System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The AFK Taper

Gathering runs at full speed for 20 minutes of no input, then tapers all the way down to a 10% floor

Mining and woodcutting both slow down the longer you go without touching the mouse or keyboard — a deliberate limit on how much an unattended, auto-swinging character can gather overnight. The design was actually reversed partway through: the original economy plan called for long idle sessions to be rewarded, targeting tens of thousands of resources overnight. After reading that back, the operator changed course — AFK gathering is meant to be a trickle, not a strategy.

The curve

The floor is deliberately not zero — the operator's own reasoning is that leaving the game running overnight should still be worth doing, just never worth more than actually playing.

What resets the clock — and what doesn't

Any real input counts: a mouse move, a click, a key press, a scroll, a touch. Gathering itself does not reset the clock. That's the entire point of the system — an auto-swinging character with nobody actually at the keyboard is exactly the case being slowed down, so the act of mining or chopping can never refresh its own timer and keep itself running at full speed forever.

Recovery is instant, not a ramp: the moment you touch anything, gathering speed returns to 100% immediately, with no warm-up period. Being slowed while you're away is meant to feel different from being punished when you come back.

Measured against the real clock, not game time

The taper is timed against the actual wall clock (when the last input happened) rather than accumulated game time, specifically because a backgrounded browser tab throttles its own internal timers — game time alone would badly undercount how long you'd actually been away. This is also why the taper applies smoothly to whatever you're doing at the moment your input lapses, rather than locking in whatever speed happened to be in effect when you started gathering a particular node: walk away mid-node and the same node keeps slowing down in real time, and come back to it and it speeds back up immediately, all without needing to restart the action.

Version history

• Added, as an amendment to a larger economy pass — the original spec called for long AFK sessions to be a genuinely strong strategy; the operator reversed that stance after seeing it written out, and this shipped as a deliberate taper instead.
• The idle windows doubled from the spec's first draft, at a direct follow-up request ("double the idle time, 20 mins 100% etc") — the 20/60/120-minute bands and the 10% floor described above are the doubled, shipped numbers.

Trivia

• Measured on a level-500 character left idle for eight straight hours: roughly 10,300 ore, not the "low thousands" the original spec's own estimate assumed — because the bulk of it (about 6,810) is earned in the first two hours before the 10% floor is even reached. Lowering the floor further barely moves the total; the real lever is how long the full-speed window lasts, not how low the floor goes.