Progression & Economy

Everything on Grindtime feeds one number: how much you earn per swing. This page explains the currencies you earn, the ladders you climb, and the shops and boosters you spend it all on.

The big picture#

Your earnings are one long multiplication. Every system on this page plugs into it somewhere:

what you earn  =  (1 + everything you've invested in)
                  × Prestige  × Rebirth  × Boosters
                  × Global Multiplier  × live server events

• Additive sources stack into that first bracket — Forge, Ascension, Island Core, Armour, Research, Rank, Perks, Totems, Runes, Collectibles, Overclocks, Discord link, Online Boost, vote rank.
• Multiplicative sources sit outside it and are far more powerful — Prestige, Rebirth, the Global Multiplier, your booster potions, and any live server-wide event, weather or Surge.

Type /multi at any time to see the full breakdown per currency, source by source.

Currencies#

Grindtime runs on four wallets. (You may see older names in very old items — those all fold into Tokens now.)

The Shards faucet#

Shards drip in just for playing actively. Every 10 minutes of non-AFK online time you're paid Shards. The payout scales up the longer your unbroken session runs, from 1 up to your rank's cap after 2 hours:

• Cap at default rank: 4 Shards per payout
• Cap at the top rank: 10 Shards per payout

Going AFK freezes the countdown — it doesn't reset it, but it doesn't tick either.

Skills & XP#

There are four skills: Farming, Mining, Foraging, Fishing — each levels 0 → 100, independently.

• Skill XP comes from every block you break / fish you catch in a grind zone.
• The XP needed per level is 1,000 × 1.15^level — so level 1 costs 1,000, level 50 costs about 1.08 million, and level 99 costs just over a billion. It gets steep.
• Your skill level decides which tier of block a grind zone renders for you, and it unlocks extra crystal sockets on that pillar's tool (3 sockets at level 0, rising to 7 at level 100).

Separately you have an Account Level, fed by the same grinding. Account XP per level is 5,000 × (level + 1), so reaching level 100 takes about 25.25 million account XP in total. Account Level is what gates Prestige, and the same XP also fills your Battle Pass (/pass).

Note: skill levels are a mastery track — they don't directly inflate your currency multiplier. Prestige, the Global Multiplier and your invested upgrades do that.

Commands: /crops · /ores · /woods · /fish ladder show each pillar's ladder and sell prices.

The Global Multiplier#

/multiplier (aliases /um, /upgrademult)

A flat multiplier on everything you earn, bought with Tokens. This is the main end-game Token sink.

• Each purchase adds +0.5×.
• The cost of the next step is current^5.25 ÷ 75 Tokens — it climbs viciously.
• There's a Buy Max button that buys as many steps as you can afford in one click.

Prestige#

/prestige

Prestige resets your Account Level in exchange for a permanent multiplier on everything.

To prestige you need both:

1. Account Level ≥ 100 + (10 × your current prestige) — so Prestige 1 needs level 100, Prestige 2 needs level 110, Prestige 10 needs level 190.
2. Tokens — the cost follows roughly P⁴:

What you get:

• A permanent ×(1 + prestige) on all earnings — Prestige 1 is ×2, Prestige 10 is ×11, Prestige 50 is ×51.
• 1 Prestige Point per prestige, spent in Ascension.
• Your Account Level and account XP reset to 0. Everything else is kept — enchants, Forge, gear, unlocks, worlds.

There's an auto-prestige toggle so an AFK session keeps climbing without you clicking.

Ascension — /ascension#

Spend Prestige Points on permanent nodes. Each node maxes at level 100:

Rebirth#

/rebirth

Rebirth is the layer above Prestige. It resets your Prestige track for an even bigger permanent multiplier.

• Gate: you need Prestige ≥ 10 × (rebirth + 1). So your first Rebirth needs Prestige 10, the second needs Prestige 20, the third needs Prestige 30, and so on.
• Reward: a permanent ×(1 + rebirth) on everything, stacking on top of your Prestige multiplier.
• You also earn Rebirth Points equal to the Prestige level you rebirthed at — so rebirthing later than the minimum pays more points.
• Prestige and Account Level reset to 0. All unlocks are kept — enchants, Forge, Ascension, Prestige Points, gear, and every world you've opened.

