Today I decided to be a nice person and launched up a Hive-Engine testnet for use by anyone who wants to try out things on engine but can't afford to do so due to the cost of BEE. While it is relatively cheap, it still might not be cheap enough for some developers to create a test NFT or a test token or even a test market pool on the mainnet. Plus this prevents wasted space on the mainnet which has no need there at all.
The testnet's chain id is ssc-testnet-hive, and it has a RPC at https://enginetestnet.rishipanthee.com/. Up until hive block 51880378, the mainnet and the testnet are the exact same. This means that anything already done up to that point has been ported over onto the testnet so you can mess around with existing stuff as well. From there on they diverge onto their own paths.
Any user who had ever held BEE before the hive block 51880378 has been granted 100000 BEEs on the testnet to play around with. This should be plenty for creating NFTs, pools and tokens. If you didn't have BEE before that point and need some(or have somehow managed to run out of the 100k you already got) you can get them by joining this discord: https://discord.gg/KHatBzj78n. There's a get-bee channel(you will need permission to type in that channel, so just ask for permission and someone will grant it once they see the request) which lets you use the bot that sends you 10K BEES over on the testnet.
I do plan on periodically wiping the testnet and resyncing it with the mainnet(until the resync starts requiring too expensive servers 😅) and will let people know in the discord server mentioned above about a week before hand. If someone asks me not to for any reason, I'll probably listen and delay it.
Do treat this as what it is. A testnet for short term tests before bringing your project to the mainnet. Don't use this to actively run anything as no backups are made(at least at first) and if its going to take too long to sync up, I'll just reimport a more recent mainnet snapshot and work off that.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments or discord.
If you like what I'm doing, you can help out by voting @h-e(https://votify.now.sh/h-e) for hive-engine witness and @hextech(https://vote.hive.uno/@hextech) for Hive witness.