Every term, defined

The black market buys brains anonymously at a random multiplier between 0.5x and 2.5x of their value, with a 10% fee taken upfront.

Use it when:

• You can afford a streak of bad luck.
• You want to chase that 2.5x premium.

Avoid it when:

• You need predictable income for a planned upgrade.

A brain is a trained AI model — the thing you ship. Each brain has:

• Quality — overall grade, drives price.
• Val / Loss — final validation metrics.
• Modules — cognitive upgrades baked in during training.
• Personality / dataset signature — shapes what it’s good at.

You sell brains on the IT market (fair price) or on the [[black-market]] (random multiplier).

NeuronIdle has three currencies. Each has its own source and sink.

• Cu — Compute Units (primary). Earned from brain sales. Spent on hardware, models, datasets, and repairs.
• Ru — Research Units. Earned during runs and from passive income (Autonomy module). Spent on modules, upgrades, combos, and most boosts in the Brain Lab.
• Nu — Neurons (premium). Earned slowly from achievements and rewarded ads (3 per ad, up to 3×/day), or purchased via IAP. Spent on premium chassis (Builder Pro / Deep Pro), premium HW, and the Nu Black Market slot unlock.

You can’t convert between currencies. Each lane has its own progression.

A Flash Deal is a rare bonus offer on the [[black-market]] that overrides the normal 50–250% rng range. It pays out between 1.5× and 6× the brain value.

• Triggers at ~10% chance per brain sale, scaled by tier.
• Penalty multiplier kicks in starting at 2.0× — the higher the payout, the worse the next-sale penalty.
• 25 flavor variants in the dialog (less stale on repeat plays).
• Logged in the Hall of Fame as “Flash” sale type.

Flash Deals are the BM’s pure-luck jackpot — you don’t plan around them, but when one hits during the first-sale bonus window you can leapfrog several upgrades at once.

Mastery is how thoroughly a [[brain]] has learned a specific knowledge domain. It’s measured per-domain, in the 0.0–1.0 range:

• Mastery = (currentQuality − startQuality) / 1% — at half the rate as of v1.0.5 (1% quality → 50% mastery, so a fully mastered domain takes about 2% of total quality progress).
• Mastery 1.0 = mastered — the badge ★ appears, and high-tier contracts open up.
• Each fully mastered domain adds +1% to brain value at sale.
• Late purchase of a domain shrinks the mastery window (start quality is high).

Mastery is the key to unlocking Specialist and Dream contracts — those want 1–3 mastered domains and pay far better than the [[black-market]] gamble.

Every [[brain]] rolls a unique personality at training. Model Potential (MP) is the composite of 5 hidden axes, each rolled in roughly the 0.80–1.30 multiplier range:

• Learning Speed — applied to run learning rate
• Ru Income — run reward multiplier
• Domain Affinity — embedding budget for domain personality
• Module Resilience — parameter budget for module weights
• Specialization — additive bonus to future fine-tune spec roll chance

Higher MP = better income and contract bonuses. MP is revealed progressively: LOCKED → APPROXIMATE (Prediction module gives ±25) → EXACT (after milestones like 5% quality, 8h cumulative runs, 1 mastered domain, fatigue module).

MP also has tiers: Baseline / Refined / Distilled / Emergent — each adds a flat tier-rarity bonus to contract payouts (+5%, +10%, +20%).

A rig is the bundle of hardware that does your training. Components:

• GPU — speed + VRAM ceiling
• RAM — dataset cache, comes in rarity tiers
• Cooling — stability under overclock
• HDD — checkpoint storage

Better rigs = bigger brains = higher prices. See [[brain]].

Specialization is NeuronIdle’s endgame layer, rolled during Fine-Tune on a Distilled+ [[brain]].

• 24 specialization paths, organized as 8 areas × 3 tiers: Basic / Pro / Excellent.
• Three sequential layers as you progress:
  1. Specialist (L1) — single spec, base bonuses.
  2. Agent (L2) — sequential roll, cap ≤50%.
  3. Multi-Agent (L3) — sequential roll, cap ≤35%.
• Each owned domain in the path adds a soft +5% chance bonus (full mastery).
• MP Specialization stat grants +35% spec roll multiplier (per-stat scaling).

Specializations unlock the Cluster chassis (endgame), which itself has two activation routes — a free path with a 7-day Multi-Agent contract risk, or a paid 1.36 T Cu lab purchase without risk. Cluster unlocks the Project Contracts board (5 slots, 2.50–4.50× rewards).