Powder grinding refers to the currency used to acquire upgrades on your Heart of the Mountain tree (HOTM), its quite simple to do but it takes hours to do. But its extremely rewarding and you can make some serious coin via the mining perks.

There's a load of HOTM tree perks you can use but the main ones for making money are Mining Fortune, Mining Speed, Fortunate and Professional are the core ones you're likely looking to level.

Its pretty simple, but always a common question “how do I powder grind fast?” well Its not going to be “fast” there is a level of RNG involved, essentially the method Im going to primary talks to requires breaking hard stone in the Crystal Hollows so you will need to have at least 1500 Mining Speed to instant mine it. Once you do, youll start breaking blocks until chests appear with a puzzle. The puzzle is simple, you look at the particles until they disappear, a chat message will then appear with what you obtained.

Where to powder grind? Well powder mine anywhere there's a large amount of hardstone. I would recommend doing it in either the Precursor Remnants or Jungle as you can get Robotron parts or Sludge (using a jungle pick in the jungle) which as you can image is one of the benefits of powder grinding and a great side income. You can make anywhere from 2 million to 4 million coins an hour while powder grinding from selling the hardstone, gemstones, ores you obtain while searching for chests and the contents of the chest themselves.

Requirements:

• Get to HOTM6 at a minimum, I know its a grind but there's a reason. You basically need the Great Explorer perk to get a large amount of chests and Mole to help you break more blocks.
• 1500 Mining Speed this should easily achieved at heart of the mountain 6, you can check your mining speed by holding your pickaxe and looking at your stats in the Skyblock Menu.
• As for HOTM tree, and the unlock priority. You want to unlock Mining Speed, Mining Fortune, Daily Powder, Efficient Miner, Mole, Fortunate and Great Explorer. You need these at minimum. If you have some left over tokens you can unlock Powder Buff next, Mining Fortune 2 and what ever other perks you may one. I tend to go for quick forge so I can flip items in the forge.
• You dont need anything spectacular but at this stage of the game you should be doing it in Yog Armour at minimum, but you will definitely need to upgrade at some point.
• Jungle Pick for Jungle mining and anything else that gets 1500 mining speed and can break hardstone instantly. At this stage you should be investing in a gemstone gauntlet.
• Pets? Well, you could just get a silverfish pet and flip it once you level it up or you can use something like a Bal pet. Scatha is best but expensive and you should focus on upgrading everything else first.

Unlock Priority goes as follows:

• Great Explorer get to 10/20 as soon as you can.
• Mole 51, 51 is a good number because sometimes the higher you go the more messy the Mole perk is but at some point youll probably end up maxing it if you have extra powder.
• Once Mole is at 51 get Great Explorer to 20/20.
• Put some levels into efficient miner if you want to quickly break through the ores youll find.
• Some levels in fortune for extra drops from the ores.

When to stop? Never. This is kind of a joke but also not. The recommend amount of powder to start with is 4m Mithril and 4m Gemstone this is enough to tune your HOTM tree for the gemstone you're mining. You need 4m powder to max mining fortune, Anything after that can go into the other perks to help you make money from mining. The next milestone would be 9-10m Gemstone and 7.5m Mithril this is enough to max a lot of things on your tree. The reason why I say to never stop, is because the “max” amount of powder is around 20 million in Gemstone, this will finish your SkyBlock level milestone for powder.

With maxed Great Explorer and as you get more efficient at it youll earn about 50k to 100k powder/hr. One tip to leave you with, If you're HOTM 6, prioritise your commissions to get to HOTM 7 but make sure you still spec your HOTM tree in the way listed above but every time your lobby has 2x Powder you should literally stop what you're doing and start powder grinding as itll help you get to that 4m powder goal so much faster.

For the love of all things holy, do your daily commissions.