Mine on Mordor
Mordor is Ethereum Classic’s proof-of-work test network. Mining there tests a mining or pool setup without real funds, and it is how a developer gets test coins without waiting on a faucet. Mordor uses Etchash from block 2,520,000.
Test coins without a faucet¶
You do not need a faucet to fund development on Mordor. Point a node at the test network with a CPU thread or two and leave it running: twenty minutes is usually more coin than a project needs for testing. The faucets are worth trying, and they are frequently dry or unattended, which is why this page exists.
It works because the test network’s difficulty is low enough that an ordinary machine is a real share of it. Measured on 18 September 2026 at block 17,006,119: the previous twenty blocks averaged 10.7 seconds apart at a difficulty near 7.2 million, which puts the whole network around 0.67 MH/s. The block reward in the current era is 0.8388608 METC, since ECIP-1017 reduces the reward by a fifth every 2,000,000 blocks on Mordor and era 9 begins at block 16,000,001.
So a machine contributing 0.2 MH/s is roughly a quarter of the network, which at that spacing is on the order of 80 blocks an hour, or about 70 METC. Your own rate decides the rest, and as hashrate joins the network the difficulty retargets upward and your share settles lower.
These figures move, so measure rather than trust them. eth.hashrate in the console reports what your node is contributing, and the current network numbers come from any Mordor endpoint:
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Mordor coins have no value and are not exchangeable for ETC. Nothing here applies to mainnet, where the difficulty is set by mining hardware and a CPU finds nothing.
Before you start¶
- A synced Mordor node: Run a Mordor node.
- An address for the rewards. The node needs no key for it.
- For CPU mining, disk and memory for the Etchash DAG, which is several gigabytes. The node generates it before it starts mining.
Mine on the CPU¶
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The node writes the DAG to --ethash.dagdir, ~/.ethash by default, then starts mining. Generating the DAG takes a few minutes and several gigabytes before the first hash is tried, so the first blocks arrive later than the arithmetic above suggests. For more hashrate than a CPU gives, point GPU mining software at the node as Mining describes, with --mordor in place of --classic.
Check the rewards¶
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The balance is in wei, and it grows as the node imports blocks mined to the address. For a readable figure:
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Stop mining¶
Stop the node, and start it again without --mine. Stop it safely applies to Mordor too.