33. I am a farmer in web3, a truly gamified blockchain game? A comprehensive analysis of Sunflower Land.

Author's Note

Actually, I have been paying attention to sunflower a few months ago, but at that time the project was in the closed beta phase and I couldn't access the game. But a few days ago, sunflower opened up 22,000 land mints, so I officially started experiencing sunflower.

What sets sunflower apart from other blockchain games is that it truly has playability. Many blockchain games on the market are just skin-changing games that attract users to make large investments and then distribute governance tokens as incentives. In reality, these types of blockchain games have no gameplay and rely on false prosperity brought by scripts and gold farming studios. Once the yield decreases, the players will scatter.

Because of this, I specifically wrote this article to analyze a clear stream in this blockchain game for readers. It includes gameplay, playability, game incentives, game economic system, technical details, and team attitude.

You are also welcome to join my discord for communication, here is the group link:

https://discord.gg/6tu2hpwvUh

Main Text#

In simple terms, sunflower is a pixel-style casual farming game, similar to a web3 version of QQ Farm. But in its actual core, it is a very pure web3 project.

Sunflower does not require a high investment. When there is still mint balance in the land, you only need to donate 10 MATIC (about $5) to get sunflower land and start the game.

It is worth mentioning that there are many lands for sale on opensea, but they are marked with a cross because they have been banned for various reasons (cheating, scripting) and have no value, so please do not buy them.

To prevent multiple accounts, the game currently requires one discord verification per person, and you can only enter the game if you own land. It is recommended to mint from the official source rather than buying from the secondary market.

Gameplay#

The gameplay of the game is not complicated. You can upgrade/sell crops for rewards (get SFL tokens) and then use the resources (wood, stone, metal, gold) to collect advanced resources and exchange for NFTs (similar to seasons, each batch of NFTs is different). NFTs have attributes and can be freely traded.

In summary, you can grow wheat to get finished wheat for sale in exchange for SFL tokens, and then buy an axe tool to chop trees for wood/buy a pickaxe to mine for stone, and so on.

When you unlock all the land, the fun part of the game appears. In each season, NFT items with attributes will be released. For example, Golden Cauliflower (doubles the yield of your cauliflower), Kumeiko (+20% yield of all crops, +15% crop growth speed, all seeds are free).

These NFTs are limited edition and can be obtained by acquiring resources through gameplay and then exchanging them with NPCs in the Goblin Village.

Taking the Golden Cauliflower NFT as an example, it requires 500 cauliflowers, 100 gold, and 100 SFL to exchange. Of course, it has already been fully exchanged, so if you want to get it now, you can only buy it on opensea.

At the time of writing, the Golden Cauliflower NFT is priced at about $410 on the secondary market, and Kumeiko is priced at about $1350.

Therefore, to summarize, the gameplay of the game is to obtain various resources through farming, chopping trees, mining, and breeding. These resources can be cashed out into SFL tokens at any time or accumulated to exchange for higher-value NFTs. These NFTs, in turn, will bring various attribute enhancements to your land, forming a huge gameplay cycle.

Playability#

Playability is a pain point in current blockchain games. Most blockchain games are "X to earn," attracting users to make large investments in real money to buy tickets and then distribute project tokens.

For example, projects like Axie Infinity, BinaryX, and STEPN require you to invest in ETH, SOL, BNB, stablecoins, and other relatively high-value tokens, and then attract you to invest more funds through gameplay (upgrades, synthesis, etc.), and finally distribute worthless tokens/project tokens to you.

Such a mechanism brings significant wealth effects in a bull market or an upward trend, but it can also easily lead to a death spiral in a downturn, where participants are less willing to hold tokens due to declining profits caused by falling token prices.

However, in sunflower, this "pay to earn" element is diluted, and I call it "operation to earn."

How to understand "operation to earn"? This needs to be explained through multiple game design elements.

The cost of playing sunflower is almost zero. Of course, you need to donate 10 MATIC, but compared to other blockchain games, it is almost zero.
The return on investment in the game is very low. Even if you fully cultivate the most valuable crops on all the land, the daily income is less than 15 SFL (1 SFL = 0.22u, about 20 RMB).
All NFTs that add attributes in the game need to be obtained through resource exchange. Of course, if they are already exchanged, you can only buy them at your own expense on the secondary market.

Based on the above three points, many gameplay strategies have emerged. For example, when you harvest crops, do you plan to sell them cheaply to NPCs or hoard them to exchange for NFTs with attributes?

Wheat has a low economic return in the current version, but the ranch function will be opened soon, and the ranch will consume a large amount of wheat. Depending on the supply and demand relationship, will you choose to switch to growing wheat in advance and profit from selling the wheat you have accumulated early in future versions?

