Grinding & Tools

Everything you earn on Grindtime starts with a grind pillar. There are five: Farming, Mining, Foraging, Fishing and Combat. Each one has its own field (or water, or arena), its own tool, and its own ladder of things to work through.

The shape is the same across every pillar, so once you learn one you know them all:

Grind the field → your drops bank into a backpack → sell them → use the money to upgrade the tool → the tool unlocks the next tier of the field.

The core loop#

Grind zones#

A grind zone is a marked-out area (a farm, a mine, a forest) filled with harvestable blocks. Blocks in a zone behave differently to normal Minecraft blocks:

• Breaks are yours alone. When you break a block it disappears for you and stays put for everyone else. Nobody can strip-mine the field out from under you.
• Nothing ever runs out. A broken block regrows for you after a few seconds and you can hit it again.
• Only that pillar's tool works. A hoe harvests farms, a pickaxe mines ore, an axe fells trees. Bring the wrong tool (or your fist) and nothing breaks — you'll get a red note on your action bar telling you which merchant to visit.
• Blocks you place yourself never pay. Seeding a zone with your own blocks does nothing.

What a break gives you#

Your action bar shows a live readout while you grind: what you just gained, your session total for that drop, your skill level and an XP bar.

Farming pays the most account XP#

Farming is the prestige specialist — it pays double the account XP per break that the other pillars do. Mining, foraging and the rest earn their edge in Tokens and drops instead.

The tools#

Four of the five pillars use the same tool design, and it's worth understanding once:

A tool has two numbers: its tier (which resource it's built for) and its sub-tier (its upgrade level, I to X inside that tier).

• Sub-tiers I → X are bought with the resource the tool already grinds, plus Tokens on the harder steps.
• Once you hit X, you trade the tool in for the next tier's tool. The old one is consumed.
• A trade-up wipes your enchant picks. A sub-tier upgrade keeps them.
• Every tool is soulbound — you can't give one away, and you can't be handed a maxed one by a veteran.

Because the trade-up consumes the tool, everyone climbs their own ladder. That's deliberate.

Tool enchants#

Each tool carries its own enchant loadout, stored on the item. You may have 4 active at once. Enchants unlock as the tool climbs its ladder, so a starter tool has the plain finders and a maxed one can reach the showpieces.

Right-click a tool to open its menu and pick.

Rough unlock order on a 13-tier tool: finders at tier 1–2, Key Finder and Swift Steps at 3, boosters at 4, the first AOE breakers at 5–6, Chain and Momentum at 7, Explosive at 8, Laser at 10, Airstrike at 11, Tornado at 12, Meteor at 13. On the 7-band fishing rod the same spread is compressed into bands 1–7.

Since only 4 can be live at once, the choice matters — an AOE breaker and three finders plays very differently to four finders.

Farming#

Command: /hoemerchant · NPC: the Farming Merchant (Toolsmith) · Free tool: /freehoe

Farming is the spine of the server. Thirteen crops, one hoe that climbs them, and the crops feed almost every other system — hoe upgrades, armour, the Warmaster's blades and the compression sink.

The 13-crop ladder#

The crops are real blocks placed in the field — all thirteen are physically there. Your hoe decides which of them you can actually harvest: a hoe can harvest its own crop and everything below it, but swing at a crop above its tier and the break is refused.

The Farm Hoe#

Your first Wheat Hoe is free. The hoe visually changes material as it climbs (wooden → stone → iron → gold → diamond → netherite).

Sub-tier upgrades are bought by right-clicking the hoe (the merchant only handles trade-ups). Each step costs a pile of the hoe's own crop, pulled straight out of your backpack:

Crop costs scale +15% per crop tier — a Crimson Roots upgrade wants roughly 2.8× the crops a Wheat one does. The Token walls at IV / VII / X scale by cropTier ^ 1.6, so they get steep fast.

From sub-tier VIII upward the highest upgrades also want Compressed crops of the hoe's own crop, on top of the raw crops and Tokens. See Compression.

Trading up to the next crop's hoe is Tokens only: 20,000 × (next tier)². So Potato costs 80,000, Carrot 180,000, and Crimson Roots lands at 3,380,000 Tokens.

