Progression

Prison pickaxe enchants: what each family actually does

On OP prison the pickaxe is your character sheet. Custom enchants are bought with tokens or in-game money and levelled into the thousands. Names differ per server but the families do not, and once you can see the families you can price any enchant menu in a couple of minutes.

Family 1: block breaking

The ones that mine more blocks per swing. Typically an area-of-effect explosion, a layer or row clear, and a plain speed boost. Common names: Explosive, Nuke, Jackhammer, Lay, Excavate, Efficiency, Haste.

These are the enchants that produce the raw block throughput everything else multiplies, so they are usually the correct first investment. Watch for a server capping them, because a cap changes the whole spend order.

Family 2: money and multipliers

Fortune-style multipliers on block value, direct money-per-block procs, and token generators. Common names: Fortune, Greed, Money Bags, Prosper, Tokenator, Goldstrike, Salary.

These scale with family 1 rather than replacing it. A money proc on a pickaxe that breaks nine blocks a swing pays nine times less than the same proc on one that breaks nine hundred.

Family 3: utility

Quality of life: auto-sell, auto-smelt, inventory compaction, keep-inventory in the mine, night vision, speed and haste effects, and backpack feeding. Common names: Autosell, Smelter, Compact, Voidwalker, Locksmith.

Cheap and easy to undervalue. Auto-sell in particular removes the walk to the sell chest, which on a server with a fast mine reset is a large real gain.

Family 4: proc-chaining

Enchants whose only job is to trigger other enchants: extra proc rolls, doubled proc chances, or a chance to fire every other enchant at once. Common names: Chain, Cascade, Overload, Double Proc, Lucky.

These are the last thing you buy and the first thing that breaks a server's balance, because they multiply everything else at once. A well-run server caps them; how a server handles proc caps is a decent proxy for how carefully its economy is tuned.

Spending order that works on most servers

1. Block breaking to a usable area of effect.
2. Auto-sell and auto-smelt, because they pay for themselves in walking time.
3. Money multipliers, now that there is throughput to multiply.
4. Everything else, then proc-chaining last.

You can test this on our number one at play.talonmc.net, whose enchant set maps straight onto these families: Jackhammer and Nuke are block breaking, Token Miner is the money family, Key Finder and Wild Blaze are utility, and Vein Miner sits between the first two.

Next in the prison wiki

• Prison economies: sell prices, multipliers and inflation Every prison economy is one ratio, sell price against rankup cost, and one failure mode, multiplier inflation with no sink.
• Prison PvP: warps, drop rules and combat versions Prison PvP lives at dedicated warps with their own drop rules, and the combat version the server runs decides how it feels.
• Prison gangs: shared money, perks and territory Gangs turn a solo grind into a group one, with shared banks, levelled perks and usually a leaderboard worth fighting over.
• Prison crates and keys: what is worth opening Crates are prison's reward loop. The useful question is not what is inside but whether the key is earnable.