DAPPNATION: THE FLOWERPATCH REVIEW
By: Daniel Thwaites Sr (CaptainKoalaDann)
Welcome, everyone, to the latest review by DAPPNATION!!! This edition we bring to you a review on the far out MMORPG collectible Cannabis card and farming game, Flowerpatch by Nugbase. If you are into the whole virtual farming thing to pass time and you love Cannabis then you are in the right place! After this little review and a lil’ playing time, you’ll be planting, breeding, and growing your Blockchain collectible collection like a pro. Sit down, spark one up, and crank up some Wookiefoot because this party bus is parked on your front lawn!
“Welcome to Alvita”, your new guide, Herbert says as you first begin. Herbert is a groovy, ganja-farming Koala who will help you, a fellow arboreal herbivore, along your journey to becoming an expert crafter, grower, and Cannabis breeder. He is one cool marsupial who eschews that bunk eucalyptus and does not care a lick for Dave!
The Flowerpatch Alpha was launched on August 25th, 2019 by Nugbase with basic features for Alpha-testers to toy with and report bugs. There have been two major upgrades (Halloween and Winter) to include more great features since and the team has gained an impressive user-base. The upcoming patches will be the biggest yet as for new features including crafting, tending, and harvesting which can be read about later in the review.
The FLOWERs
To begin play, you must obtain your first FLOWER. A FLOWER is an ERC-721 token on the Ethereum Blockchain that represents a strain of Cannabis. The FLOWERs have 6 different land affinities or mediums they will grow in; lava, stone, sand, water, soil, and ice. There are different levels of rarities as well going in order from least to greatest; Uncommon, Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. These are some of the coolest Blockchain collectibles that are currently out. Noobs to the game can join the Flowerpatch Discord and obtain a free welcome FLOWER by talking to the team in the chat. You will need an ERC-721 compatible wallet for your FLOWERs and to interact with the game. Once you have that, you can sign the message inside your wallet to connect it with the Flowerpatch game. That is it! Now you are ready for planting and breeding!
- Pro Tip: FLOWERs can be bought and sold on the OpenSea marketplace!
Planting: Ya, Dig?
The planting feature is the foundation of Flowerpatch. With this distinctive element, you can plant your newly acquired FLOWERs and watch them grow in one of the six corresponding mediums that is Alvita. Once the FLOWERs become beautiful, full-grown Cannabis plants the magic happens within the community with breeding.
For now, you are able to just plant your FLOWERs and forget ’em, but in one of the next patches, that will all change. A new tending feature will be introduced which will require some attention to your plots. Players will need to water their planted FLOWERs every few days with the new watering can action button or they will wither up and fade away (no worries about losing your Blockchain item as they never leave your wallet). For those of you who have many responsibilities in life, like, well, everyone else on the planet, do not panic! There will be craftable sprinklers!!! That is going to be an awesome addition!
The last patch brought with it presents! Presents spawn randomly around Altiva and the first to plant and complete the growth cycle of the FLOWER gets the gift. Please hold all tears inside if you get that dank coal!!
- Pro Tip: Leave room around your planted FLOWERs to allow others to plant and breed with them.
Breeding: More, Please
Though you can breed between your own FLOWERs on the website’s breeding page, you can also plant your FLOWERs adjacent to another FLOWER to breed them. This will create a newly minted ERC-721 token that will go directly to your linked wallet. The rarity of collectible that is bred is based on some really fascinating mechanics that can be read about in detail in this Medium article. The fee for breeding is shared between the game and the owner of the FLOWER with which you breed with. The fee is currently set at 0.013 ETH of which .003 ETH goes to the owner and .01 ETH to the game. This covers all GAS fees and helps fund the game's development while at the same time putting in a reward system to encourage play.