Crop yield#

Farming is the one pillar where your multipliers land on the quantity of crops per break rather than on a payout. Everything that stacks into it:

• Your invested Tokens power
• Rank crop-yield perk (+10% at Volt … +200% at Redline)
• Crop Milestones stage-5 doubler for that crop
• Idols (+5% each, to +50%) and Relics for that crop
• The Starfall weather
• The Fortune stat (a chance to double a drop)

Crops always bank to the backpack — they're never auto-sold — because their value is realised in /bazaar.

Selling crops — the Bazaar#

Command: /bazaar (aliases /bz, /market)

A crop sells for its tier in Tokens: Wheat 1, Potato 2 … Crimson Roots 13. Selling also stocks a shared, server-wide pool that other players can buy out of at 1.25× tier. The only crops on sale are ones players have sold in — it's a genuine player market.

Mining#

Command: /minemerchant · NPC: the Mining Merchant (Minemaster) · Free tool: /freepickaxe

Mining mirrors farming exactly, one ladder over.

The 13-ore ladder#

Important difference from farming: in a mine, the ore you bank is decided by the pickaxe you carry, not by the block you hit. The field renders as your tier. So mining a higher ore means trading the pickaxe up — there's nothing above your level to swing at.

The Pickaxe#

Your first Coal Pickaxe is free. Ten sub-tiers per ore, thirteen ores.

Ore counts scale +15% per ore tier; the Token walls scale by oreTier ^ 1.6. Trading up costs 25,000 × (next tier)² — Ancient Debris lands at 4,225,000 Tokens.

Sell ores through /backpack. Use /ores to view the full ladder in-game.

Foraging#

Command: /foragemerchant (aliases /woodsman, /axeshop) · NPC: the Foraging Merchant (Woodsman) · Free tool: /freeaxe

The wood pillar. Same structure as mining: the axe you carry decides which log you bank.

The 13-wood ladder#

The Axe#

The Oak Axe is free. The cost curve is identical to the pickaxe's: logs at 16 / 32 / 64 / 128 / 224 / 384 / 640 / 1,024 / 1,600 (scaled +15% per wood tier), Token walls of 3,000 / 24,000 / 180,000 at sub-tiers IV / VII / X (scaled by woodTier ^ 1.6), and a trade-up of 25,000 × (next tier)².

Use /woods (aliases /forage, /logs) to see the ladder.

Daily foraging payouts: logs chopped are counted toward the daily payout board, so it's worth putting time in even after you've maxed the axe.

Fishing#

Commands: /rod (the Fishing Merchant) · /fish (your Fish Backpack) · Free tool: /freerod

Fishing is the idle pillar. You cast once, leave the line in the water, and it works while you do something else. There are two separate streams running at the same time:

1. The species catch#

Roughly once a second while your bobber is in water, you land a fish. It surfaces a few blocks out, swims to your bobber trailing its rarity colour, and banks into your Fish Backpack. +N Species shows on your action bar in the species' colour.

Landing a Legendary or Mythic is announced to the whole server.

The species ladder#

Nothing is ever locked out of your pool. Every species is catchable from your first cast — a better rod only bends the odds. Values climb far faster than the weights fall, which is exactly why levelling the rod is worth it.

Two specials also ride the ladder. They never bank and never sell; they pay out the moment they surface, but they do score on your collection board:

• Drift Cache (Epic) — a stored Token Booster (30%+ for 20 minutes)
• Redline Key (Legendary) — a crate key
• Tidecaller (Mythic, very rare) — the Big Catch charm itself

Rare-catch luck#

Two things lift the odds on everything above Common:

• +4% per rod level (your effective rod power)
• Your account-wide Fortune stat (Voltweave gear, charms, pets)

The combined luck is capped at 6×, so no amount of gear can invert the ladder.

2. The currency faucet#

Separately, every 5 seconds your line pays:

• Shards (base 2, scaled by rod power)
• A 15% chance of a Gem trickle
• A 3% chance of a Token Booster (25%+ for 15 minutes)

This stream is deliberately decoupled from the catch — catching faster does not multiply your Shards.

