Questions you should ask before minting

What actually happens when I mint?

You get a dormant rig. It sits there. It earns nothing, it loses nothing, and it will happily sit dormant forever. Minting is not a commitment to play — activating is.

So what does activating do?

It writes the current block timestamp into the token and starts two clocks at once: the one that pays you and the one that takes it away. Activation is permanent. There is no off switch.

How much $RUST does a rig make?

0.0001 $RUST per block per 1× of hashrate. RUST rigs are 1×, IRON is 12×, URANIUM is 65×. A block is two seconds, so a URANIUM rig makes about 280 $RUST a day — if you actually collect it.

What is the decay window, exactly?

The maximum time you can go without claiming. 72 hours for RUST, 48 for IRON, 24 for URANIUM. Claim at any point inside it and you keep everything accrued. Go one second over and the entire pending balance is worth zero.

Zero as in slashed? Redistributed to other miners?

Zero as in it was never minted. There is no burn address holding your $RUST and no other holder receiving it. The tokens simply do not come into existence. The only trace is a Decayed event with the amount you lost, which is why the leaderboard can show it.

My rig decayed. Is it bricked?

No, but it does not fix itself either. A decayed rig keeps reading zero every block until you call claim. That claim pays you nothing — it exists purely to restart the clock. From that block it mines normally again.

Why would I ever buy URANIUM then?

Sixty-five times the hashrate for fifty times the price, with a third of the safety margin. It is the best rig on the board and the least forgiving. That is the entire trade.

Can I claim a hundred rigs at once?

Yes. activate() and claim() both take arrays. The front end batches forty per transaction. Every token still emits its own event with its own amount, so a decayed rig in a big batch is never quietly folded into the total.

What if I sell a rig mid-cycle?

The pending balance follows the NFT, not the seller. Whoever holds the token at claim time gets paid. Sell an activated rig with twenty hours of $RUST on it and you are handing that over too — check the dashboard before you list.

Is the art on-chain?

Entirely. tokenURI returns a base64 SVG generated in the contract from a seed fixed at mint. Nothing is pinned, hosted, or fetched. The art is also stateful: a dormant rig is dark, a running rig spins, and a decayed rig is visibly cracked and rusted out. Your negligence is rendered.

Is there a supply cap on $RUST?

100,000,000, with 20,000,000 carved out at deploy for treasury and liquidity. Everything else can only be created by a rig that mined it and an owner who claimed it in time. Decay is permanently deflationary against that cap.

Who can mint $RUST?

Only the DecayMiners contract, and the address is set exactly once at deploy and then frozen. Not the owner, not the deployer, nobody. Check setMiner and minerLocked yourself.

DECAY MINERS — fully on-chain art, fully on-chain decay. Claim or lose it.