Another noteworthy feature with the breeding is the name of the new strain. The first name of the first FLOWER chosen for breeding will be paired with whatever words come after the first word of the second FLOWER. For example, an Acapulco Ghoul bred with an Auburn One Witcha will result in a new strain called Acapulco One Witcha. This could lead to some very interesting names, especially when it involves Alaskan Thunderf…
- Quick Facts: Only 10 Legendaries have ever been bred!!!
- If you have two perfect legendaries (100 rarity, 100 mutability), you can produce new legendaries at a rate of about 1 in every 114 attempts
Strain Editor: Chronic Fun
The strain editor page of the website is where the community can create their own strains with a bong load of options to choose from. This is one of the more fun features that are out so far. You can customize your strain by visual characteristics, numeric stats, and even choose your favourite aromatic odor the FLOWERs emit.
The visual characteristics include different shapes of buds, leaves, stems and the particles that arise from them. Other great options available are the most important choice of Indica vs Sativa and the “I wish I had a scent emitter” smells. These fun choices are Cheese, Citrus, Earth, Floral, Fruit, Pine, Skunk, and Smoke! The numeric stats that can be customized include THC and CBD levels, growth speed, height, harvest size & spread, plus many more.
Though FLOWERs made in the strain editor are not Blockchain items, the .json file can be saved to your device and can be loaded from the strain editor page. This is where the FLOWERs are made for the themed strain creator contests that are held in the Flowerpatch Discord.
- Quick Fact: There are 16,777,216 different color options for each of the four color stats. That is 67,108,864 options…
Current Game Stats
Total FLOWERs: 19,386
Total Flower Breeds: 6,351
Total FLOWERs planted in Alvita: 2,567
The stats above can be found on the Flowerpatch website’s explorer page. You can also find the top ten holder list with a filter by rarity there as well.
The Future (of Flowerpatch)
Nugbase will eventually be utilizing their own tokens to conduct breeding and other really awesome things in the future which can be explored further on the Flowerpatch website. The upcoming sacrificial altar is sure to please as well. You will have the option of essentially trading in those doubles that you keep breeding, trying for that oh so elusive legendary, at a two for one rate! This is one feature we can not wait to see! The future is very bright for Altiva. The next few patches are sure to keep the fanbase satisfied and up the replay value with the crafting, harvesting, and tending features.
Opening a present
The Future Is Now Here: Alpha v1.25 Patch Is Live!
Well, to prove the point we were trying to make about the Flowerpatch team working hard to continue to build a better game, they have released an update to the game before we could even publish this! There were quite a few things in this patch though the harvesting, crafting, and tending features will be in the next one. Included with this update was in-view FLOWER loading, UI/UX upgrades, remaining growth time will show when inspecting un-grown FLOWERs, and new “planted” indicators on the explorer/account page will bring you right to your FLOWER with the click of a button!
The team also fixed a few things and added a few more small things to the game repairing the focus on scrollable areas, the click-dragging with the tools have been redone, and the Minimap is now usable for navigation! That minimap upgrade is cause for some cartwheels of joy right there!
The biggest additions to the game from the Alpha v1.25 patch have been saved for last; Growth times and the NFT drops in the presents.
The FLOWER growth times have been rebalanced with the minimum growth time being 8 minutes (100 growth rate), and the max 88 (0 growth rate). This is to balance out who can get the presents that appear. Speaking of presents, check out the wicked awesome update below!!!!
Presents now support any ERC721 token! With the current system, a huge variety of NFTs can now be dropped from other amazing Blockchain games. Community members are able to donate NFTs to the pool but there are going to be limits to what you can send. There is a whitelist in place to prevent subpar tokens from being thrown into the mix. Currently only Ethermon, Tides of Magic, and, of course, FLOWERs are currently whitelisted but stay tuned to the Flowerpatch social channels for updates! If you are interested in donating any of the current whitelisted NFTs for others to receive, the address to send them to is 0x2bEa56e7d81369A97fe09219b2734956BE995880. The drop rates for the presents are listed below.
