Flowerpatch & Crypto For Dummies
By somewhat popular demand, the Flowerpatch team would like to share a quick guide on our product, crypto, and how they correlate. While we have a firm grasp on the tech we use within crypto, the entire space is rapidly evolving. While we remain in this exciting phase of trial and error, the technology and ideas are often rough around the edges and take some onboarding. Ours included.
Nugbase / Flowerpatch
Nugbase is an indie game studio that was conceptualized and founded in 2017 by a group of friends who shared common interests in gaming, tech, and cannabis. Since then, we have been working to do several things through our game, Flowerpatch (and now several other projects, as well): build the world’s best digital cannabis community with respect towards the plant and its caretakers in mind, build a marketing and tech platform for cannabis brands by harnessing the benefits of crypto, and game-ify the dispensary experience.
How does the game work?
Similar to popular Facebook game, Farmville, Flowerpatch is a multiplayer farming game in which you take on the role of a peaceful Koala in the land of Alvita. Farmers in Flowerpatch will plant and harvest digital cannabis, which is represented by “FLOWER Tokens.” Each FLOWER is an NFT with over 20 traits (including smell, taste, height, and THC content) coded into the Ethereum blockchain.
When you plant your FLOWER in the game world, you have the option to breed with other FLOWERs that are adjacent, or harvest it for resources and SEED Token.
When you breed two FLOWER NFTs, you pay a small fee in SEED Token (or ETH but gas is expensive), which is a cryptocurrency we created as an in-game currency. You can get SEED Token from harvesting plants or you can purchase it on an external market. Breeding mints 3 brand new FLOWER NFTs that share traits from the two “parents,” such as their strain names.
With our 5 tier rarity system for all FLOWER NFTs, you have a chance to get a higher rarity than the parent FLOWER when you breed. The higher the rarity, the higher performing and more valuable the FLOWER is. The rarity system is tiered with 5 rarities and on a scale of 1 to 100:
Two primary factors dictate FLOWER’s rarities: growth speed & harvest size. Rarity is the average of the two, which are also on a scale of 1 to 100.
Thanks to our amazing community, and the OpenSea NFT marketplace, our rarity system has taken on real value, with the lowest rarity costing roughly $5 and the highest rarity ranging into the thousands. For full details on the stats behind breeding check here.
While the core features of the game revolve around these FLOWER NFTs, we will be adding more and more features to Alvita (and other worlds soon,) such as clouds and weather, private land, playable Koala avatars, factions and lore, an in-depth skill tree, and more… As it stands, Alvita is in the “stone age” in which magic and mystery dominate. As the community plays the game more, they ascend the global consciousness of the Cannaverse, unlocking more features and lore as we grow.
What are NFTs and why do this on a blockchain (or two)?
“Can’t I just take a screenshot of a FLOWER NFT?” Yes, if you just want to be able to look at that image. But now, there is much more to owning an NFT than just that.
NFTs: As you may have heard by now, an NFT is a Non-Fungible Token — But this does not pertain to just digital artwork. The best way to view an NFT is as a digital key that only you can access, if you own it.
This can apply to many situations ranging from a concert ticket/event (digital or physical), to a virtual social club, or a video game. The important part is that when you own the private key to an NFT, your ownership is guaranteed — anyone can go onto the blockchain to see that you own this key and it is nearly permanent.
In Flowerpatch’s case, the project is built on two blockchains so far: Ethereum and Polygon.
The Ethereum Blockchain: Most widely used blockchain across all industries and has the most gaming and NFT projects built on top of it. Ethereum is secured by “Mining” and “Proof of Work,” which makes it impossible to hack.
The Polygon(MATIC) Blockchain: The Polygon network is a “layer 2 solution” created with the intention of assisting the high congestion on the Ethereum blockchain. While Ethereum is incredibly flexible, it can only process 30 transactions per second, which considering . Recently in October, Polygon reached 566,516 daily users, surpassing Ethereum at the time (527,158 daily users.) Good thing that volume was not weighed entirely on the Ethereum network, huh?
It’s important to note that Polygon is not an “ETH Killer” and very much was made in collaboration with the Ethereum Network. The Polygon team has done an amazing job keeping up with the rapidly changing Ethereum ecosystem and will be an important building block for the future.
We decided to integrate to Polygon so as to make the use of FLOWERs cheaper — SEED breeding, which we rolled out a few months ago, cost 2,000 SEED per breed + a small fee in Polygon (less than a dollar) instead of Ethereum gas. 500 of that SEED goes to the owner of the secondary parent plant!
You can access this side of our breeding page by simply switching to the Polygon network in your MetaMask. Here’s how to set it up. We also support Portis!
Happy farming and please reach out to our team via Discord or our website if you have any questions for us!
— The Nugbase/Flowerpatch Team
