Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Season’s Greetings! Drop #12 explores the weird and wonderful world of … well, worlds. NFT Worlds that is, and we’re not just talking about the NFTWorlds. The Metaverse is always expanding, and we’re dropping into the hottest Metaverse world-building projects around for your viewing pleasure. But wait, there’s more! We’ll also be covering an interesting NFT project that we think you’ll love, Terraforms by Mathcastles! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Drop Magazine. .
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Contents
World Wide Webb
An MMORPG cyber-punk pixelated Metaverse? Say no more – let’s jump into some Ready Player One shit.
6-7
NFTWorlds
Minecraft compatible, massively multiplayer, developer focused – the NFTWorld is your oyster.
8-9
The Sandbox
The Sandbox is a virtual Metaverse where players can play, build, own, and monetize their virtual experiences. The OG of Metaverse worlds with a creator-focused business model.
10-11
Terraform by Mathcastles
Ok, so you’ve heard of on-chain artwork, but have you ever heard of extremely on-chain artwork?
12-13
Meta News
All the things you might have missed this week in the Metaverse.
World Wi You don’t live in the real world, Z. The Worldwide Webb is a 2D cyber-punk esq pixel-verse where you can use your NFTs from other projects as in-game avatars, pets, items and more. True to the MMORPG genre the Worldwide Webb features quests, NPCs and even playerhousing. Well, player housing may be considered an archaic term by todays standards. I’ve played MMOs all my life, RuneScape, WoW, Starwars (the good one before it was updated) – what we call player-housing, Webb calls Land. And rightly so – the possibilities are much broader than just housing. Lands are in-game spaces that you can own within the game, yes, but the ambitions for their utility extend beyond just housing into world building, quest building, even smartcontract integrations that could enable a business-driven sub-
category of land. Think of it like this, Drop Magazine could one day have a Worldwide Webb Office, where players could buy and read our magazines as ingame items.
I want to be myself, I want to change that when I want to, I want to choose. – hack3r.eth If you’ve already heard of Worldwide Webb - it’s likely due to one of the many NFT projects they have integrated as playable avatars. Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult, The Littles, Cool Cats, CyberKongz to name a few. The Webb also have their own in-house avatars and collectibles, if you happen to have 8.5Ξ (Dec 2021) handy – you could cop yourself a
ide Webb CryptoWeeb – avatars with unique powers, abilities and in-game utilities. And what’s a Weeb without a Waifu? Or should I say, CryptoGF – augmented reality trading cards with several perks for collectors.
I AM OVER-INVESTED” – the key to Webbs success will likely be made or broken by their team’s ability to deliver.
Movers,shakers and producers. Me and my friends understand the future
The tell-tale sign of an upcoming blue-chip is in the team behind it. The Worldwide Webb Team seem like the NFT version of the 92’ Dream Team. First there is hack3r.eth A.K.A Thomas Webb – Thomas started his professional career as a technology magician and hack3r, performing on America’s Got Talent and showcasing his mind-reading AI robots and autonomous drones on news stations and TED talks worldwide. Supporting him is Mesetatron a.k.a Yuan Gao, Three-time CTO and Forbes 30 under 30 programmer. There’s Kreum the god-tier pixel artist, SpotLongDon on Marketing + Community, and that’s not even the full headline act.
When it comes to building a whole new world – therein runs the risk of setting ambitions too high to achieve. And with the NFT community the way it is, “DEVS PLEASE DO SOMETHING
This project is undeniably impressive, words really don’t do it justice, go to https:// worldwideweb3.com/ on your mobile phone and see just how scalable this thing really is.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for the Worldwide Webb, and the icecaps are already melting as things heat up with a playable game in place. The Webb already has items, quests, and lots of parties.
NFTW Explorable, Minecraft compatible, massively multiplayer? Say no more. NFTWorlds are a collection of singular virtual worlds with their own set of geography, resources, environments, and special attributes stored on the Ethereum Blockchain.
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So where does Minecraft come in? Well, each world can be explored, developed, and creatively built by their holders using Minecraft. That’s ingenious when you think about it – rather than spending a lot of time and resources building software
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On Chain, On Mass
NFT Worlds have a LOT of data on-chain – the smart contract is worth checking out, whether it’s Geography, Resources, Biomes, or Features, it’s on-chain. The worlds are generated using a seed, which is just a number or string used to procedurally generate a unique result. The code used to procedurally generate NFT worlds based on a seed is backwards compatible with Minecraft, meaning you could spin up the game right now and copy pasta the seed from any NFTWorld to get a clone of it on Minecraft. Don’t get any ideas, right-click savers.
