Caverns & Essence

The Caverns are mining's own content. They sit in a separate world, they run on timed sessions, and they pay in currencies you cannot get anywhere else.

Getting in

/caves          The caverns menu (aliases /cavern, /caverns)
/caves tp       Enter a cave and start a session
/caves upgrades Cave-specific upgrades and enchants

/caves tp is the only way in. Each cave is a hand-built shared area, but the ore you see is yours — every player in a cave gets their own set of nodes rendered over the same shell, so nobody is racing you for a vein.

Sessions are time-limited. When yours ends you are teleported back out, so treat a session as a run to be prepared for rather than somewhere to hang around.

Setting a home inside a cave is blocked, along with the other commands that would let you anchor yourself in there.

What caves pay

Two things, and they do different jobs:

• Gemstones — mined items that turn into money and island trophies.
• Essence — a cave-only currency that exists to be spent in the Crucible.

Essence is not tradable and has exactly one sink, so there is no reason to hoard it beyond what you are saving for.

The Essence Crucible

/crucible       Spend essence

The Crucible is a catalog split into bands, and it is where essence turns back into power. Consumables sit in the first band; the bigger entries sit above them.

Some entries are weekly-capped. The menu shows how many of each you have bought this week against the cap, so plan a week's essence around the capped entries you actually want rather than spending it the moment it lands.