NFT Worlds - The Minecraft Powered Virtual World

TLDR

NFT Worlds is a virtual world project built by leveraging Minecraft.
NFT Worlds has created its own architecture in order to provide a more resilient and decentralized hosted world ecosystem.
Interoperability between the different worlds is possible by taking advantage of ‘portals’.
Players can access NFT Worlds using the Minecraft game client on different platforms (Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs, Android and iOS devices, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch consoles).
Players no longer need to have Ether or Matic (Polygon Network) to conduct in-game transactions. Gasless transactions are possible due to NFT Worlds’ network of nodes.
The WRLD token is the official token of the platform.
The project also enables staking and renting of NFT Worlds.
Genesis avatars are 15,000 1-of-1 playable NFT characters within the NFT Worlds ecosystem.
The genesis avatars mint will take place in 2 phases. An initial whitelist mint for anyone holding an NFT World (4th of May), and a public mint open to anyone (5th of May).
Going forward, the team will continue to tap into the Minecraft ecosystem to accelerate the project development.

Introduction

In the last couple of years, we have witnessed a number of virtual world related projects being launched in the crypto space. NFT Worlds is a project launched more recently, but one that has attracted attention very quickly. NFT Worlds was launched to create a community-driven, customizable, cross-platform (computers/consoles), play-to-earn gaming ecosystem that allows landowners to construct games and experiences for users within their worlds. The project has also been built by leveraging Minecraft’s existing open-source gaming ecosystem. This enabled the team to take advantage of various open-source tools and allowed them to focus more on the NFT implementation and less on the game aspect. NFT Worlds is a collection of 10,000 worlds that are all different. Each NFT World is a procedurally generated 3D voxel world that is absolutely unique. The platform’s native token is the WRLD token, which is the primary utility token and the token used when playing in an NFT World.

Minecraft

The team’s decision to bootstrap the project by taking advantage of existing open-source gaming ecosystems has proved to be a good call. The team has nearly a decade of experience working within the Minecraft open-source ecosystem, and as a result, they used the open-source tools and mods to power the virtual world of NFT Worlds.

Some of the benefits of using Minecraft include:

Minecraft has a large user base. When these players transition to NFT Worlds, they will have little difficulty navigating the system.
Thanks to open-sourced server bridging solutions, players can access NFT Worlds using the Minecraft game client on different platforms (Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs, Android and iOS devices, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch consoles. Players will also be able to access & play in NFT Worlds directly through a web browser in the future).
It is all thanks to Minecraft’s open-sourced mods that NFT Worlds can be so customizable.
Simple but powerful world-building tools through the Minecraft client, WorldEdit, the MCEdit program, and more.
Taking advantage of a robust ecosystem of building partners who are familiar with the Minecraft ecosystem and know how to create entirely unique experiences, custom gameplay, and now in-world interactions that interact in real-time with smart contracts and online APIs.

Additionally, the team is also making improvements to the game by introducing the NFT Worlds Game Client, enabling better graphics, support for equippable cosmetic items etc. (Minecraft only supports low-resolution skins). In worlds played through the NFT Worlds Game Client, there’s an improvement in the visual styling, as things like lighting, shadows, water, and particle effects are being modified through the implementation of custom visual shaders. It is important to note, however, that NFT Worlds will always have voxel-based visuals. Improvement on the NFT Worlds Game Client and on in-game user interfaces will continue through Q2 and Q3, 2022. More launcher features are in the works, including WRLD marketplace, full support for custom player avatars, and the ability to use portal mechanics to easily connect worlds.

An additional benefit of using Minecraft is also the huge player base the game has (nearly 140,000,000 with a significant proportion of them playing online). The team plans to consistently attract new players by tapping into that ecosystem. The team is also planning to target non-crypto Minecraft enthusiasts as NFT Worlds can have great gameplay in addition to strong economic incentives. They have started to connect with a number of the best Minecraft content creators and will start deploying their marketing budget to raise player awareness around NFT Worlds in late Q2 2022 when more compelling worlds and content go live.

NFT Worlds Decentralization and Features

At the moment, many NFT/P2E games (if not all) are entirely reliant on centralized servers. If these servers were to go down the entire game would crash, causing players to lose game progression and any assets acquired during that session. This of course presents a significant risk for any virtual world/gaming platform that tries to be decentralized. As a result, NFT Worlds has created its own architecture in order to address this issue.

Source: High-level architecture overview. Source: NFT Worlds

NFT Worlds uses its game launcher in order to prevent such issues. The NFT Worlds Game Launcher automatically installs the Minecraft mods, a blockchain-specific unique ID and other requirements needed by NFT Worlds in the players’ local Minecraft client. The game launcher interacts with a smart contract that acts as a world server router, allowing the game client to know in a decentralized manner where a specific world's server is hosted and how to connect to it.

A world owner can use any cloud-based hosting provider, their own hosting infrastructure, the NFT Worlds hosting service, or any other hosting option to host their NFT World for others to play. A more decentralized hosted world ecosystem can be created by decoupling where each world server is hosted and giving world owners authority over how they host their world. In the event of an outage, the integrity of the entire NFT Worlds network is not jeopardized by one world going offline for a short period of time. The World Server Router smart contract handles all world lookups on the blockchain.