Affordable Entry The floor for NFTWorlds at this time (Dec 2021) sits above just 1Ξ – considering the project was released for free to initial minters on October 5th 2021 – that’s a very good sign this project is healthy and in it for
the long-run. Most NFT projects fail to last even 3 weeks let alone 3 months, which in-turn feels like 3 years in non-fungible time. Though NFTWorlds is not endorsed or partnered with Minecraft / Mojang in any way, we can’t help but wonder the potential here for Notch to come along and sweep the floor.
$WRLD Degens love tokens, and NFTWorlds are in the process of snapshotting and airdropping an initial distribution of their $WRLD token to holders. There are plans to introduce staking in order to allow holders to earn $WRLD over time and it is expected to be used in Play to Earn models as well. Though every project and their dog have a token these days, sometimes for no particular reason, it’s clear NFTWorlds are approaching this with a good deal of thought and utility. By giving players the ability to control and distribute $WRLD within their world, it opens the doors for immersive activity like VIP events, pay to access exclusive areas and more. Soon, you’ll be refused entry to metaverse clubs as well as real life ones!
The Sa The sandbox feels a bit like the final boss of metaverse world building, it’s certainly the main contender for the top spot alongside Decentraland. With over 100K items and a floor price of around 3Ξ The Sandbox has a lot to wrap your hands around. Utilising a communitydriven platform where creators can monetize voxel assets and gaming experiences, The Sandbox metaverse comprises a map made up of 166,464 LANDS. LAND owners can host contests and events, stake to earn, vote on governance - all the hits, all the good ones, all the big ones. Are you starting to see a pattern here? The Sandbox is by far the most mature and developed metaverse building project out there, this thing has a dedicated marketplace, a game maker, animation software, user generated NFTs. It is truly, a Sandbox.
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project, but The Sandbox have already demonstrated they have the know-how. They’ve been there, done that. Like Worldwide Webb and NFTWorlds, The Sandbox is also eyeing out the market of virtual events, live gigs in the Metaverse from big names and opportunities for new partnerships. It really is an exciting time to be alive and we’re extremely bullish on all three of these world-building projects. It remains to be seen how directly these projects will have to compete with each-other. You might argue it’s easier to compare Decentraland to The Sandbox than it is for other projects – both seem to be competing for the same market, building out their own complex ecosystems while NFTWorlds and Worldwide Webb head in a different direction, choosing to co-exist with other projects and focusing on integration rather than world domination.
Terraforms by If you’ve been paying close attention to my most recent articles, you probably think I’ve got something of a fetish for generative NFTs. Well, you can add today’s write up to that thesis, as we’re staying very much on that course. The difference? Today I’ll be diving into the first on-chain project, which also allows for heavy user input and customisation! If you haven’t guessed by now, the focus here is on the incredibly novel and exciting Terraforms! The collection itself was developed by Mathcastles, a digital studio co-founded by 0x113d and xaltgeist.
So first of all, what on earth is it? Terraforms are a visual representation of procedurallygenerated code, which is housed on the Ethereum blockchain. Each NFT you see is a small plot of land, all coming together to form a 20-level (or story, depending on your lingo!) ‘hypercastle’. Of the 11,104 total parcels of land, 9,905 were minted for a cool 0.16 ETH each. The remainder are currently held by the creators, who aren’t taking any royalties, as a reserve. Trading of these plots has been frantic so far,
Now you’ve had a little overview, you’re likely wondering what the NFTs themselves are? Well, strap in - to say there’s a few levels to this, both literally and metaphorically, would be an understatement! To begin, here’s a little breakdown of the traits for each plot:
Biome - This property outlines the possible building blocks for individual plots of land. Each piece can be made up from combinations of letters A-Z, numbers 1-9, as well as other, more decorative characters. There are 92 different biomes. Mode - The mode references the state of each NFT and determines how it can operate and behave. With a small handful of options, we’ll explore these below.
