Fission

Fission is a Powerball path perk for pickaxe prestige. When a Powerball finishes its run, it bursts into smaller fragments that keep going.

At a glance

How it works

Every ball you fire splits once, when its run ends — however it ends. That matters more than it sounds: a ball almost never dies by exhausting its block budget. Live telemetry counted 8,038 balls that spent their budget against 91,041 that ran out of bounces, time or range first. An older version only split on a spent budget, so the perk was doing nothing on roughly 92% of balls and just read in-game as the ball vanishing.

Fragments launch from the nearest open space next to where the parent died, rather than from the death point itself — balls usually die against a block face, and fragments spawned inside solid rock spent their whole life boring their way out.

Each fragment gets half the parent's original budget and a 2.5 second clock. The clock is what actually bounds a fragment: at typical break rates that is around 1.7 blocks each, which puts Fission roughly level with Swarm and Meteor.

Notes

• Fragments do not fission again. Only first-generation balls split, and each splits only once.
• Fragments inherit the parent's credit chain, so their yield shows up as Powerball to Fission rather than as extra free Powerball income.
• If the pickaxe leaves your hotbar mid-flight, the split is skipped.
• Balls fired by Barrage fission too.