It is important to note that NFT World's multiplayer server software is a “fork” of a popular open-source Minecraft server codebase, although the team further optimized it to allow 500+ players to play together in a single world at any time. Support for a theoretically unlimited number of players is already available via horizontal scaling of world servers or through NFT Worlds’ partners such as WorldQL services.

Playing Between Worlds

In any NFT World, owners are able to create an indefinite number of ‘portals’ that could transport players within that world to other NFT Worlds. Through the portal system, players can also be transported to a specific location coordinate within the same world.

This interoperability between worlds opens up numerous possibilities for owners to collaborate in designing worlds and potentially could make the gameplay more interesting.

The portal mechanism works by enabling the player's game client to look up the connection data for the world the portal is moving them to in the World Server Router contract. If the lookup is successful, the player's game client connects to the world's server and places them at the portal's defined coordinates.

Console Play & Blockchain Interactions

At this time, connectivity to worlds on consoles must be manually entered into the game via a dApp. It will take less than a minute for console players to complete this task. Warping via portals to other worlds works as planned once connected to any world.

NFT Worlds multiplayer on consoles will be played through Minecraft Bedrock edition. Because Minecraft Bedrock edition cannot be modded like Java edition on PCs, it is not possible to have the same blockchain interaction UI. For blockchain interactions on gaming consoles, a combination of text-based and native in-game UI will be used.

Custodial Player Wallets

One of the main inhibitors slowing down adoption in many blockchain-based games is of course the crypto expertise required by players to play the game. A lot of traditional gamers not exposed to crypto will have to learn all about wallets, gas fees, exchanges etc. in order to play blockchain-based games. This creates friction for the player and acts as an obstacle to player adoption. As a result, NFT Worlds has introduced custodial player wallets in order to address this specific issue. Custodial player wallets eliminate the need for players to manage or comprehend the operation of a crypto wallet. Players who join NFT Worlds get a wallet linked to their account automatically. WRLD deposits automatically into their managed wallet, and spending WRLD in-game is as easy as hitting a "confirm" button. Players can, of course, choose to use their own managed wallets at any moment.

Gasless Transactions

In order to reduce friction for players, NFT Worlds has also introduced gasless transactions within games. Players no longer need to have Ether or Matic (Polygon Network) to conduct in-game transactions. In the new infrastructure, NFT Worlds’ network of nodes covers the gas fee required for players to submit transactions, transfer WRLD, make purchases, and update other on-chain data. These nodes are compensated automatically from the player's wallet with a predefined fee in WRLD token to cover the transaction's gas costs. As a result, to submit transactions, players just need to have WRLD tokens in their wallets.

This also simplifies the implementation of transaction automation for custodial player wallets based on player behaviors. This leads to a much smoother player onboarding experience as players don't even need to understand how gas payments are made on different chains. They can simply transact with WRLD for any use case, just like they’re used to with any non-crypto game’s currency.

WRLD token

The WRLD Token is the official token used for transactions within the NFT Worlds games. It is available in both Ethereum and Polygon. It is the primary medium of exchange within the NFT World's ecosystem and is needed to access exclusive experiences, items, perks, content and more within NFT Worlds. Additionally, Play-to-earn rewards given to players for completing quests, challenges, winning competitions and more across the NFT Worlds ecosystem will be handed out in WRLD tokens (amounting to 35% of the total supply). The Play-to Earn faucet is a system that gives owners access to distributions of WRLD specifically intended to be used to reward players in their worlds. To gain access to the faucet, worlds must stake predetermined sums of WRLD tokens in order to gain access to different tiers of allocations. The faucet contract will hold this staked WRLD as collateral and will slash it if the worlds entrusted with faucet disbursements misuse their WRLD allocations in any way that is outside the specified player disbursement guidelines (defined by governance members).

When a faucet is cut, the offender loses access to future disbursements and their staked WRLD is taken to compensate the faucet treasury for tokens wasted.

Furthermore, 10% of the WRLD tokens were distributed to NFT Worlds NFT holders, while 35% will be distributed over a 5-year timeline to world owners that stake their NFT Worlds. The team Reserves amount to 5%, and 15% will be used for exchange listings and on Market Makers. The maximum supply of WRLD tokens is 5,000,000,000 (Five billion tokens).

The team is also introducing new mechanisms to stabilize WRLD and promote healthy TVL.

These mechanisms include the staking of WRLD tokens, which will be rewarded with $veWRLD. $veWRLD is a governance token, but it can also be used to earn exclusive in-game items, cosmetics, and player titles based on the amount held by a player. Additionally, going forward it will also be possible to stake WRLD to a specific world to help meet the world's staking requirements for the play-to-earn faucet. Staking to a particular world will result in WRLD incentives based on that world's success and market activity.