The tiered rod#

The rod is 7 world-bands × 10 sub-tiers = 70 rungs. A band is a world on the /worlds ladder, and each band is sold only at that world's Fishing Merchant, to a player who has that world unlocked.

Each upgrade costs the band's currency plus a specific species drained from your Fish Backpack — so the pillar feeds itself, and later bands ask for genuinely rarer fish. Costs escalate ×1.6 per sub-tier, and a trade-up into a new band carries a 3× premium on that band's first cost.

Your rod power is (band − 1) × 10 + sub-tier, so a Band 3 Rod VII is power 27. That single number is what bends your catch odds, and it works identically in every world.

The Fish Backpack#

/fish opens it. Every species on the ladder, what you're carrying, and a sell button. Click a species to sell just that one, shift-click to sell the lot. Fish sell for Tokens, through your normal multiplier.

/fish collection opens Fish Caught — your lifetime catch, species by species, with undiscovered fish as silhouettes and your server rank.

Combat#

Command: /swordmerchant (aliases /warmaster, /swordshop) · /mobs · Free tool: /freesword

The mob platform#

/mobs lets you choose which mob to grind. Like the crop and ore fields, the platform is rendered per player — you see your selected mob at every spawn point, nobody else does.

There are 30 mobs in order, from Chicken up to Warden. You unlock the next by killing the current one: 50 kills for the first, +25 more each step (so Chicken → Pig is 50, Pig → Cow is 75, and so on).

Every spawn rolls a rarity, which makes it both tankier and worth more:

Kills pay Gems (scaled by the mob's ladder position and its rarity) plus account XP, and each hit rolls your sword's enchants. Only a sword does damage — hits queue damage that drains the mob's HP over a few ticks.

The Sword#

The sword works differently to the other four tools, and it's worth knowing why:

• Sub-levels are earned, not bought. Your blade gains XP from kills and levels itself 1 → 10 inside its tier.
• Tiers are gated on bosses. Tier 1 is the free Scrap Blade from the Warmaster. Every tier above it requires you to have defeated that tier's personal boss, then pay in that boss's Fangs plus a large pile of that boss's crop.
• A tier-up keeps your enchant picks (unlike every other tool). Your levels reset to 1, which is punishment enough.

Each level inside a tier adds +1.5% of base damage — worth finishing, never worth as much as the next boss. The blade also carries crit chance (3% at T1 → 10% at T8), attack speed (+7% → +21%), crit damage (1.55× → 1.90×) and boss damage (+2% → +16%).

Tier-up costs run from 16 Fangs + 250,000 crops (tier 2) up to 48 Fangs + 3,000,000 crops (tier 8). At the top of the ladder the crop portion is paid in Compressed crops instead.

Levelling XP scales hard: ×1.45 per tier and ×1.35 per level, from a base of 750 XP. Arena kills feed it at about 115–240 sword XP each, so tier 1's ten levels are a few hundred kills and tier 8's are a few thousand.

AFK grinding#

Some zones are AFK zones — an empty standing room rather than a field. Stand in one and you get a passive grind hit every 2 seconds, no clicking:

• A drop into your backpack
• Skill XP and account XP
• Full enchant procs, including AOE breakers

You'll see You are AFK! on screen when you enter, and a countdown to your next action on the action bar.

Two things AFK grinding does not do: it does not build your Momentum combo (it holds it frozen instead), and standing in an AFK zone pauses the separate online-time Shard faucet (that one rewards being active, not idle).

The rod is the other idle lane. Cast a line and leave it — see Fishing.

Compression#

Commands: /compress (aliases /compressor, /cc) · /withdraw <crop> <amount> (aliases /voucher, /wd)

Late-game farming produces absurd crop counts. Compression is where they go.

10,000 raw crops = 1 Compressed crop. 10,000 Compressed = 1 Double-Compressed. That's the whole ladder — two tiers above raw, and no more.

Compression is completely lossless. It only ever moves value; nothing is minted and nothing is burned, so decompressing always returns exactly what compressing took. Compressed crops live in your grind backpack alongside your raw crops.

In the panel:

• Left-click a tier → compress one · Shift-left → compress as many as you can
• Right-click → decompress one · Shift-right → decompress all
• Compress Max folds a crop as far up the ladder as it will go in one pass

What compressed crops are for: they're the top-end cost for the highest hoe sub-tiers (VIII and above), the highest sword tiers, and the fighting armour sets.

