any gear in the WuXing Oven, which makes it valuable. They're rare on purpose: a throwaway alt never
reaches the proficiency to find one, and the higher your rank the richer the vein (a Master occasionally
unearths a higher-plus stone). Bank them up to fuel your composing.

Flow State — the long dig

Mining the same spot without stopping puts you into a rhythm. The longer you swing, the more the
ore in front of you thins out — and once it's nearly spent, you cross into Flow State:

"You settle into the rhythm of the stone — FLOW STATE. The ore is spent here, but your eye for gems
has never been sharper."

In Flow, gems and +N Stones come at double rate. Ore is all but gone; gems are the point.

Your proficiency decides how fast you get there. This is what training a pickaxe really buys — not
just a bigger yield per swing, but a much shorter road to the good part: about 105 minutes of
unbroken mining for a fresh pickaxe, about 26 for a Master (the exact figure for every skill level
is the "Flow arrives after" column above) — and a Master still carries their full gathering bonus on
every swing along the way. Flow sits on top of proficiency, it doesn't replace it.

Watch the seam

You don't need to open anything to see how a dig is going — and that matters, because opening a
panel means clicking, and clicking ends the dig.

The moment you start a dig, Working the Seam appears in your buff tray, and its timer is the real
time left until Flow — not a guess: it is refreshed on every swing from the exact swing count and
your current rank, so if your proficiency ticks up mid-dig, the countdown shortens with it. Hover the
icon for the short version of this page.

• counting down — you are on an unbroken run; the seam is thinning
• gone, with a message — the count reached zero: you are in Flow State, and stay there
  until you stop
• gone, silently — the dig ended (you moved, clicked, or logged out) and the count is back to zero

There is no separate "Flow" buff, on purpose: Flow has no duration — it lasts exactly as long as
you keep swinging — and a tray timer that could not count anything would be a lie. An empty slot
after the countdown is the arrival.

Everything here is yours alone — nobody else sees it.

One unbroken session, or nothing

The count resets to zero the moment you stop mining. That means any of these:

• taking a single step — by far the most common way people reset without noticing
• attacking, or clicking an NPC or item
• leaving the map, dying, or being teleported
• unequipping your pickaxe, or logging out

Nothing carries over. There is no way to swing faster than one every 3 seconds, and no way to advance
the count except by swinging.

Want ore, not gems?

Then don't chase Flow — ore is richest in the first few minutes of any session, and a single step
puts you straight back to full rate. The Dynasty Board's mining job asks for 5–25 ore,
which you'll clear well inside the opening stretch at any rank.

So the two ways to mine are both real choices:

• Short bursts (step, swing, step) — maximum ore, ignore Flow.
• One long dig — ore fades, gems double. This is where the good finds live.

Type /mining while you're digging: it shows how much ore is left in the seam and counts down the
swings until Flow.

⚠️ Keep bag space free. Your bag holds 40 items and ore and gems don't stack. If it's full when
something would have dropped, it's gone — and the swing still counts. Drop your ore before a long
dig (dropping doesn't break the session — moving to do it would).

Why train one miner instead of twenty alts?

Because proficiency is the multiplier. Twenty level-15 alts each mine at the floor; one invested miner
mines several times better — and staying invested (one character, real time) is far less hassle than
juggling a swarm. Mining rewards commitment, not account count.

See The Economy & Currencies and the Daily Rewards board (it has a
mining job).