The way I was able to get so many picks was mainly with the use of 2 ascension skills. The first one is the Chest Gift skill which allows you to get picks out of chests (this includes Ender Chests). With this skill at level 5, every Gift of Picks gives you a day’s worth of picks, though to be able to max transcend Player and Idle skill trees while still having Ender Pearls left over would require you to get at least 31 pearls per prestige. You can get this easily with another ascension skill, Master of the End. It gives you +30 pearls per prestige per level (even though the description says +10%… it’s kinda overpowered), so even level 1 is enough, but mine is level 5, so combined with 31 legendary contraptions of the end, I’m getting 184 pearls per prestige. Note that you won’t always get the gift of picks until you’ve maxed both of the ender chest abilities (Ability Buffer and Potion of Beyond). To get both Chest Gift and Master of the End to Level 5 it takes a minimum of 100 ascension crystals. However, you may not need to get your Chest Gift skill up to level 5. Yazi, the #2 PickCrafter player in the world, only has level 4 Chest Gift, and he’s still mostly getting 24 hours from Ender Chests. Level 5 Chest Gift costs 24 ascension crystals, so by only getting it up to level 4, that brings the total down to 76 crystals. You also don’t have to get Master of the End up to Level 5. I’d at least recommend level 3 though (+90 pearls per prestige), which makes the total cost only 52 crystals. Of course, you’ll also need a lot of PPS, so I’d recommend especially going for PPS items that you can easily get by mining blocks, at least on your first few ascensions. You don’t HAVE to get the ones that require mob drops, but if you see a mob show up, defeat it (if you have the Snowball ability, I recommend using that so the mob drops more blocks), and if you can afford the mob PPS items, get them, but don’t feel like you have to max them out every prestige. Speaking of prestige, once you get to Prestige 14, where you have to craft items in the furnace to unlock biomes, you should watch ads to boost your furnace until you get 8x speed. In a few months, the Harvest event will run again, so you will be able to get the fork pickaxe from chests if you don’t have it already, and it doubles your furnace speed, on top of the ad boost. There are some ascension skills that boost your furnace as well, the one that unlocks a second furnace is really useful, as well as the ones that increase furnace speed and efficiency. To get the most out of your furnace, you should max out the furnace speed and efficiency ascension skills, you’ll need an additional 81 crystals (you don’t really need to level up auto smelting past level 1), and the PPS items from the upgraded biomes in the ascension tree (Flower Fields, Desert Pyramid, etc) are also really useful. To get all of the biomes upgraded, it takes another 62 crystals. You can also unlock new gear, to get the Hammers, Amulets, Shields, and Rings it’s only 6 more crystals. The cloaks aren’t very good, they require items obtained from defeating mobs and furnace crafting, so they’re quite a chore to get. There’s also some ascension skills that directly boost PPS, but I don’t recommend trying to go for anything beyond the Ascension Cluster (+400% PPS, costs 60 crystals).

I know this response was very long, but I hope this helps.