Rebirth is also the main gate on the Worlds ladder, so it's what opens new areas of the server.

Worlds & Warps#

/worlds (alias /warps)

Seven areas, opened one at a time and permanently — unlocks survive Rebirth. Everyone starts on Neon Fields and never has to buy it.

You open the next world by finishing the one you're on: hand over its top-tier armour set, its maxed pillar tool and sword, hit the Rebirth it asks for, and pay a currency top-up. The gear is consumed. That's deliberate — it's the sink that stops a finished pillar's kit rotting in a chest.

How the panel works:

• Green tile = unlocked. Click to travel there.
• Grey tile = locked. Hover it and the tooltip is the full price list, with a ✔ or ✘ on every line and a held/needed counter on each gear item.
• A better item always pays a lesser price — a maxed hoe satisfies a "Hoe [XIII]" requirement.
• Clicking a locked tile with everything in hand spends the lot and opens it for good. The first player to open a secret world gets it announced server-wide.

Apex Nexus shows as ??? until somebody opens it.

Ranks#

/ranks (alias /rankup) · also on the /store shelf

Nine permanent ranks in three tiers, bought with Credits. Buying a rank charges every step between where you are and where you're going, so a jump never undercuts the ladder.

Every rank also gives a permanent +5% Tokens on top of its listed perks.

Climbing the whole ladder costs 154,850 Credits.

• Tier 1 ranks wear a solid neon colour. Tier 2 wear two-stop gradients. Tier 3 are animated on the client (you need the resource pack to see the flow).
• Rank Tickets are a rare crate reward that grant a rank for free — but only up to Turbo. Tier 3 (Nitro, Plasma, Redline) is never obtainable from a crate; it's Credits or the web store only.
• Rank tooltips also advertise player vaults, daily crate keys and daily kits. Those are modelled on the ladder but aren't wired to a live system yet — treat the three percentages and the command unlocks as what a rank actually does today.

The Bazaar#

/bazaar (aliases /bz, /market)

A player-driven crop market. There is no infinite NPC supply — you can only ever buy what other players have sold in.

Selling. Crops land in your grind backpack. Selling one pays instantly in Tokens and stocks the shared server-wide pool. The payout is:

crop tier  ×  (1 + your rank's Token bonus)  ×  (1 + relic Sell Value)  ×  your full Tokens multiplier

A crop's base value is simply its ladder tier: Wheat = 1 Token, Potato = 2, Carrot = 3 … all the way to Crimson Roots = 13. The rank bonus applies before your multiplier, so it compounds with Prestige and boosters rather than being a flat tack-on.

Buying. Pulls from the shared pool at a 1.25× markup on the tier value (always at least +1 Token). If the pool's empty for that crop, nobody's sold any in.

Every click is clamped to what the pool holds, what you can afford and the room left in your backpack — you can't overspend or drop crops on the floor.

Boss Market (the /bz boss tab). The same mechanics in Gems:

• Sell boss eggs and personal-boss spawners straight out of your inventory for Gems.
• Sell and buy boss Hearts through a shared Heart pool, with the same 1.25× buy markup.

Related: /backpack (/bp) to sell drops · /compress to compress raw crops into tiered blocks · /withdraw <crop> <amount> to pull crops out as a tradeable Crop Voucher.

The Gem Shop#

/gemshop (aliases /gems, /shop)

Spend Gems on booster potions and crystal boxes.

The Shard Shop#

/shardshop

Where your online-time Shards go.

Shards are also the currency for Armour levels (/armor) and several fishing rod upgrade bands (/rod).

The Credit Store#

/store (alias /creditstore)

Four shelves, all priced in Credits:

1. Ranks and rank jumps (see the ranks table above)
2. Server-wide boosters
3. Server-wide weather
4. Grind+ membership and a link to the web store at store.grindtime.cc

Server-wide boosters#

Buying one boosts everybody online, not just you. Only one can run at a time — a second buyer is refused and told how long is left.

Server-wide weather#

Also one-at-a-time, and it reverts to clear when the timer runs out.