Level - Determines which of the 20 levels the land parcel resides on. This can also help to decide colourways, with certain zones (or mixes) only available on particular stories. X/Y coordinates - These determine the 2D location of the parcel within the level. Levels vary in size and therefore have different quantities of available coordinates, with 13 & 14 being the largest! Zone - Perhaps confusingly, the zone here refers to the colour palette of the NFT. There are 75 different possibilities for this. Chroma - Once again breaking standard naming practice, the chroma in this instance refers to the speed of the animation, of which there are 4.
The aforementioned ‘mode’ attribute is definitely the most important to consider when it comes to playing around and having fun with your piece. Firstly, we have the ‘Terrain’ form, which refers to pieces in their genesis state. This displays the randomly-generated, animated art using the zone, chroma & biome allocated when minted! Although every parcel of land starts off in this way (other than the special ones detailed below), the nature and mechanics of the project makes this a deflationary trait. As touched upon earlier, users can customise their NFTs. However, in order to do this, pieces need to be converted into the ‘Daydream’ state, which is
with over $6.5 million worth of OpenSea volume in just a single week since mint!
y Mathcastles an irreversible change! Once in this form, users can interact with the Terraforms’ smart contract to draw whatever they want (within the constraints of their character set and number of inputs). In order to finalise their drawing and display it within the castle, collectors have to convert their items once more, into the ‘Terraform’ mode! It’s worth noting that - whilst stepping away from a ‘Terrain’ cannot be reversed the ‘Daydream’ and ‘Terraform’ states are completely fluid, allowing for unlimited amounts of fun in terms of creating new code-based drawings and rendering them on the blockchain for all to see! In true degen style, we’ve already witnessed several pepe-themed pieces popping up throughout the castle! If you’d like to learn how to enter the various modes, approach on-chain drawing and even reset your parcel of land back to a blank canvas, there’s plenty of discussion going down in the Discord on how to do all of this! One truly unique aspect of the Terraform system is that, given the right conditions, the entire castle could actually collapse
and cease to exist! The smart contract is set to self-destruct if not enough parcels of land are in a daydreaming (or terraforming) state. Because of this, at the point of minting the team issued a number of special plots with these modes already in place, in order to prevent immediate destruction! These select pieces were allocated to early supporters and are named ‘Origin Daydream’ and ‘Origin Terraform’; they can be interchanged in the exact same way as their normal counterparts and have no extra utility or bonus properties, solely a difference in name. By definition, the origin plots are rarer as only a small amount were issued to prevent failure until the project progressed naturally. Wondering why I haven’t made more of a deal about the castle being destroyed? Don’t worry! Each piece in a ‘Daydream’ or ‘Terraform’ state extends its life by 10 years. If and/or when 500 items are in this form, the collapse is prevented indefinitely - a milestone which has almost been reached already, with a total of 483 (origin) terraforms and daydreams in play at the time of writing!
There’s no question that Terraforms are on the bleeding edge when it comes to NFTs and their possibilities for interaction and utility. The project also satisfies the appetite for onchain storage and execution that many fans of generative art seem to be developing recently. However, due to the relative complexity of Mathcastles’ wonderful creation, this isn’t too likely to attract the attention of the real masses, especially newcomers, who - unfortunately - often feel more at home with the latest ape derivative or 10k collection featuring their favourite zoo animal! For more information on this intriguing collection, make sure to head over to the Discord and make use of their incredibly useful channels. We’d also recommend giving the fantastic unofficial guide a read, written by astrostl.eth!
Words by @early_alpha
This week in the M (Dec 20th – 26th 2 Vulcan Forged Refunds Users after $140 million hack The play-to-earn platform refunded over $140 million worth of cryptocurrency to all investors, following a security incident that allowed hackers to steal forged user’s private keys. This is not the only big hack this month, On December 6, hackers stole $31 million from multichain decentralised exchange, MonoX.
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Psychedelics Anonymous One of the most anticipated NFT projects of Q4 is finally here. The Psychedelics Genesis Collection has already began rocketing to a floor price of over 0.5 eth and with one of the most impressive owner distributions we’ve ever seen at a whopping 80~% unique owners, this is one to keep an eye on.
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Issue #12 - 27/12/2021 - Was written by The Drop Magazine & @early-alpha with support from @lordampersand, @Worldwide_WEB3, @nftworldsNFT, @TheSandboxGame & @mathcastles