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Professions

Fifteen professions, three slots, five ranks, and a sixteen-step chain that decides what one action really pays you.

What a profession is

A profession is a filter, not a title. It decides which of your actions produce job XP and coins at all. With no Miner in a slot, mined ore pays you nothing from the job system: the payout stops at the slot check before anything is calculated. The five smithing professions spent a long stretch in exactly that state, defined in code but missing from the selection menu, and therefore impossible to earn with.

You get three slots. Two are free from the start. The third is a one-time unlock from /shop at 150,000 coins; until you buy it, the slot shows a red placeholder in the job menu and in /profile. Once unlocked it counts everywhere the first two do: XP awards, rank-ups, mastery and ability triggers.

The surface is /job (also /jobs, also /j) for selection, info, the leaderboard and abilities, plus /profile for your three slots at a glance. The selection screen fits 14 professions per page, so with 15 there are two pages, and the arrows are painted only when there is somewhere to go. On Java you shift-click a profession to select it; on Bedrock any tap works.

The fifteen professions

Seven gathering and combat professions, five smithing professions, plus the Archaeologist, the Rift Hunter and the Farmer. Each earns from its own set of actions, and an action belonging to a profession you do not hold pays nothing.

The five smiths earn XP only. Every award call from the forge passes an income of 0.0, so no smithing profession ever pays a coin directly. Their value sits in their rank passives, their abilities and their masteries, and a smithing company earns no labour revenue either. That is a design decision rather than an oversight, and the founding card says so to your face.

Three more honest edges. The Runesmith has exactly one XP source, rune engraving, and the tooltip says so rather than padding the list. The Archaeologist has no rank passive at all; it carries only its two secondary traits, Luck and Ruin Loot, which feed the trait multiplier in the income chain. The Farmer has no active ability: it is a passive profession with the traits Fiber Hands and Master Curer, and the mastery menu skips it instead of opening an empty picker.

Two numbers moved for reasons worth knowing. Archaeologist XP now comes from brushing a suspicious block; breaking one gives nothing, while decorated pots still pay on break. And Explorer chunk XP dropped from 7.0 to 2.0 per new chunk (4.0 with the Cartographer mastery) when a second, unrelated payer that had been paying for the same chunk crossing was removed.

Ranks and the XP ladder

Every profession runs the same five-rank ladder, and XP is tracked per profession. All fifteen ladders exist side by side; only the ones sitting in your slots advance.

/job info prints the whole ladder with a marker on your current rank, and both the selection items and /profile carry a Next: <rank> (<xp> XP) line, so the next threshold is never a guess.

The rank multiplier is the largest single number in the payout chain, and its position matters as much as its size: it is applied after the action-chain clamp, so the clamp of 3.0 is not a ceiling on your total.

Ranks also unlock passives. The clearest example is the Miner's: from Journeyman upward, breaking ore below y 64 carries a 50 percent chance of one extra drop set, stamped with the ore region it came from. It deliberately does not fire when your own chunk zone already suppressed the drop, which is why it pays nothing on the first break of a Rich-zone vein.

Masteries: the one branching choice

Reaching Master, at 60,000 XP, opens a two-path picker for that profession. You take one path. Across the roster there are 28 masteries, two on each of 14 professions. The Farmer is the exception with none, and the menu skips it rather than dead-ending on an empty picker.

On the gathering side the masteries lean towards income and XP rather than combat effects. The Explorer's Cartographer doubles chunk XP, taking 2.0 per new chunk to 4.0. The Trader's Merchant Prince is worth 1.25 on income, and Smuggler adds 1.15 at the same step; both are coins-only and land late in the chain, after the rank multiplier.

Active abilities

Hold the profession's tool, sneak, right-click. That is the entire trigger, and it is the same on Java and Bedrock. The tool decides which profession answers: a pickaxe for the Miner, a forged weapon or the Forge Hammer for the Weaponsmith, forged armour for the Armorsmith, a forged tool for the Toolsmith, a Rune Stone or forged item for the Runesmith, an ingot or forged relic for the Alloy Master, a Brush for the Archaeologist, a Rift Shard for the Rift Hunter.

Most professions carry two abilities. Cooldowns are per ability and run from 30 seconds to 120 seconds.

Two conveniences are worth knowing. An ability that finds nothing does not burn its cooldown: Relic Sense and Rift Sense both return quietly and leave the timer untouched. And the Cooldown Pass, 3,000 coins from /shop, halves every ability cooldown while it is active, survives a restart, and says so on the action bar when an ability is refused for cooldown. Inside an expedition arena, on a server where that system is switched on, a live action-bar readout shows each slotted ability as READY or with its seconds remaining, the pass and any mastery halving already accounted for.

