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

Author's Note

Actually, I started paying attention to sunflower a few months ago, but at that time the project was in the closed beta phase and I couldn't mint, so I couldn't play 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 give readers a brief analysis of this refreshing game in the blockchain gaming industry. It includes gameplay, playability, game incentives, game economy system, technical details, and team attitude.

You are also welcome to join my discord for discussion, 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 playing the game.

It is worth mentioning that there are many lands for sale on Opensea, but those are banned lands due to various reasons (cheating, scripting) and have no value, so please do not buy them.

To prevent multiple accounts, the game currently requires one person to verify one discord account and have land to enter the game. It is recommended to mint from the official source instead of buying from the secondary market.

Gameplay#

The gameplay of the game is not complicated. You can upgrade/sell crops (to earn tokens SFL) by farming, 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 a nutshell, you can grow wheat, sell the harvested wheat for SFL, and then buy an axe to chop trees and get wood/buy a pickaxe to mine for stone, and so on.

When you unlock all the land, the fun part of the game begins. 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 exchanged by obtaining 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 now if you want to get it, you can only buy it on Opensea.

At the time of writing this article, 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 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 loop.

Playability#

Playability is a pain point in current blockchain games. The majority of blockchain games are "X to earn", which attract users to make large investments in cryptocurrencies and then distribute project tokens as rewards.

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

This mechanism can bring significant wealth effects during a bull market or an upward trend, but it can also easily lead to a death spiral during a bear market, where participants are less willing to hold tokens due to decreasing returns.

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 yield in the game is very low. Even if you fully farm the most valuable crops, the daily income is less than 15 SFL (1 SFL = 0.22u, about 20 RMB).
All NFTs that enhance attributes in the game need to be obtained through resource exchange. Of course, if they are already exchanged, you can only buy them from the secondary market.

Based on these 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 attribute-enhancing NFTs?

Wheat has a low economic return in the current version, but ranch functionality will be opened soon, and ranches require a large amount of wheat. Depending on supply and demand, will you choose to switch to planting wheat early and profit from selling the wheat you hoarded in later versions?

In the next season, there will be cake-themed NFTs that require a large amount of wheat to exchange. Will you choose to plant wheat in advance or buy some wheat from the secondary market?

In the sunflower land game, there are many economic choices, and these diverse economic choices converge into "operation to earn". If you manage your farm well, you will make a lot of money, earn more SFL, and cash it out into USDC, real money.

Game Incentives#

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

These NFTs can enhance the base 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, there is a minimum price limit on Opensea, which leads to a huge price difference. For example, wheat is priced at about $0.5-0.6 USD off-market, but Opensea limits the minimum price, so the lowest listing price is $3 USD, a five-fold difference. 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 lower-priced item sales.

Game Economy System#

I didn't use the term "token economy system" because in the official documentation, the team has clearly stated that the token SFL 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 do not view the SFL token from an investment perspective, and if you must make a comparison, you can think of it as World of Warcraft gold.

In World of Warcraft, gold is used as a currency with the reference of WoW Tokens (monthly subscription). On the server I used to play, it was about 600,000 gold per token.

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

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

For example, in a new season, resource consumption will increase, resulting in a decrease in SFL circulation and deflation. Or when new high-yield crops are introduced, resource output will increase, resulting in increased SFL circulation and inflation. The total supply of SFL is currently about 11 million.

Therefore, SFL is a very economic game currency in sunflower land, rather than an investment target. I hope readers will 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 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. So after buying tokens/NFTs on Opensea or Quickswap, you also need to transfer them to the built-in custodial wallet in the game to use them.

In terms of NFT standards, sunflower has chosen the ERC1155 standard, which has the advantage of allowing 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 and can transfer 150-200 tokens per second.

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

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

Team Attitude#

In previous pay-to-earn projects, the most popular behavior among users was to create multiple accounts and use scripts. This would bring more investments, and the team would make 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 value.

At the same time, the team 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 image below.

Alright, this is the introduction to sunflower land. I'm going to harvest my crops now.

Author: 柳叶惊鸿 (Liuye Jinghong)

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