Yesterday I posted about setting up Brave browser to earn free tokens while you surf the web. Today I have an internet card game for you.
Some info
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This game is well suited for anyone who spends a lot of time browsing the web. You can leave it running in a browser tab. It won't slow your computer down like traditional crypto-mining. You will however need to go back to the browser tab running the game every few minutes.
Get a free wallet
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If you already know what a WAX wallet is and have one, you can skip this step. If not you can get a free wax wallet here. You will need a wallet to store all the free goodies which will soon be coming your way. All you need to set-up the wallet is an email address. Just follow the instructions.
Ready to Play?
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Alien Worlds is the game we will be playing but read this whole article through before you start. This video on YouTube explains how the game mechanics work. Essentially it boils down to a couple of mouse-clicks every few minutes. As you get in-game rewards the time between rounds will get longer until you only need to click once every couple of hours.
Before You Start
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The good stuff I didn't know about when I first started playing this. Each time you click the 'mine' button you will earn a small amount of trillium (TLM) which you can think of as a virtual metal ore. The amount of ore you mine is added to a total amount in the 'Tokens' section of your WAX wallet (see the pic above). There are factors which affect how much you will earn each round of mining but for a beginner with no additional tools you should expect 0.05 to 0.3 trillium per mine.
As you earn trillium, you can also TRADE IT for real dollars here. I reached around 100 trillium before finding out it had real world value and only learned this by watching this video which explains the trading process.
Random NFT drops.
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There's also a chance you will get free NFT's from mining. This game attempts to combine learning about how crypto works with digital card collecting. These are intended to be similar to Pokemon cards or the football stickers many of us collected in our youth (or cigarette cards if your memory goes back further). There is no 'album' yet although I suspect that could appear at some point. The problem with albums is that some of the cards are so limited in supply that it would be impossible to complete.
The digital 'cards' are pushed into your wallet when they are discovered. An important note here is they might not show up in-game until next time you log in. I played for a fortnight before I discovered I even had any. For this reason I suggest keeping your wallet open in another browser tab and reload the tab every couple of hours. The game is still under development so not all cards have use just yet. Character cards are being rewarded ready for the 'Thunderdome' button (left side on the home screen). This is for some sort of battle mechanic which the developers intend to implement in the future.
The Marketplace
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There is clearly a push to create a digital version of collector cards whether we want it or not. This means there has to be a way to trade with other people. If you want to trade with people you know and trust, you can click the transfer arrows at the top of the NFT cards to send them to another persons wax wallet. You can also send trillium to another user by clicking on the send button (right-side panel of the wallet). There is also a marketplace where you can trade with other people online. Just follow the link and click on the alien.worlds filter on the left side to see what others are selling. The sales history button (bottom left) will also let you see what trades have taken place - useful for research.
If you keep playing you will eventually end up improving your tools and finding more NFT's as you mine. You will get duplicates of the same cards. You can offer these for sale using the WAX trading tab in your wallet or you might like to explore 'Shining' if you have four or more of the same card. More about this in a bit.
Land
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It's worth mentioning at this point that you may see NFT's for various plots of land listed at some eye-watering prices. NFT's for land DO NOT drop as random prizes. They were available from the developers website in very limited numbers (3,000). There is nothing ruling out the possibility of further planets being created at some point in the future but as it stands there is currently no way to acquire land (except from another ridiculously generous player or the marketplace). Sadly these are too much of a stretch for me at the moment so if virtual land is appealing, I suggest a search on YouTube.
Where can I find out more?
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Try the Alien Worlds Community Portal
What is staking?
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As far as I can tell, staking is lending your mined trillium to a planets reward pot. As you don't need trillium for any sort of in-game replenishment, I opted to stake mine once I had earned 10. I don't know how much of a factor this was in affecting my NFT drops but it did seem like I wasn't getting them before I started staking. Once your trillium is staked it takes several days to get it back so you risk being unable to remove it from the game and convert to $USD etc. when you stake. This means your in-game currency is tied-up in-game and you might miss out on a really good exchange rate. I haven't yet un-staked any trillium so I don't know if you get back more, the same amount or less.
Any other tips
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Once you have multiple mining tools, you can equip them in the mining hub. When you do this, a trash-can icon appears in the cards title box after its name. This does not delete the card, it unequips it - useful if you want to unequip an item to trade or gift it to someone else. Hopefully this will be replaced by a more obvious unequip button below the tool in a future version.
Shining
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Nothing to do with Jack Nicholson films. If you obtain 4 identical NFT's and a lot of trillium, you can convert them into a higher-level shiny version. This destroys the four originals but creates a new card which might have minor stats improvements. See this video for more information.
Does free really mean free?
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After a couple of weeks I got a message about 'not enough CPU'. This is not about the Alien Worlds game but a feature of the WAX crypto network it runs on and suggests that all WAX-based games may eventually have this issue. It appears that the blockchain requires investment from time-to-time in the form of WAX tokens. This is explained with a really bad analogy to airlines, airports and tickets. My understanding is that if you run out of NET or CPU, it's possibly because there is a lot of trading of the underlying crypto-currency. RAM on the other hand seems to be about the amount of data on the blockchain you are using at the time. My solution for now is just to stop playing for the day once any of these events occur. It's not helpful to intermix computing terminology and airports into a wacky explanation of blockchain (after all my network is fine, I have enough ram to play this and my cpu temperature is ok according to the read-out on my PC).
You can keep an eye on your CPU, NET and RAM usage using the 'resources' button on the right side of your WAX wallet.
Final Verdict
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When I first started playing Alien Worlds, I didn't really think of it as playing or collecting. I think there are things which need improving. It would be nice to have some animation on the mining screen and while you wait for your tools to recharge. It would be nice to have an audible prompt when your tools are recharged and you can mine again. It would be great if little animated miners could jump up & down on-screen if you unearth an NFT reward. It would be good to have a digital sticker-book page in the wax wallet which shows all the in-game NFT's and highlights which ones you have. Yet for all these things I am still playing it, just to see what else there is to discover. It can be quite complex with six planets comprising 3,000 plots of land, which are linked to different planetary reward pots, have different luck factors to influence your NFT drop rate and also different charge time multipliers affecting how frequently you can mine there. I imagine some people will try it and just cash-out anything they earn. Others will stick around and collect the NFT's and hope the developers build a bigger game around this NFT lucky-dip system. I'm undecided yet but will likely keep the good finds but use some of the trillium to complete my challenge.
The Bottom Line
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Ok so the final target for me is some coins in a crypto-wallet but maybe you don't want WAX tokens? Well you can always use an exchange like CoinGecko to convert the WAX into something else as explained in the previous video on the subject. At this point I also want to mention Bitrefill which allows you to turn crypto into gift cards for various UK stores. As crazy as it sounds, we are sort of there with that virtual game world where a random number in a game might just pay for your next console. We should probably expect to see more of this to come. Let's just hope it doesn't turn us into a nation of gambling addicts or day traders. If you are currently working from home or able to use this as a timer between tasks then why not have a go. My first challenge is complete at this point after trading in just over 10 TLM. Sure I'm no bitcoin billionaire but after a few clicks today I now have a whopping (sic) 0.8 WAX. It's a start. Yes it might have been cheaper to turn the computer off and save electricity but I have also been entertained, kept warm and avoided parting with any debit/credit card details.
