The core promise of the game: your character earns whether or not you're watching. The honest question is how much you give up by not watching.
How idling works
When you leave, the server freezes a snapshot of your combat setup — your level, your gear, the zone's monsters and their drop tables — and replays the maths against elapsed time. On your return, the banked experience, yang and drops are committed in one batch.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- Equipment swaps don't apply retroactively. The snapshot is taken when the session starts, so upgrading mid-idle doesn't improve what you already banked. Equipping something stops the session and starts a new one.
- Accumulation caps at 8 hours. Past that, time stops counting. Coming back twice a day loses nothing; coming back twice a week does.
Focus stacks
Active play layers focus on top. Attacking builds stacks; stacks decay when you stop. At the ceiling they give:
- +40 stacks maximum
- +0.01 damage per stack
- +0.02 rewards per stack
More damage means faster kills, and faster kills mean more rewards per hour on top of the reward multiplier itself — the two compound. In practice active play lands somewhere around 1.8–2.5× the experience per hour of pure idling.
So is idling punished?
No, and this is deliberate. Idle earnings are the baseline: the weighted per-kill maths the idle simulator uses is the same maths the live combat engine uses, so an hour idle is a real hour of fighting, not a discounted one.
Active play is a bonus for attention, capped at roughly 2×. That's enough that playing actively is worth doing, and not so much that being unable to play actively locks you out of content.
Getting the most from idling
- Pick the right zone. Idle earnings track kills per hour. A zone where you kill quickly beats a higher-level zone where each fight drags.
- Come back within 8 hours when you can. Past the cap you're earning nothing.
- Gear before you leave, not after. The snapshot freezes at session start.
- Watch your survivability. Dying interrupts accumulation; a zone slightly below your level often out-earns one slightly above it.
Per-kill experience cap
A single kill can never award more than 20% of the experience needed for your next level. This only binds when you're killing something far above your level, and it exists so a single lucky high-level kill can't skip a level. In normal play you'll never see it.