Mining and rewards
Mining is how minted TLM reaches players. It is also the most cross-contract operation in the
system: a single mine action touches four contracts and must succeed in all of them or none.
The contracts involved
| Contract | Role |
|---|---|
m.federation   | The mining contract. Validates proof of work, pays rewards. |
awlndratings | Land ownership, land commission and profit share. |
uspts.worlds | User points, earned from NFT attributes, redeemable for NFTs. |
atomicassets | The third-party WAX NFT standard holding tools and land. |
A mine action, end to end
The player does the work off-chain — hashing until the result satisfies the difficulty set by their land and tools — then submits it. Everything after that happens in one transaction.
Because these are inline actions, a failure anywhere — insufficient pot, a cooldown not elapsed, a bad proof — rolls the whole thing back. There is no partial mine.
A mine action moves no TLM to the miner. The reward is written into the minerclaim table
with a claim delay, and the player collects it later with claimmines. The same is true of the
landowner's share, which accrues into landcomms for claimcomms.
There is exactly one inline transfer during a mine: when the landowner is open.worlds, the
profit share is sent immediately rather than accrued.
NFT minting is likewise not part of mine — the mining contract mints via setland, when a new
player is given their first tool.
Why rewards are accrued rather than paid
Both miner rewards and landowner commissions accumulate in tables and are paid out later, by
m.federation::claimmines and
m.federation::claimcomms.
This is deliberate. Transferring on every mine would spam the chain with micro-transfers — one per mine, per miner, and one per parcel for every landowner. Accruing means each party pays for one transaction whenever they choose to collect.
If you are building a UI, this is the reason a player's wallet balance and their "mined so far" figure are different numbers held in different tables, and why a freshly mined reward is not spendable until it has been claimed.
What decides how much you earn
Mining output is not flat. It is the product of several factors, which is what creates room for strategy:
- Tool rarity — each rarity draws from a different pool, and each planet can configure the percentage share per rarity independently.
- Land attributes — a parcel's ease, delay and difficulty modify the work required and the payout.
- Bag cooldown — the cooldown is taken from the most recent of the miner's previous mine or the last use of any tool in their bag, so tools cannot be cycled freely.
- Pot fill rate — the pot refills over time from inflation, so mining into an empty pot pays less.
The per-planet configuration lives in
m.federation::pools and
m.federation::config.
Land, commission and profit share
Land is an NFT, so land ownership changes by NFT transfer, not by a contract action. The land ratings contract tracks ownership and the commission each parcel takes from mines performed on it.
Owners set their own terms with
awlndratings::setprofitshr and
awlndratings::setlandnick. Both actions were
originally on the federation contract and moved here.
User points are a second currency
Mining earns TLM and user points, weighted by the attributes of the tools used. Points are
tracked in uspts.worlds and redeemed for NFTs rather
than tokens — which is why mining with better tools matters even when the TLM pot is low.
Points are added by inline action from the mining contract, so a player's point balance is only ever changed as part of a mine.
The proxy contract ptpxy.worlds is a budgeted
delegation layer in front of the points contract. An allocator is registered with a total
budget; the allocator then grants a points manager a budget spread over a number of days, and
the contract clamps each grant so the allocator cannot exceed its own total. setbudget requires
the allocator's authority, so point-granting can be handed out to other systems without giving
them unbounded power to mint points.