Well, it's very exciting to me to launch the second Hive-Engine game. You're invited to start playing and mining Mythical.
What's Mythical?
Mythical is an idle mining game. You purchase miners, and through various staking, mining, and burning activities you farm governance tokens to make your miners more powerful so you can capture the most output. The interaction on the website is quite simple: Buy, Stake, and Burn are your actions. On the social side you're able to form alliances with people to make your NFT miners more powerful.
Why play this?
It's a simple game, it's a fun social experiment, the NFTs you buy are in limited edition, and those NFTs constantly mine tokens which trade on Hive-Engine. Those tokens can either unlock additional NFTs or mine additional tokens when staked.
It's a great learning experience to figure out how concepts hashpower and mining work without necessarily having to spend $10k on a single ASIC or live with a loud blockchain space heater in your office.
Furthermore, $FARM and $FARMGOV that have been mined through FarmFarmer.Farm have been trading at $2, often around $5 and even over $12. So, by owning and staking these NFTs you start mining tokens that people that like the game want. There's just not enough for everyone so hang on tight. Also be careful because Hive-Engine accepts these tokens at $1/FARM.
What can I do with Mythical tokens?
In game:
When you earn $MYTHICAL you can burn them to get additional miners called "Witches." You can also stake $MYTHICAL to earn Serpentis.
When you have $SERPENTIS you can Burn them to get Mages which "boost" your Power score on NFTS that mine $MYTHICAL or get Lords which when staked earn $CONTROLUS.
Boost is an ability that looks at all of your miners and applies to buff to every one you control. If you have 5 boost miners then each one will effectively multiply by your Power score by the boost bonus.
IE You have 100 Power and 5 Boost NFTs that are 1.05. Your new power would be 100 X 1.05 X 1.05 X 1.05 X 1.05 X 1.05 = ~127.
When you earn $CONTROLUS you can burn it to change the "Power" of the Mythical Miners. Power is similar in concept to Hashrate for BTC mining. So you can speed up the power of your miners while slowing down miners you don't own.
Also, don't just send these tokens to null. The burning function will be in the games shortly and the transactions need to be formatted correctly or else you're just wasting your tokens.
Out of game:
It's tough to know. Once these things are out there people can base stuff off of them. It's possible future games will airdrop to token holders here. It's possible these tokens get integrated into other games. It's hard to know when starting what the blockchain world will create from this starting point.
I'll make a point to integrate tokens earned here and in Farm Farmer into future stuff on the Hive-Engine games side.
How much do I need to buy in order to mine stuff?
That's a dynamic number. Your percentage of total mining power is what determines how much you'll mine. There's a lottery every hour and at least for $MYTHICAL 20 prizes of 5 $MYTHICAL each will go out. Each of those prizes is rolled independently so if you have 1% of the mining power then you should statistically get 1% of the $MYTHICAL over time.
Which Miners should I buy?
Ultimately you want to control the most Mining Power for the least amount of money staked. At the start of the game the best miners are the most expensive ones, but over time the rules change so you'll have to stay a little up to date to figure out which are the best miners.
You should take into consideration: total supply, cost, starting power, and distribution when you're making your first purchases. You may want to own only one type. You may want to spread them out. These are the things to consider!
Why launch these games? How is this different than Farm Farmer?
The plan is that as more complexity rolls out into smart contracts for Hive-Engine that I'll roll out demonstration games that showcase how the new smart contracts can be used.
This game is taking advantage of the boost function that's built into the "Dynamic Mining" contract. That's the contract that stores the power ratings of the NFT miners and then the governance portion of the contract allows for CONTROLUS tokens to be burnt in order to change the value of the Power rating in the contract.
In the end, these games provide a source of entertainment for players, the potential to own limited edition NFTs, the ability to mine tokens in a game that people want, and the funds further help develop the Hive-Engine ecosystem.
What's Hive-Engine working on?
The goal is to create many off-the-shelf, no-code, modular smart contracts that game designers, service providers, and businesses can use to create dapps, apps, services, and businesses on the Hive blockchain. By supporting these games you're funding development projects in this ecosystem and helping us all grow.
Aggroed, all this is great and all but I want you to shut up and work on Splinterlands. All this is a distraction.
I get how you could feel that way. There's a couple of things that make me think differently.
To grow Splinterlands we need new players. Simply having a great game and a cool blogging application are clearly not enough to get people en masse to come to Hive to poach. We're in a bull market and Hive is still 10 Cents. We clearly need more.
So, I think it's vital for the Splinterlands ecosystem that other services and businesses form here and I think Hive-Engine is the single best tool on the chain to make that happen.
In order to make that faster and better we need new smart contracts and better tools in the hive-engine ecosystems. Simply having the tools isn't enough we have to document them and showcase how they can be incorporated into things.
It takes money to build these and players have to spend money to buy these things. You'll notice DEC and SPT are available payment methods, which provides an additional usecase for the Splinterlands token holder ecosystem.
Saving the best for last: It's hard to make changes directly to Splinterlands as it keeps growing because the stakes are so high. There's already thousands of people in 142 countries playing around the clock and every change is met with excitement and skeptisim. I drastically prefer to use these new games as sand boxes to explore concepts to add to Splinterlnds because the stakes are much smaller with these simple games. It's on my brain to figure out things like how to use the Splinterlands cards in a idle mining game like this outside Splinterlands, but I haven't figured that out yet. Anyway, before messing with things on production servers in Splinterlands I'd rather do some game design testing through new mini-games on Hive-Engine and double dip that learning experience to pay Hive-Engine devs to make more cool features.
I think you'll see that as we can advance the technology on Hive-engine and enable better trading the volume of Splinterlands stuff will increase, and we should see new types of trading and features available to Splinterlands players.
I'm a communist and think you should make this game work differently.
The great thing about this ecosystem is that the smart contracts on the back end are available for everyone to use. You don't need my permission. You can just make stuff by submitting the appropriate transactions to the Hive blockchain. If you feel strongly that the games or services should work differently because of your political persuasions I would strongly urge you to make your own game or system and test your hypothesis that way. Run the experiment, show success, and who knows, maybe folks will follow.
What's next?
Cryptomancer recently finished the "Pack Manager" smart contract for Hive-Engine. This enables us to create and sell packs similar to Splinterlands. Hopefully before the year is over I'll be able to make a game that uses that functionality. We'll have some packs to sell and I plan on allowing the miners to unlock pack tokens as well!
I'm also interested in exploring payout systems that allow people to get into a witness-like role and earn a percentage of token inflation for promoting these games. These developments are moving along and you should be able to see them in future mini games.
Should be fun!
Reserve the Right
I don't plan to mess with Farm Farmer. If players want a new feature it may get included, but I plan to leave that alone. With Mythical I do plan on coming back after a little while has passed to add more cards that can be purchased through burn cases.
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