The sixteen-factor income chain

Every coin a profession pays passes through one funnel, in one fixed order. Each action starts from a base value set by its income tier.

That base then walks the chain. The order is the point. The dampers come first, the multipliers after, and the rank multiplier lands past the only clamp in the sequence.

The clamp is not a ceiling. Step 11 clamps the running multiplier at 3.0, but step 12 applies rank afterwards. With no action chain running, Dangerous 1.5 times night 1.3 times low health 1.5 times dimension 1.5 times no armour 1.25 times trait 1.5 times Bounty Rush 2.0 already comes to 16.4, and Legend at 3.0 on top of that reaches roughly 49. A maxed income booster pushes the theoretical ceiling to about 294. It needs seven conditions at once and nobody plays that way, but that is the real shape of the arithmetic.

The floor is the more common experience. Pattern detector 0.25 multiplied by diminishing returns 0.25 is 0.0625. On a Common action with a base of 10.0 coins, a fully damped action pays well under a single coin. That is also the honest answer to why the old faction income boost felt like nothing: a single 1.5 sitting at step 14 cannot rescue a payout the first two steps already cut to a sixteenth.

Step 15 is the company fork. If companies are enabled, the action pays coins, you have an employer for that profession and you are clocked in, the coins go to the company and reach you on your payslip instead of your wallet. The fork sits after every multiplier deliberately, so clocked work is never worth less than the identical freelance action. The action bar tells you when it happens, and the five smiths pass 0.0, so the fork never fires for them.

Chunk zones

Every chunk carries one of four zones. The classification is biome-weighted, seeded and cached per chunk for the session, so a chunk keeps its zone while you are playing. It is step 3 of the income chain, and for the Miner it also changes what the block itself does.

You get zone reminders as you cross chunk boundaries. For a deliberate look ahead there is the Chunk Reveal Token at 1,500 coins: right-clicking it consumes one token and prints a three by three map of your chunk and its eight neighbours in chat, green for Rich, white for Normal, grey for Depleted, red for Dangerous, gold for where you stand, with a legend naming your own chunk's zone. Neighbours that are not currently loaded show dark grey, because the token never forces a chunk to generate.

Why mindless farming stops paying

The first five steps of the chain are dampers, and they have more teeth than anything that follows.

• The AFK gate at step 0 skips the award instead of shrinking it. Standing still while something else does the work pays nothing at all, rather than a smaller amount.
• The pattern detector keys on the raw coordinates of the action and cuts everything after it to a quarter. Feed it the same coordinates over and over and it will keep doing so.
• Diminishing returns key on the action id, halving and then quartering as one action repeats.
• Location hoarding halves the payout again.
• The action chain is the same mechanism pointed the other way: each step of variety adds 1.2 to a running bonus, and the rank multiplier lands on top of that cap rather than under it.

Multiply the two worst dampers together and a payout is 6.25 percent of its base. That is how a 10-coin Common action becomes 0.625 coins before rank is applied. The dampers measure repetition of place and of action, not how long you have played, so the way out is to vary what you do and where you do it.

Two documented cases of the dampers catching legitimate play, both since fixed, show exactly what they are measuring:

• Group rift clears passed every payee the shared rift centre as the action location, so every player after the first tripped the coordinate-keyed pattern detector and took the 0.25 deterministically. Each payee is now passed their own position.
• Kills across a rift fight compounded diminishing returns, because a wave legitimately concentrates kills in one chunk. The mob-kill action id now carries the wave number, which resets the damper each wave.

What sits alongside the professions

Two other systems feed the same numbers without being part of the job system.

Skills are a separate progression: 81 base nodes across 10 disciplines, plus 30 rank nodes. They stack on top of your professions rather than replacing them, and a lot of the quality-of-life lives there.

Boosters are the paid layer. The job income booster is a ten-level ladder from +50 percent to +500 percent, taxed like anything else. It sits at step 14 of the chain, which is exactly why a single +50 percent used to be invisible. The ladder is priced against a modelled hourly income: levels 1 to 5 return more than they cost and are a reward for playing, while levels 6 to 10 cost more than they can ever return and are a deliberate coin sink, level 10 landing at roughly 193 percent of its own break-even point. The Cooldown Pass at 3,000 coins halves ability cooldowns; the Trait Boost at 7,500 coins doubles secondary-trait gain, and hunters see it confirmed on the action bar with every kill. Both survive a restart.

A note on how to read all of this. A large part of the newer material is written from source and marked as not yet verified on a live server. Where a number here and your experience in game disagree, this page reports what the code says.