Not to be confused with /weathers, the synthwave buff-event system — those stack, and you can buy as many as you like.

Grind+#

A subscription tile linking to the web store. Listed perks: 2× grind output, 2× XP, 3× daily crate keys, a weekly kit, special chat + tab icons, and a /grindplus command.

Boosters#

/boosters (aliases /booster, /bpack)

Booster potions are consumables that multiply one channel of your output for a set time. There are eight types, and no two share a channel:

Every potion carries its own percentage and duration, stamped on the item when it was made — so a "+250% for 15m" Token Booster and a "+100% for 15m" one are different items that stack separately in your backpack.

Key rules:

• Time only ticks while you're online. A booster never burns down while you're logged off.

• Boosters multiply each other within a channel, but each channel is hard-capped:

  Channel	Cap
  Currency	×6
  XP	×6
  Enchant procs	×4
  Crop yield	×4
  Fortune	×3

• The Emberglass charm (Shard Shop, 45 Shards) increases the potency of every booster you run.

The backpack, Auto Queue and Auto Deploy#

Right-click any potion to open your boosters backpack. Three toggles live there:

• Auto Deploy — boosters you win from crates, rewards and drops go straight into the backpack instead of into your inventory.
• Auto Queue — every second, for each channel with nothing running, the game automatically activates your highest-percentage stored booster for that channel. It never stacks two on the same channel, and it pauses entirely while an Everything booster is live so it can't waste potions under one.
• Booster HUD — a boss bar showing every live booster, its percentage and its countdown, plus how many you have stored.

"Deploy Inventory" folds any loose potions in your inventory into the backpack in one click.

The Stranger#

/stranger (aliases /trader, /wt)

A mystery vendor who arrives three times a day — 09:00, 15:00 and 21:00 (UK time) — and stays two hours.

• While he's here, every player is dealt a different hand of 6 offers, rolled from a weighted pool. Your hand is stable for the whole visit and re-rolled next arrival.
• His stock gets stronger as the season week advances — low-tier gear early, mythic boxes and the big-ticket items by week 4.
• Offers are priced in Tokens, Gems or Credits, and most carry a per-visit buy limit.
• His arrival and departure are announced server-wide.

The Stranger's Demand#

/core (alias /thecore)

Once a day, on the first Stranger visit with players online, the server gets a 2-minute burst with a countdown on a boss bar. It's the server's anti-inflation sink — and a community race.

How it works:

1. The game scans what everybody online is currently hoarding across six categories — Crops, Fish, Ores, Gems, Tokens, Shards — and picks the single thing the server is most drowning in.
2. Everyone feeds that one thing to The Stranger. Item demands come out of your inventory and backpack; currency demands come out of your wallet.
3. One shared running total accumulates. Crossing a threshold fires a temporary server-wide multiplier for everyone online, whether they fed it or not:

1. The booster's own timer is independent of the 2-minute countdown — it keeps running after the buzzer. Past the top rung, everything fed still sinks, it just fires no new rung.
2. Contributors get a small personal top-up of +10% for 10 minutes on top of the shared booster. Deliberately minor — the event is communal, not pay-to-win.

Fairness rules:

• A demand can't repeat within 5 days.
• Categories rotate — a pillar milked recently has to be roughly 3× as over-hoarded to be picked again (9× if it was picked twice), so the demand visibly walks ores → crops → currency → fish.
• Nothing permanent is ever created. The multiplier lives in memory only and expires itself. The removal of the over-held resource is the whole point.

Your lifetime donations are tracked on the Core Patron ladder — pure status, no power.

Other multiplier sources#

Smaller but permanent, and they all show up in /multi:

Command quick reference#

Progression — /prestige · /rebirth · /ascension · /multiplier · /multi · /worlds · /ranks · /stats

Economy — /bazaar · /backpack · /gemshop · /shardshop · /store · /stranger · /core · /pay

Power — /boosters · /forge · /islandcore · /armor · /rod · /research · /perks · /totems · /runes · /charms

Info — /menu (the hub) · /guide · /commands · /formulas (the in-game economy formula book) · /leaderboards · /crops /ores /woods /fish

Rewards — /daily · /vote · /pass · /quests · /milestones · /crates · /referral