- 10% chance of an NFT (one ToM, Ethermon, or FP)
- 5% chance of a rare FLOWER from the market
- 15% chance of an unusual FLOWER from the market
- 35% chance of a common FLOWER from the market
- 35% chance of coal (that updated screen tho)
The End (of this Review)
What started out as a less than 3000 FLOWER supply at Alpha launch has grown to over 17,000 in just over 5 months. This shows great potential to explode with activity as the new features drop. The team at Nugbase has done an amazing job of not only building a great, Blockchain-utilizing MMORPG Cannabis farming game (say that ten times) but continuing to build on their vision as they go.
The community behind the team is a strong one who has great banter in the chats and shows amazing support for the project. Join the Flowerpatch discord not only for the great company you will find, but also the sweet contests they hold such as themed FLOWER creator contests, meme contests, and every so often they just give away a few free FLOWERs just because they can!
Flowerpatch is already fun to play and although there isn’t a whole lot to do in-game for the time being, the next few months will bring some fantastic new things and will up the replay value immensely. It is a must-play for Cannabis fanatics and Blockchain gamers alike.
If you have enjoyed virtual farming games in the past but have asked yourself, “What’s the point of this?”, then you are not alone. Those F%#@Book games don’t offer actual item ownership that is etched into a Blockchain, yours to keep forever. This is the only farming game around that you need. It offers it all and a bag of chips (for the munchies, duh)! Pop on in their Discord and get yourself a FLOWER today! See you in Alvita!!!
Flowerpatch Links
Homepage — Game — Market — Explorer
Strain Editor — OpenSea Assets
Telegram — Discord — Medium — Reddit
Flowerpatch Twitter — Nugbase Twitter
Flowerpatch Community Quotes
“Flowerpatch has the ability to become a great game. When I first started playing Flowerpatch on July 9th of 2019, there was no game world. The developers have pushed out consistent updates since then. With that being said. The game has evolved into something I look forward to in the years to come. Honestly, I’m proud to have bred the 5th, 6th, and 7th Legendary Flower. It’s all good fun!” -Doliner
“I stumbled upon Flowerpatch by accident and did not really think much of it back then. I gathered my first few flowers through airdrops and contests, but ended up getting more involved after seeing the team’s progress and commitment to deliver an entertaining, blockchain-based game. I’d like to emphasise this last point: To deliver a GAME! Progress takes time but the FP team never has disappointed me so far, hence why I am really excited to see the upcoming new game mechanics to be implemented!” -bla_bla_bla
“FlowerPatch is one of the most innovative crypto games I’ve ever had the pleasure to be apart of. Over the past year I’ve seen the true dedication the developers have to making FlowerPatch one of the best crypto gaming experiences around.” -Adam Leaf
“The game itself is simple to understand for non crypto users and has a very wholesome vibe to it that resonates outside of the crypto community’s geeky niche. Following in the footsteps of the success of NFTs like cryptokitties they have remarkably improved on the idea with the addition of actual gameplay. This brings me to the current biggest draw of the game, being such a small team progress is slow and actual gameplay is still to be promised even though they are ahead of the schuduled roadmap. This also highlights the best part of Flowerpatch as a whole: the community. They’ve really curated a friendly, welcoming player base and have always been extremely communicative with almost 24/7 support.” — Jack1555
Three Questions With The Flowerpatch Team
Q. What made you decide to build Flowerpatch?
A. ANDREI EDELL (HUGE LUNG): I’ve been a game developer for most of my life. I started by making text adventure and clicker games in my early teens and eventually worked on shooters, strategy games, a platformer, and a digital board game. After saving up money by working at Evernote Corp for 6+ years, I decided to form Nugbase with some of my friends and family. We saw a lot of potential in the emerging crypto and cannabis markets and wanted to dedicate our time to follow these passions.
