Blockchain game lovers have yet another great project that they can enjoy since Astral Pioneers has officially hit the market. This presents itself as another blockchian-based project that offers fun and properties at the same time.
Astral Pioneers (AP) is a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) blockchain project and Ethereum metaverse that will allow players to own their own land, mine that land for resources, and build with those resources on 30 different planets.
Originally conceived by an independent team of developers, Astral Pioneers is an upcoming metaverse project that aims to turn that fantasy into reality.
What Is Astral Pioneers?
Astral Pioneers is an upcoming blockchain game that features 30 unique planets in a virtual galaxy, each with its own resources. In Astral Pioneers, players take on the role of a human being with the power to perform astral projections on other planets throughout the galaxy, making them take the form of an alien being. Players can create funky alien avatars to join the universe by purchasing land and extracting different resources to build structures that function as NFT. NFTs are tradable with other players using the in-game currency, along with the mined resources.
In addition to the resource-based economy, players will also be able to participate in player-led events, such as social gatherings and elections. The latter will be done through players’ voting rights and players will be able to legislate their laws on their land.
Astral Pioneers is a project founded by Greg Betz, a blockchain architect based in Columbus, Ohio. Greg has been involved with blockchain companies for over half a decade and is certainly no stranger to the concept of blockchain gaming.
Inspired by other blockchain metaverse projects such as Sandbox, Decentraland and Otherside, Betz envisioned Astral Pioneers as a play-to-earn (P2E) digital world where players can have fun and make money at the same time.
Betz is collaborating with artist Malcolm Smith, who is the creator of the Blue Pixie comics, and Generativenfts.io, an NFT creation group for engineering and technical support. Betz wanted to create a game with real government, while allowing players and creators the freedom to mint and trade NFT on a single platform.
“We are the first metaverse with a real government and the first to have extractable resources in the game world,” says Betz. The developers plan to add RPG-style missions where players can collect resources and “magic items” that function as NFT.
Benefits for players
Betz decided to do the project on the Ethereum blockchain, a decision that significantly affects the design of the metaverse. Astral Pioneers may just be the blockchain game to boast a few more firsts in the blockchain gaming space (no pun intended), thanks to Ethereum’s built-in next-generation functionality. Blockchain allows players to interact with others in different ways, allowing for both internal and external trading.
Ethereum allows the team to build a metaverse around a tokenized economy, using the ERC-721A token standard. This version of the ethereum smart contract’s native token is optimized for using gas (the blockchain’s native cost management resource). The standard allows multiple players to mine land-based resources and mint NFTs with minimal gas usage.
The tokenization inherent in Ethereum, and later astral Pioneers, adds different levels of governance, identity management and Defi capabilities to the game. If you’re familiar with how blockchain works, all of these features sound like picketing and smart contracts made for a game.
To get started, players will need to purchase an avatar, an alien NFT display image plus a 1/1 ambient scene in the background. The starting price is 0.0888 ETH. Players will be able to choose from “multiple alien races, with unique traits”.” Smith’s distinctive art style is a notable feature in these avatars.
The game will use its own stablecoin for in-game transactions, dubbed APIC, which can be used to purchase land and resources. New players will receive 50,000 APUs from the start and will be able to use it to purchase land on one of the 90,000 states on the 30 different planets.
Astral Pioneers allows anonymous users to play for free. These players appear in the game as spirits. Spirits will be able to view public events such as live concerts. Registered players who are logged into the metaverse will need to create an avatar for 100 APIC. These players will be able to play the base game, but without voting rights.
For the best experience, players can pay an additional 200 APIC per user to become citizens of any state. Obtaining citizenship will require players to fill out a detailed KYC form, after which they will obtain a Soulbound Token, a non-transferable NFT that is cryptographically linked to a player’s account.
Astral pioneers moving forward
The team plans to add a way for players to lend or invest their APIC tokens or other resources for profit. This will be linked to the charity DAO and player-run gaming DAOs.
Betz and his team have not yet announced a concrete launch date. However, they established a roadmap for the project, in which they describe in detail the various milestones of the astral pioneers. The current plan is to launch several stages of the game over 7 seasons, starting with NFT coinage and completing with the first donation to the DAO charity.