In the next season, there will be NFTs related to cakes, and they will also require a large amount of wheat for exchange. Will you choose to grow wheat in advance or buy some wheat from the secondary market?

In the sunflower land game, there are many economic choices, and these numerous economic choices converge into "operation to earn." If you manage your farm well, you will make a lot of money and earn more SFL tokens to exchange for USDC, turning them into real money.

Game Incentives#

Game incentives are also a fascinating element in sunflower. Although the income from farming is low, only about $3-5 USD per day, limited edition minted NFTs are released in each season.

These NFTs can increase the basic income of your farm/ranch/collection, and these NFTs can also be sold at high prices on opensea.

Almost all items in the game can be traded on open markets like opensea. However, they are subject to the minimum price limit on opensea, resulting in a huge price difference. For example, wheat is priced at around $0.5-0.6 USD in the community, but opensea limits the minimum price, so the lowest listing price is $3 USD, resulting in a price difference of up to five times. If you don't understand this mechanism well, you may end up buying items at a premium.

For this reason, the sunflower team is developing its own trading market to support selling items at lower prices.

Game Economic System#

I didn't use the term "token economic system" because in the official documentation, the official has clearly stated that the SFL token in the game is not an ordinary ERC20 token.

It is a theoretically infinite in-game currency, rather than a token that provides governance or trading functions. There is no concept of public offering shares, lock-up amounts, or team reserves.

Therefore, please readers do not view the SFL token from an investment perspective. If you must make a comparison, you can take World of Warcraft gold as a reference.

In World of Warcraft, gold is used as a currency with the reference of WoW Tokens (i.e., monthly subscription). In the server I was on, it used to be around 600,000 gold for one token.

In sunflower land, the reference is the lowest-level crop, sunflower.

In simple terms, when the supply of SFL increases, the yield of each sunflower will decrease. This concept is similar to the bitcoin halving. Over time and with gameplay changes, SFL will fluctuate between inflation and deflation.

For example, in a new season, resource consumption will increase, thereby reducing the circulation of SFL and achieving deflation. Or, if a new high-yield crop is introduced, resource output will increase, thereby increasing the circulation of SFL and achieving inflation. The total supply of SFL is currently about 11 million.

Therefore, SFL is a very economic game currency, not an investment target. I hope readers keep this in mind.

Technical Details#

Sunflower is a game based on Polygon, so you need to configure the Polygon RPC before playing the game.

There are two ways to save the game, "save" and "sync."

"Save" is to save the game data on the official server, and it is usually saved automatically. But it is also recommended to manually save before going offline.

"Sync" is to synchronize the saved data with the blockchain. After depositing/withdrawing tokens or NFTs, you need to sync with the blockchain. The official recommendation is to sync once every 1-3 days to ensure that the game items can function properly.

It is worth noting that sunflower actually has a dual wallet mechanism. In addition to your own wallet, the game itself has a built-in custodial wallet. Therefore, after buying tokens/NFTs on opensea or quickswap, you also need to transfer them to the built-in custodial wallet in the game to access them.

In terms of NFT standards, sunflower has chosen the ERC1155 standard. The biggest advantage of this standard is that it allows NFTs to be both fungible and non-fungible. It also supports batch transfers of multiple token IDs in a single transaction.

Since each Ethereum transaction takes about 15-30 seconds, ERC-721 takes a long time to transfer tokens, while ERC-1155 can send hundreds of different tokens in one block. The optimized ERC-1155 has passed the test smoothly and can transfer 150-200 tokens per second.

For users, the biggest improvement in using the ERC1155 standard is that NFTs have depth.

Taking the Easter Bunny as an example, there are a total of 100,000 bunnies, but because the ERC1155 standard is used, all the Easter bunnies are aggregated on one page for sale, creating an experience similar to NFT trading depth.

Team Attitude#

In previous "pay to earn" projects, the most favored behavior was users creating multiple accounts and scripting. Because this would bring more investment, the team would also generate more profits.

But in sunflower, it is the opposite. The sunflower team strongly opposes multiple accounts and scripting. Since April, sunflower has implemented a one-person-one-discord-one-account policy. And there are mechanisms against scripting and multiple accounts to continuously combat mass production players.

On opensea, you can see many banned lands being sold at extremely low prices. Please do not buy them, as they have no meaning even if you buy them.

At the same time, the official has set a 30-day observation period for each new player to observe whether they are cheating. During this period, your land will be gray, as shown in the following image.

Alright, that's all for this introduction to sunflower land. I'm going to harvest my crops now.

Author: 柳叶惊鸿 (Liuye Jinghong)

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