Every miner is a dormant rig until you switch it on. From that block it accrues $RUST — and starts a countdown. Claim inside your tier's decay window and the balance is yours. Miss it and the entire unclaimed balance is burned. Not slashed. Not redistributed. Burned. It is never minted at all.
A decayed rig does not heal itself. It keeps reading zero, block after block, until you finally claim — which pays you nothing and restarts the timer.
You get a dormant rig. It is worth exactly what you paid and it earns nothing. Its art is generated on-chain from the block it was minted in — no IPFS, no metadata server, nothing that can 404 in a year.
One transaction flips it on, permanently. The fans start turning in the artwork itself. From this block it accrues $RUST at its tier hashrate, and the decay clock starts running.
Claim any time inside the window and the pending balance is minted to you. The clock resets and the rig keeps mining. Batch as many rigs as you like into one transaction.
Let the window lapse and the pending balance is gone — burned, never minted, gone from the supply forever. The rig sits at zero until you claim. Your art cracks. The leaderboard records it.