What is Alien Worlds, and what can it evolve into? | Beyond Horizons
Introduction to Beyond Horizons
Welcome to Beyond Horizons, the goal with this series is to help the community navigate the Alien Worlds Ecosystem. With the growth of the Alien Worlds Syndicates and the Galactic Hub, we have started to see more growth of the ecosystem. Even though alienw.com was born out of filling the need for the community to follow this, it's to time consuming and at times even hard. There's a lot of activities to break down and made aware of. So that's where this series comes in.
I intend to look at all that is happening in the ecosystem, go through it, and gather what I deem as interesting, valuable or in other ways worth sharing. This might be updates from the Alien Worlds team, new projects funded through Galactic hub, Proposals through the Alien Worlds Syndicates or updates from existing projects. It might even be some broader changes in the Blockchain or WAX ecosystem that has a direct impact, or potential impact on the Alien Worlds Community.
I welcome and encourage all forms of discussions, feedback and ideas for this series and other related topics through Twitter (X?) Just tag @anyobservation and Alienw Telegram Channel. Some of these ideas and discussions might also be elevated and shared in the future Beyond Horizon releases. Through that I hope to give a voice to the thoughts and ideas of the community.
With the start of Beyond Horizons, you will also see some changes to alienw.com, where I will attempt to gather more community resources and easy to digest data available for you and anyone else. Blockchain is a powerful tool when it comes to keeping transparency and history, but we need good User Interfaces to digest and understand the data. We have over 2000 proposals across the syndicates, and we are not even one year into the existence of them. Imagine trying to go through the entire history in 3 months, 6 months, or even 24 months... It won't be easy to digest and make sense of everything happening. If you have any suggestions or general input, please share them with me.
The first 9 months of the Alien Worlds Syndicates
We have passed the 9 months mark, and a lot has happened. We have seen 67M TLM distributed over 1600 approved proposals, with over 200 cancelled and over 300 expired proposals. The Galactic Hub has also gone through 2 seasons of grants, providing support for 13 different games, tools and ideas.
With that, you can likely already see the sheer amount of information to digest to just understand what is being created by the community. And since this is the first Beyond Horizons article, let's start by actually breaking down what it all actually is. And then moving forward we will start to break down updates and projects that I believe is worth mentioning. Keep in mind, the idea of these articles is not to simply praise projects, but to digest information and give my honest take on it.
The Alien Worlds Syndicates - Community DAOs
Alien Worlds was launched back in 2020, with a mission to create a gamified DAO ecosystem with a strong foundational economical layer (TLM). Where both the community and the initial Alien Worlds team could help steer the direction of the project. They had a lot of ideas and directions, some that has come into better fruition than others. After 2 years we finally saw the birth of the Planetary DAO Syndicates.
The Syndicate DAO system is part of the Alien Worlds Game in the form of gamifying DAOs Game. It's intended to be a way to explore what a DAO is, or can be. For most gamers, the syndicates has nothing to do with gaming. It's a way for decentralized community to organize and make decisions. However, if you change the scope and perspective, you can start to identify the entire AW ecosystem as a new type of game. Where you find a lot of activities and games in different forms. What is lacking is however visual gameplay, which is what most people associate with a game.
The Syndicate governance and flow of TLM
The Planetary DAOs are governed by the community, whom vote for the planetary custodians. The federation can configure the length of each term, which is currently set at a weekly duration. After about 7 days of voting, the custodians are put in power of the Planetary decisions, where they have the power to distribute TLM as they deem fit. For any decision they make for the planet, they require an on chain action where at least 3 of the 5 candidates approve the idea.
After every election, a new portion of TLM can be claimed by the DAOs. This is coming directly from the planets reserve accounts. The amount of TLM that is claimable is a configurable number set by the Federation, and is currently set at 2% per week. This is announced to change to 4% if total staked TLM across all planets passes 42,000,000 TLM.
The reserves are then filled daily, and the ratio depends on how much TLM is staked to that planet, compared to the other planets. So if one planet has 10% of all staked TLM, it will receive 10% of the daily distributed TLM into their reserve account.
The Federation is Alien Worlds controlling body
Currently the power of the Federation is in the hands of the Alien Worlds team. The initial plan was(is?) to release the power of the Federation to the community as well. If that happens, some of the core mechanics are configurable, such as the daily percentage of TLM that goes to the planets, land owners and/or the mining game.
The Alien Worlds Galactic Hubs
The Galactic Hubs is a way for Alien Worlds to help the community create value for the Alien Worlds ecosystem. This is done in Seasons by providing financial support for ideas through distributing TLM to these teams. This gives incentive for content creators, programmers and other creative minds to spend their time to add value to the community.
Season 1 grants: https://alienworlds.io/blogs/presenting-galactic-hubs-season-1-grant-recipients Season 2 grants: https://alienworlds.io/blogs/galactic-hubs-season-2
What Alien Worlds is, according to me
Let's start by stating that I've been a part of the Alien Worlds community since before it was announced. And I've been around and present ever since. I'm a Land owner, created multiple small and medium sized tools, and a lot of written and video content and of course mined my fair share of TLM.
So far, what we have seen from Alien Worlds, is just the first layer. It's an economic layer, where we basically have seen different ways to distribute Trilium (TLM) through different means. What makes Alien Worlds interesting, is what will be done on top of that foundation. Finally after the release of the DAOs, it's a community led project, that can go anywhere. I wrote a visionary article back in December 2020, with some of the potential of this system You find it on my medium.
