Swarm

Swarm is a Powerball path perk for pickaxe prestige. Every Powerball proc launches more balls, and each extra ball carries its own full block budget.

At a glance

How it works

When a Powerball volley is about to fire, its ball count is multiplied by 1 plus your rolled value. A 4-ball volley with a 50% roll becomes 6 balls.

Fractions are not thrown away. If the maths lands on 4.5 balls you get 4 balls with a 50% chance of a fifth, so a sub-one-ball fraction still pays what it is worth instead of silently rounding down to nothing at low ball counts.

Crucially, each ball carries its own block budget. That makes Swarm a real output multiplier rather than just a bigger firework — which is also why its roll range is much smaller than the old version of this perk, which made every ball share one pooled budget.

Interactions

• Stacks with the Riftborn full-set bonuses, which are applied after Swarm: Powerball Split adds a chance at one more ball, and Riftcharged doubles the whole count every 5th proc.
• Meteor fires after Swarm and collapses the entire volley into one comet — but the comet is paid the swallowed volley's whole budget, so a big Swarm makes a Meteor bigger rather than wasting it.
• Fission then splits each ball when its run ends, so a Swarm volley produces proportionally more fragments too.

Notes

• Swarm is skipped during a Prismatic Efficiency rainbow echo.
• There is a per-player cap on how many balls are actually rendered. Over-budget balls still fly, bounce and break blocks — you just do not see them. Nothing is lost.