AFK Heroes Bosses Now Drop Pickaxe Crates as Solana Idle RPG Prepares for Mining

In Brief:

• Pickaxe Crates now drop from bosses in AFK Heroes (official site), and players can open, upgrade, reroll and fuse them.
• The pickaxes prepare players for Mining, a feature the team has neither released nor given a date for.
• The update is the newest addition to Season 3 of the Solana idle RPG. That season reset every hero to level 1 on Aug. 28.

Boss loot tables in AFK Heroes now include Pickaxe Crates. That gives players an early look at the tools for a mining system the studio has yet to switch on.

The team announced the update in a post on X: “Bosses now drop Pickaxe Crates. Open them, upgrade, reroll, fuse… and get ready for Mining.”

The post carried the heading “PICKAXES ARE HERE” and sent players to an explainer described as “Everything you need to know.”

What’s live and what isn’t

The team named four things players can do with the new items. They can open crates, upgrade pickaxes, reroll them and fuse them. Bosses were the only drop source the team mentioned.

Mining is not live yet, and the announcement didn’t include a launch date. It also didn’t explain how pickaxes will connect to $AFKHERO earnings. Nor did it say whether upgrading, rerolling and fusing will cost tokens or in-game resources.

For now, players can gather pickaxes and improve them, but they have no way to use them.

Boss content in the current season

The game’s map is split into zones, and each zone has its own boss. The zones run from Frozen Spire at level 40, through Molten Foundry, up to Singularity Vault at level 90 and above.

Season 2 arrived on July 24 with server-wide zone bosses. It also added guilds, crafting, tournaments, PvP and a feature called Powerball. Because the new crates only come from boss kills, players have one more reason to work through those zones.

In Season 3, everyone started that climb again from level 1. The season began on Aug. 28. It wiped hero levels and the leaderboard and brought a reward pool three times larger than Season 2’s.

Token and staking

$AFKHERO launched on pump.fun with a maximum supply of 1 billion tokens. Roughly 944.84 million are currently in circulation.

In September, the team announced that its staking vault had reached its cap of 250 million $AFKHERO. That locks away 25% of total supply, which the team described as one out of every four tokens now held in the vault.

Several factors affect payouts. Heroes with a higher Power Level receive a larger cut of the reward pool. Guild members can earn up to 25% more $AFKHERO, along with 100% more XP and 100% more gold. Deposits, holdings and account linking can add up to an earning boost of as much as 80%.

The referral program has grown as well. Under the updated terms, players earn from what the friends they refer spend and trade. They also get paid faster and can enter a 5,000,000 $AFKHERO prize race.

Background

AFK Heroes launched on Solana in June. It’s a voxel idle RPG that runs in the browser, so there’s nothing to download. Players connect a Phantom or Solflare wallet, pick a knight, mage or rogue, and send their hero out onto the map.

The hero keeps fighting while the player is away. It earns XP, gold, loot and $AFKHERO even after the tab is closed.

In Season 2’s first week, more than 10,000 wallets connected and about 6,000 players were active. Players deposited 378.9 million $AFKHERO that week, and the game paid out around 126 million.

Market data for the token shows that a small number of wallets hold most of it. In mid-August, the top 10 wallets controlled 85.91% of supply, up from 72.11% in early August.