Your Pickaxe

Your Ancient Pickaxe is the heart of everything you do on Ancients. It stores the Ancient Energy you mine, gains its own levels and enchants, and can eventually be prestiged into a specialised endgame tool. Take care of it — a well-built pickaxe is worth more than anything else in your inventory.

Pickaxe tiers

Pickaxes come in six tiers. Each tier unlocks at a mining level, and you can buy one from the shop with money:

Each tier unlocks higher tiers of ore to mine, but each pickaxe level costs more energy on a higher-tier pickaxe.

Energy and levelling

Every ore you break feeds Ancient Energy directly into the pickaxe you're holding. The pickaxe shows a charge bar filling toward its next level's cost.

When the bar is full, throw the pickaxe into the Wormhole — the swirling portal right next to spawn. The Wormhole consumes the stored energy, raises the pickaxe one level, and lets you pick a new enchant from a set of floating options (see the Enchants page for how that roll works). Levelling always succeeds; only the enchant roll can fail.

Level-up costs grow with every level, and the current cost is always shown on the pickaxe itself.

A pickaxe normally can't hold more energy than its displayed capacity — unless it carries the Energy Battery godly enchant, which lets it keep banking energy far past 100%.

Getting energy back out

Hold the pickaxe and use /extract <amount|all> to pull stored energy out as physical Ancient Energy items you can spend elsewhere. Extracting inside a safe zone is tax-free. Anywhere else, extraction is taxed: the tax starts at 20% and shrinks with each rank you hold, down to 5% at the top rank. Certain pickaxe prestige stats (and outpost buffs) can reduce the extract tax even further. Splitting an existing Ancient Energy stack with /extract is never taxed.

Pickaxe trims

Trims are rare cosmetics you drag onto a pickaxe for a permanent bonus:

Pickaxe Prestige

Once a pickaxe has done serious work, you can prestige it with /pickprestige (also /pickaxeprestige). A pickaxe can prestige 11 times. Prestiging keeps your level, energy and enchants — you lose nothing.

Each prestige requires two things, both shown in the prestige menu:

1. Mined-ore progress — each pickaxe tier tracks its signature ore. Higher-tier ores also count toward the bar, and premium ores count as more than one block (emerald ore ×1.25, ancient debris ×1.5, calcite ×2).
2. Stored energy — a chunk of the pickaxe's banked energy is consumed; the exact cost is shown in the menu and rises with each prestige.

What prestige gives you

• Most prestiges: pick a base stat for your pickaxe — rolled bonuses like Ore Gain, Energy Gain, XP Gain, Shard Chance, Global Proc Chance, Calcite Charge Find, Energy Capacity, Reduced Extract Tax, Ore Respawn Rate, Meteorite Energy, Meteorite Ores, or Mining Speed.
• Prestige 3 and 8: pick a path perk instead.
• Prestige 5 and 10: pick a base stat and a path perk.

Path perks come from three paths, each pushing a different playstyle:

Every stat and perk rolls a value within a range, so two pickaxes are never quite the same. Special tokens let you tune the rolls — the Perk Swap Token, Perk Reroll Token, Stat Swap Token and Stat Reroll Token each drag onto a pickaxe to swap or reroll perks and stats. They drop from boss fights and other high-end content.

Prestige 11 — Tartarus Prestige

The final prestige is different. It requires a Tartarus Sigil applied to the pickaxe before you can attempt it, plus a massive 50,000,000 weighted-ore requirement (the same for every tier). On success you choose one of three Pure specialisations, each rolling 80–100% more of one yield while giving up the other two entirely:

• Pure Insight — XP only (no energy, no ore)
• Pure Conduit — energy only (no XP, no ore)
• Pure Vein — ore only (no XP, no energy)

Useful pickaxe commands

Protecting your pickaxe

A White Scroll can be dragged onto a pickaxe (or satchel) to protect it: if you die, you keep the item and only its stored energy drops. White Scrolls turn up in contraband and lootboxes.