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I’ve been up for over 48 hours in an effort to ensure that this launch went as smoothly as possible and I am exhausted. Still, before I retire for the day, I will do my best to address some common questions and concerns expressed regarding the Ethercraft project.
Where’s the free loot crate I was promised?
The “free loot crate” we were talking about in our first post is available here free of charge: https://ethercraft.io/#/shop/32 (It’s called a “gift bag”, but on the back end it is a chance item, AKA a loot crate.)
When will trading be available?
Trading is technically available right now, as every single item you buy is minted as a token and sent to your wallet address, allowing you to move your items between different addresses immediately. This means you can use something like 0x to set up direct item trades with other users right away. Still, we’d like to streamline this process and incorporate it into our front-end somehow, and our goal for that is ASAP, time permitting.
When looting dungeons, will I lose all of my items when my character dies?
No, you’ll risk only what you choose to equip your character with. Moreover, the dungeon crawling mechanic will be a completely separate and voluntary aspect of the game. (There’s also no reason you shouldn’t be able to spin up a toon with some free leather gear and give it a go!)
How much gas should I use when buying items?
Excess gas is simply unspent, so if you double whatever the estimator fills into MetaMask, you’ll simply get back whatever wasn’t needed for the transaction. Right now we’re autofilling the estimated gas price of the transaction which should generally work, but you should bump it up a bit if you’re having trouble with transactions running out of gas. (If the client fills in 150,000 and you’ve been having trouble, try bumping it up to 200,000.)
What should I set my gas price to?
Visit https://ethgasstation.info/ and play with the slider. See how long each amount of gwei is likely to take and then use whatever you’re comfortable with.
Are any of these items rare? Why should I buy an item with an unlimited supply?
Some of our items, such as the free leather armor set, are designed to be used as throwaway items at very little cost to the player (essentially just transaction fees). However, many of our other current items will become ‘rare’ for two reasons: Firstly, Enchanted items will gradually increase in price as more of them are purchsed, making them more valuable over time. Secondly, all items currently for sale in the shop have a hard-coded timestamp after which sale of the item is discontinued. Moreover, many items, including the various cogs and even the lowly kitchen knife, are going to be part of profitable crafting recipes (think breaking down the knife into its raw components to be used in the construction of something else) which will remove large amounts of them from the game economy rather quickly.
To be clear: It is our intention for our current Enchanted items to be among the rarest and most powerful in the game. After all, we still have relatively little exposure, and many of those items have very few sales. Most of our current items are essentially one-time runs — if only 4 or 5 Merchant’s Enchanted Rings have been purchased by the time we reach the endTime, for example, then that will be the total number of that item that will ever exist in the Ethercraft universe. Basically, we want to reward early adopters as much as possible.
Also, the endTime for each item is easily viewed on its respective shop contract. All of our current lineup will stop being sold by its respective contract with no input from us roughly this time next month. We don’t display this countdown simply because we couldn’t come up with an elegant and aesthetically pleasing way to do so before our self-imposed launch deadline, and we figure a month is enough time for everyone to grab what they want.
On a related note, as far as the game client goes, there’s a lot that we just haven’t implemented yet, even though it’s there on the back end. For example, items are actually supposed to have in-game types and rarities, not to mention sets, but we aren’t displaying those at the moment because we’ve been scrambling to keep everything together during this hectic launch! Similarly, translations (Spanish and Japanese) were also broken somewhere between completion and launch — I suspect this has something to do with how our web server is serving the json object — but we aim to get those up and running again ASAP.
But isn’t this just another Etherpokemon, Blocktanks, Bitcoin Cats rip-off?
No — we built all of our contract code from the ground up and are not a clone of those other projects which mostly use monolithic data contracts with proprietary storage and which are completely centralized in the hands of the developers. All Ethercraft items are minted as tokens and are sent directly to your wallet — you are actually in possession of the item immediately after your transaction confirms. Check out Corn here on etherscan.
In fact, as outlined in our inaugural post, our end goal is is to properly leverage the power of the EVM in order to create a truly decentralized ecosystem. A lot of these other ‘games’ might just be clones of one another with monolithic data contracts and developer centralization — we do not aim to be one of those projects.
Aren’t you just going to take the ETH and run?
Of course not. All reserves are handled completely by the contracts and anyone can review the code for any given item (shop). We do not have arbitrary control over our deployed contracts. Unlike a lot of other projects out there, we did not grant ourselves the ability to arbitrarily mint tokens—only our shop contracts can do that, and only in response to a purchase (or a 0-eth transaction in the case of our free items)! And as you might notice, we even implemented a “lock” on the reserve balance of individual shop contracts so that the community will have a full two weeks notice should we ever need to access the ETH held in a given shop’s reserve for any reason.
Is this just another cash grab?
If we were just in this to make a quick buck, we would have done a lot differently. We wouldn’t have written our own smart contract ecosystem from the ground up, we wouldn’t have designed an extensible live UI rather than generating a series of simple static pages, and we wouldn’t have spent countless hours reimplementing something that we could have just copy-pasted and deployed like the rest of the projects out there. Also consider that over half of our items are either free or are so inexpensive that they will never even recoup the cost of their contract deployment (which we knew going in, of course).
So what’s next? Simple stuff.
- tidy up the client and fix all of the little bugs that revealed themselves during launch
- fix translations! We have full translations in both Japanese and Spanish (and with Russian mostly complete) which are just waiting to be served.
- get some sleep :)
For those of you who are interested but who missed it, please check out our launch article here.
Social media:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethercraft_io
- Telegram: https://t.me/ethercraft_io
- Discord: https://discord.gg/WAJdrvw
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ethercraft_io/
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