Staking & Rent for NFT World holders

World owners can stake their world to earn WRLD tokens and at the same time make the world available for rent.
World owners may claim their WRLD token earned from staking at any time.
The amount of WRLD earned on a daily basis for a staked NFT World is determined based on a formula that takes into account its rarity.
More than 89% of NFT Worlds are staked at the moment.
As the floor price of NFT Worlds rises, the rental system will become increasingly important in allowing creative builders and developers to produce quality NFT World experiences that pay them WRLD. This allows creative individuals and teams to contribute to the ecosystem's content creation without being priced out if they can't afford to buy an NFT World due to the high price.
Additionally, this allows world owners to put their worlds to use that they otherwise would not have planned to construct on or that they may not be using right now.
All renting logic and conditions are managed by the staking smart contract. The world is never transferred out of the staking/renting smart contract.
Rental management is available through the World Manager dApp.
World owners are able to control :
- The monthly price in WRLD required to rent their world.
- The deposit required to rent the world. If a tenant defaults before the term ends, the world owner keeps the deposit.
- The minimum and maximum rental term lengths available in months.
When a staked NFT World is locked into an active rental it cannot be unstaked or accessed by the world owner until the rental term is fulfilled or the renter defaults.
After a rental term ends, the world is reset to its original world state so the world owner does not get access to any of the world developed by the renter or the proprietary game systems the renter may have made.
If a term ends and the renter wants to renew their rental agreement they can negotiate with the world owner. The world owner can create a wallet-specific rental agreement that only the renter wallet can accept, preventing other parties from sniping the world if it were to be listed publicly.
If the owner and renter cannot come to an agreement, a system will be in place to allow the transferral of the renter's world creations to another NFT World without disrupting what they've built.

Builders Marketplace

The Builders Marketplace is a public marketplace that runs on a Discord server. It has over 30 independent teams that are masters at generating Minecraft games and content, all of which have been verified by the team. Hundreds of NFT projects and individuals have collaborated with these certified builders to develop their own worlds on NFT Worlds.

You can access the NFT Worlds Builders Marketplace Discord server here

Competition

The table below shows a brief comparison between NFT Worlds, and other virtual world projects such as Decentraland and The Sandbox.

Source: NFT Worlds

The image below shows the playable size comparison between the three different virtual worlds.

Source: Source: NFT Worlds

Projects Building On NFT Worlds

To date, there are over 100 NFT projects and communities that have publicly announced they are building their games on top of an NFT World. A full list can be viewed here.

According to the team, there are over 50 more that are planning to build but have not publicly made an announcement.

Genesis Avatars

Genesis avatars are 15,000 1-of-1 playable NFT characters within the NFT Worlds ecosystem.

Genesis avatar holders will be eligible for 50% of the total WRLD marketplace fees (generated from buying, selling, and trading of NFT Worlds game-specific items). These will be distributed as WRLD tokens. Monthly distributions will be relative to the rarity of each genesis avatar (if the base distribution for the least rare genesis avatar is 1x, the distribution for the rarest avatar would be 4x. Based on their rarity, the distributions of other avatars would fall somewhere within this relative scale).

Furthermore, a genesis avatar owner will get airdropped or given first access to many of the rare item drops offered by NFT Worlds and its partners in the future.

Access to an exclusive world specifically built for Genesis Avatars holders, to be released in the future is also an additional benefit. The world will feature games, hangout spots, venues and more.

Furthermore, users who possess a Genesis Avatar will also have access to exclusive vanity titles that players who do not own one will not have.

The genesis avatars mint will take place in 2 phases. An initial whitelist mint for anyone holding an NFT World, and a public mint open to anyone. 10,000 avatars are allocated to the whitelist mint. An additional 5,000 NFT Worlds Genesis Avatars will be available for mint in the public sale, along with any unminted supply from the prior whitelist sale.

Mint Price

The whitelist mint price will be 0.4 Ethereum per avatar. Whitelist Passes which give you access to minting a Genesis Avatar during the whitelist mint have already been airdropped (currently selling for 0.6ETH).

The public mint price will be a dutch auction starting at 1 Ethereum per avatar and reducing down to a bottom price of 0.4 Ethereum per avatar over a period of time.

Mint Date

The whitelist mint will be held on May 4, 2022.

The public mint will follow 24 hours after the whitelist mint begins, on May 5.

Takeaway

NFT Worlds is an interesting virtual world project presenting a compelling implementation to power its virtual world. The team’s decision to leverage Minecraft to build their project has proven to be a good decision, as they were able to focus on the NFT and blockchain implementation and less on the gaming aspect. This enables them to launch and deploy much fast as many of the open source tools and solutions were already available. This also gave them various advantages over other virtual worlds, such as enabling them to be a cross-platform virtual world project, for example. On the other hand, being a "derivative" project also means that the project is heavily reliant on Minecraft. Going forward, the team also plans to use Minecraft to accelerate the project development. It is already planning to tap into the Minecraft ecosystem to attract a huge player base by working with influencers, using referral systems, establishing connections with many of Minecraft’s content creators and reducing friction for onboarding non crypto-gamers. The team is continuing to build and there are many things to look forward to going forward such as the introduction of avatars in NFT Worlds. Additionally, the team is also working on the WRLD Launchpad, avatars & player cosmetics, the WRLD Name Service (cross-network alternative to ENS), live video & audio streaming support and things such as proximity voice chat support which could improve player experiences considerably.