The sections that follow open with the 3.28 Mirage Kingsmarch context, walk through the ore-shipment loop with the current reward swap, name the scarab loadout, cover the disenchanter and Thaumaturgic Dust side income, and close with the practical worker and risk-management details that decide profit per hour.
Kingsmarch is no longer league-restricted. The Kalguuran settlement that debuted in 3.25 Settlers of Kalguur joined the core game with 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas and has been a permanent endgame option through 3.27 Keepers of the Flame and now 3.28 Mirage. When you hit maps in 3.28, Johan still invites you to the settlement on your first port arrival, and the unlock chain has not changed: complete the campaign, hit the Atlas, get the invite, start staffing buildings.
What changed in 3.28 is the reward layout, not the underlying mechanic. The shipment rewards that used to come back from crops shipments now come back from ore shipments, and vice versa. The headline:
The Kingsmarch settlement plaza below shows the central courtyard where the smelters, port, and disenchanter buildings cluster.
With the new reward layout in mind, the ore loop is what most 3.28 players spend their map sessions optimising.
The core ore loop is unchanged from 3.25; only the rewards on the back end shifted. Per pull, the steps are:
Pick destinations based on what you actually need this league: currency ports for the conversion-to-Divine play in 3.28, equipment ports if you are still gear-building on a fresh character.
The current Maxroll-recommended scarab loadout for 3.28 Kalguuran map farming runs:
The two niche Kalguuran scarabs are worth knowing even if you do not always slot them:
📌 Common mistake: running "Scarab of Enrichment" or "Calguran Scarab" pages of older 3.25 or 3.27 guides on autopilot in 3.28. The canonical spelling is Kalguuran (K, double-u) and the rarer-scarab name is Enriching, not Enrichment. Maxroll's 3.28 tier list also flags Scarab of Monstrous Lineage as a better pick than Enriching at the top map tiers because of diminishing returns, which is why the build above leans on Guarded Riches instead.
The right map for 3.28 ore farming is fast to run, has no boss altar that punishes the scarab setup, and accommodates the duplication-zone overlap that Mirage's league mechanic adds when you weave it into the loop.
Strand often shows up on legacy ore-farming map lists, but in 3.28 it is the Delirium-anchored map, not the ore-farming pick. Skip it unless you are deliberately mixing strategies.
Disenchanting is the second Kingsmarch income channel, and it is independent of the ore loop. The building staffs up around Rog, the Disenchanter: workers feed equipment into the building, and the building produces Thaumaturgic Dust based on item quality, rarity, and ilvl.
What controls dust yield:
What dust is for:
✏️ Technique tip: the biggest yield-per-input items are corrupted uniques with high quality. Run the Cartography Scarab of Corruption in your ore-farming map loadout (already in the recommended setup above), let the corrupted unique drops pile up, and disenchant them in batches rather than one at a time. Workers grind through batches more efficiently than they grind through staggered single-item queues.
Workers cap at level 5. Higher-level workers mine and smelt faster, ship larger loads, and disenchant more efficiently. The hiring rules in 3.28:
Worker quality compounds: a level-5 smelter clears the same backlog in half the time a level-3 smelter does, which is the entire reason the 4,000-gold refresh is worth chaining.
Every shipment carries a risk gauge per port. Ship at 0% to avoid cargo loss, period. The risk math is unforgiving: losing a 50-Divine shipment to a 5% risk roll is a hit that takes 20 or more maps to recover.
If your Divine-per-hour math suggests buying is faster than grinding for the league phase you are in, compare PoE Divine Orb stock shows where the market sits before you commit another five hours of farming.
⚠️ Warning: 3.28 Mirage ends approximately July 13, 2026. After league end, Kingsmarch persists in core (since 3.26) but the specific 3.28 shipment-reward layout (ore returning currency, crops returning equipment) and the smelting-speed buff will not necessarily carry forward into 3.29. Reverify before assuming this guide still describes the current reward layout in a future league.
Kingsmarch unlocks after Act 10 plus your first map. Johan, the Kalguuran captain, finds you at the map device with the settlement invite. If you are still mid-campaign, the unlock is in front of you; if you have an old character on standby, the settlement is already available when you log in.
If you would rather start fresh on a new character at maps without re-running Acts 1-10, a PoE leveling carry is the standard way to land at the Kingsmarch unlock without the campaign grind.
Yes. Kingsmarch joined the core game in 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas and is permanently available. The 3.28 changes were to the shipment-reward layout (ore now returns currency, crops now return equipment) and to smelting speed (doubled), not to the existence of the settlement.
Enriching increases ore per deposit at the cost of higher monster difficulty. Refinement makes deposits grant Smelted Bars directly instead of raw ore, removing the smelting bottleneck. Enriching is the per-map output lever; Refinement is the smelter-bottleneck workaround. Pick one based on whether your build can handle the bumped guards or your smelter staff is undersized.
It is a common AI-generated misspelling. The canonical name is Thaumaturgic Dust, produced by Disenchanter workers at Rog's building in Kingsmarch. Older guides and machine-translated pages sometimes mangle the spelling, but the in-game item is always Thaumaturgic Dust.
Not directly through shipments — gems and scarabs were removed from shipment reward pools in 3.28. You can still pick up Kalguuran scarabs from monster drops while running maps with the Kalguuran Scarab base in your loadout, but the bulk-scarab shipment loop from 3.27 is closed.
The Recombinator is Rog's crafting machine inside the settlement. You feed it two items plus Thaumaturgic Dust as activation cost; it attempts to merge the best modifiers from both inputs into a new item. The output quality depends on item-level matching, mod-tier overlap, and rng. It is the long-game payoff for keeping the disenchanter staffed even when your immediate gold income is in ore shipments.
Variable by map tier and scarab budget. At T15-T16 Waystone maps with the Maxroll loadout, experienced farmers land in the 8 to 15 Divines per hour range on the ore loop alone before adding the disenchanter and Recombinator income. Newer farmers who are still building scarab supply usually land in the 3 to 6 range while they grow their settlement.
Yes, and the overlap is a meaningful boost. Mirage's Djinni Wishes mechanic seeds Astral Realm pulls into the map, and the wish modifiers can be tuned to bump rarity or pack size on the ore-deposit maps you run. Cartography Scarab of Corruption plus Kalguuran base scarabs plus a Mirage wish that increases monster rarity is the current top-end stacking play.
Maintained by WowCarry's Path of Exile team. Last reviewed 2026-05-19 against league 3.28 "Mirage" (live since March 6, 2026, ends approximately July 13, 2026). When 3.29 lands, reverify the shipment-reward layout and smelting-speed numbers; both are league-tuning items and may shift.