Crop Vouchers#

/withdraw <crop> <amount> pulls an exact amount of a crop out of your backpack into a tradeable Crop Voucher item. Anyone holding it can right-click to redeem it into their own backpack — that's the point. If a redeemer's backpack can't hold it all, they bank what fits and keep a smaller voucher for the rest. Nothing is lost either way.

Special Crops#

Command: /specials (alias /specialcrops)

Special Crops are a live minigame that rides on top of ordinary farming. As you harvest, a crop in the field occasionally lights up with a glowing outline. Harvest it and it pays a multiple of that crop straight into your backpack instead of a single unit.

Each type asks for a different action. One type, one verb.

How they appear#

• ~2% chance per manual harvest. AOE proc cells resolve specials but never spawn them, and neither does the AFK lane — you have to actually swing.
• Up to 4 live at once per player.
• They appear within 14 blocks of the crop you just broke, so they turn up across the field rather than only under your feet.
• Only one timed/chase special (Nitro, Cascade, Capacitor) runs at a time. A rolled timed type falls back to a Glitch while one is already going.

What raises the rate: the Special Surge weather, your prestige (+2% per level, capped at +200%), Relic Special Crop Chance, your Fortune stat, and the Overclock Special Crop Chance node.

The types#

The first five are available from a brand new account. The other five unlock one rebirth at a time.

The crash game (Capacitor and Singularity)#

These two work like a crash/Aviator game and they are the most interesting thing in the field.

A multiplier starts at 1.00× and climbs on its own, faster the higher it gets. At any tick it can blow out. Harvest the marked crop to cash out at whatever it's showing. Let it blow and you get nothing at all.

The catch is that the bust odds sour faster than the climb accelerates, which puts the sweet spot low.

Of Capacitor rounds you hold: ~74% see 2×, ~56% see 3×, ~33% see 5×, ~9% see 10×, ~1% see 20×. Expected value peaks flat across 3–4× and is already below the stake by 10×.

So: cashing out early is the correct play. Chasing a 10× is a deliberate gamble for a big number and a server-wide shout. Which is exactly the point.

One extra wrinkle — every ordinary harvest near a live crash round nudges its multiplier up 1% (1.5% for the Singularity). So farming around it still matters. AOE procs deliberately don't count; one proc clearing hundreds of blocks would skip the risk entirely.

What a special actually pays#

multiplier × your crop-yield multiplier of that crop, into your backpack.

Specials multiply the crop, never Tokens — so the payout rides your whole yield stack (Tokens power, Starfall weather, Crop Milestones, Idols, Relics, Vault Seals, rank crop-yield) and its value is realised when you sell in /bazaar. A special crop of a maxed crop pays double, same as a normal harvest of one.

If your backpack fills mid-payout you'll be told, once, on the action bar.

Tuning the noise#

/specials lets you choose, per type, how you're told about a payout:

• Title — a big message across the middle of your screen
• Chat — one line in the usual house format
• Both
• Off — nothing written. You still get the sound and the glow.

By default the big timed ones (Nitro, Cascade, Capacitor, Singularity, Mirage) use a title because they demand you look up now; the quieter ones (Glitch, Fractal, Prism, Echo, Overgrowth) use chat, so a field full of Glitches never blanks your screen.

The outline colours are a language worth learning: Nitro is always yellow, Cascade is always blue. Everything else takes its type colour, and Glitch takes a colour picked to contrast with whatever crop it's standing in.

Selling and the backpack#

Command: /backpack (alias /bp)

Everything you grind banks here by type and total count. It has five capacity tiers:

Tabs across the top: Everything, Crops, Ores, Fish, Wood.

If it fills up you'll get a red Backpack full! Use /backpack to sell. on your action bar and further drops are lost, so keep an eye on it.

Auto-sell is available on ores, wood and fish with the rank perk — drops convert instantly instead of banking. Crops always bank, because they're sold through the Bazaar.

Command reference#

The /free* commands each refuse if you're already carrying that pillar's tool. They're a safety net for a binned tool, not a way to farm spares.