In the last several years, I realized the incredible potential of cannabis. To say that it has “no medical value” is clearly false, and beyond that, it has incredible industrial uses. Despite this, there are extremely few quality cannabis games on the market. To us, this looked like a huge opportunity!
Our team wants to make a relaxing game that combines elements of Minecraft and Stardew Valley, in a highly multiplayer world. A game that would present cannabis in a respectable but fair way, promoting responsible use, and showing the plant’s diverse utility.
I have a major love of role-playing games, where you can work with others to create a farm or base. As Flowerpatch evolves, players will have more and more control of their environment. Upcoming features include: being able to reshape the land, customizing your farm, harvesting FLOWERs for resources, crafting items like sprinklers and bombs, and trading of crafting materials.
Q. What was the biggest “oh no” moment so far in making Flowerpatch?
A. ANDREI EDELL (HUGE LUNG): The evolving nature of web3, Ethereum, and wallets. Honestly, I *love* this tech, but it’s fair to say that it’s all still kinda “beta”, and changing rapidly. This is both the “really fun” and “really scary” part of working on the cutting edge.
For example, when CryptoKitties started, there was basically one choice of wallet to use: MetaMask. MetaMask set an informal standard for what a modern web3 wallet is. However, since then, I’ve encountered wallets that don’t have the same features that MetaMask has. Some may not implement subscriptions to Ethereum events. Others may not give you Ethereum data at all, instead expecting that you will only use the wallet to sign transactions. Dapper introduced smart-contract based wallets, which have to use an alternate method of signing / verifying cryptographic messages (because only normal wallets have public/private keys, and smart-contracts do not).
There’s always a lot to keep up with, and not a lot of well-established ways of doing things. We ended up building a lot of infrastructure and services that we didn’t know that we would need to build. For example, scanning the blockchain for FLOWER data is slow and expensive, so we have a microservice dedicated to replicating FLOWER data from Ethereum to a private database that we can query. We built several custom endpoints to provide information (and images of FLOWERs) to 3rd parties like OpenSea. We created our own user account system that uses Ethereum signed messages instead of username/password.
Overall, my “oh no” moment was realizing that I can only spend about 1/3 of my time actually working on the game itself. A lot of time is spent creating surrounding infrastructure, and taking care of the business. Similarly, a lot of time is spent staying up to date with Ethereum and talking with other teams. I’m particularly excited about the future of zero-knowledge and optimistic rollups, which are poised to help massively scale Ethereum 1.x in a decentralized way. Very cool stuff!
Q.What is your absolute favorite part of Flowerpatch?
A. NIK PASH (PASH): I’ve been a dev on the project since we founded in 2018, and what excites me the most about Flowerpatch is that we’re finally ready — We’ve spent a lot of time getting here, building this foundation; we first built the Nugbase company website, support contact pages, FAQs — you know — all of the official stuff. Then we laid out the groundwork, built out the Flowerpatch site and card system, and started spreading the word organically long before the Game alpha was even out.
Now, after months of iterating on our playable alpha, and building up an active community of early adopters, we’re finally in a place where we can start focussing on the exciting bits — breed fee sharing, a sacrificial altar where you can sacrifice your NFTs, harvesting, and crafting, p2p trading, earning real cannabis while playing an MMORPG farming game.
We’ve always had more ideas than time to implement them, but it’s really exciting to actually make them a reality, one idea at a time. On top of what we have today, we can really focus on what makes Flowerpatch unique: combining social interactions and programmable money in unprecedented (and fun!) new ways.
Overall though, I’d say my favorite aspect of the project is the Flowerpatch community. Our community really does it all. Aside from providing valuable feedback and feature proposals, our boys are out here making memes, breeding flowers, helping new players, sharing FLOWERs, and did I mention building 3rd party scraping sites to track in-game presents? Looking forward, I’m confident that feedback from the community will become an increasingly important force in the project, and I’m excited to deliver on what y’all come up with in the future!
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