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05 / 09 All mechanics

Wildcat

The rounds where most of the ZINC goes to a single lucky miner.

Beginner

Sometimes a round turns into a “Wildcat,” where a big reserve of its ZINC goes to one lucky miner on top of the normal payouts.

  1. A round plays out as normal: miners pick squares and one winning square is revealed.
  2. Every so often, that round is also flagged as a Wildcat round.
  3. When that happens, the round sets aside a reserve of ZINC for a single winner.
  4. One miner is then chosen to receive that reserve.
  5. That lucky miner walks away with most of the round’s ZINC reserve, on top of whatever they normally won.

So a Wildcat is just a special round where the ZINC, instead of being shared thinly, piles onto one person. You do not do anything different to take part. If you are already mining and you land on the winning square, you are in the running for the big prize.

Intermediate

Here is how often Wildcats happen and who can win one.

  1. Roughly 1 in 4 rounds becomes a Wildcat round. (That ratio is just an example; the real frequency is set by the protocol and can change.)
  2. When a round is a Wildcat, most of that round’s ZINC reserve goes to one chosen miner, on top of the normal payouts.
  3. Only miners who landed on the winning square are eligible.
  4. Among those eligible winners, one is picked to take the Wildcat reserve.
  5. Your chance of being picked is not equal for everyone. It scales with how many round Bricks you brought into the round, so committing more Bricks improves your odds.

In short: keep entering rounds, aim to land on the winning square, and stack round Bricks.

Advanced

On-chain, a Wildcat is a weighted single-winner selection layered on top of normal round settlement, driven by the wildcat_* fields on the Round account.

  1. At settlement, the round is tested for Wildcat status; if it qualifies, is_wildcat_round is set true.
  2. Only miners on the winning tile enter the selection. Each is assigned weight proportional to their round Bricks, and these are summed into total_wildcat_weight.
  3. A random wildcat_ticket is generated against that total weight, walking the weighted entrants until the ticket lands inside one miner’s slice.
  4. The selected miner is recorded in the wildcat_winner_* fields and receives most of that round’s ZINC reserve, on top of their ordinary pro-rata payout.

Because selection is weight-proportional, your probability of winning is your Bricks divided by total_wildcat_weight (for example, a single dominant miner might hold 69.268% of the weight, just an illustration). More round Bricks means a larger slice of the ticket space and better odds.