TLM is the in game currency, and governance token of the Alien Worlds ecosystem. It can be swapped 1:1 to planetary tokens, which gives you a voice on that planet. There are also other use cases for TLM such as upgrading in game assets and participating in different events and games. Let's break down the different systems of distributing TLM to users.
The Mining game
A simple time based clicker, where you have your tools, select a planet, and go digging. For your work you are rewarded with TLM and NFT points (previously NFTs). The amount of TLM you get depends on the current TLM pool of that planet, the tools you use and the land you mine on. - Mining
The Binance Missions
In the Alien Worlds Missions you use TLM to sent Spacecrafts on missions for a duration of time, and when they are done you get rewarded with TLM and NFTs on the Binance Smart Chain. - Missions
The Land Owners
By owning and holding lands, you receive TLM in two ways. One is through the daily distribution of TLM to planets and land owners. The second is through each user that mine TLM on your land. This is the game tax that is applied to each user that spend time on your property. There was recently some changes to the Daily TLM distribution for lands, which enormously reduced the TLM distribution for most land owners. Being a land owner, I hate that change. - Land market on NFTHive.io
Opening Alien Worlds promo packs
In the early stages of Alien Worlds, there was Promotional Alien Worlds packs, where you got a random amount of TLM and a basic starter NFT. You can still find some of these packs in some users wallets, here's a list of accounts.
Participating in the Alien Worlds Syndicates
You have multiple ways of acquiring more TLM through this DAO system. The main idea is to get planet(s) to support you in some way. What each planet deems as valuable to the ecosystem will differ. So there is no straightforward way to get into the syndicate world. You can look at previous proposals for different planets and see how much TLM they seem to grant for what type of proposal, and which candidates that support it. You find them all here
The NFTs of Alien Worlds
In Alien Worlds, the main type of NFTs are the tools and lands. Lands are limited in supply per planet, while tools have a growing supply, where some of them are in very high supply, the abundant tools. Then you have a bunch of NFTs with no real utility even this far into the game. This is one of the main critiques the Alien Worlds team has been receiving.. Where is the promised PVP game mode named Thunderdome?
But the some of the syndicates and Galactic Hubs proposals are pushing for a change on that. We have started to see some third party games and events add some sort of utility to these Alien Worlds NFTs... The intended Thunderdome game is supposedly also on the way. But to be honest, we have been told that for the last 3 years. Perhaps this time it will happen?
The Official Alien Worlds Twitter(X?) shared this Tweet back in 15th April 2021. So it seems like they are/where as eagerly as the rest of us. Since then there has been a few teasers, but nothing tangible.
They did finally release the DAOs after long delay, and some other products in the last year, so it's possible that we will see Thunderdome as well. Will it live up to all of our expectations?... Time will tell.
After the initial Alien World Pack sales, the only way to get your hands on them was either by locating the community run second hand markets. Or by playing the mining game. In the beginning of the mining game, you were able to randomly receive different Alien Worlds NFTs while digging for Trilium. It was based on chance, and was quickly nerfed as the drop rate was to high. In my opinion, this was a good thing and something I was personally pushing for. It was to easy to get the more rare NFTs, which would crush their rarity. However, after a while, they removed this all together.
Since the launch, they have kept tweaking parameters in the mining game. Recently they pushed an update to increase the impact from the rarity of your tools. On top of that, not to long ago, they added NFT points in the mining, these points can be redeemed for NFTs. That way, you are still able to just start to play the game and over time improve your set of tools and become a more advanced miner. They also just renamed these NFT points into "shards".
Currently, NFT points(shards) can be achieved in two ways. Either by mining, or by playing on the Alien Worlds Minecraft server. Where you have missions, or quests, which upon completion will reward you these shards. This Minecraft world is created and hosted by the eosusa team.
The potential for these NFT points(shards) is however much broader. The contracts are actually designed to allow other projects to tap into them. So don't be surprised if you start to see other ways of earning these shards by other games and projects.
What does other Candidate say about Alien Worlds
To complement this article, I sent a question to some of the long-term syndicate candidates and community members of Alien Worlds. To see what they believe Alien Worlds is, or can be. I will also add links to their planets Telegram channels if you want to reach them for discussions or questions.
ShrimpBaguette | Naron Council Member | Naron Telegram
Alien Worlds describes itself as a 'Community-created metaverse' on their website, and this description strongly resonates with me. While I believe that Dacoco should provide more ways for other projects to connect to Alien Worlds, it has always served as a successful incubator for new communities, ideas, and projects.
The introduction of syndicates was a brilliant move by Dacoco. It allows players to actively contribute to expanding the metaverse without Dacoco having to invest their own resources. While both, the syndicates and gHubs serve similar purposes, syndicates enjoy greater flexibility in experimenting with different ideas. Unlike Dacoco, they can easily try out new approaches and pivot if something doesn't work as expected. Therefore, I think it's essential for syndicates to take full advantage of this unique position.
Lisa Chandler | Eyeke Council Member | Eyeke Telegram
Alien Worlds is an innovative economic-simulation game platform for players to create a community-built Metaverse where people can play for free and play to earn using blockchain technologies.
Creators can create communities, brands, products, services, games, experiences and the Metaverse as they envision it. Collectively, elected custodians allocate resources coming from the Planets to creators and have the opportunity together to create thriving ecosystems.
Planets who create the most value may be able to turn their ecosystems into scalable, and self-sustaining communities that can support their players ongoing in unprecedented models that could serve to inspire game creators around the world.
DrYunani | Neri Council Member | Neri Telegram
Alien Worlds has mainly given me the opportunity to get to know people from all over the world. So I would say it's a platform to meet and interact with people from all over the world. Being a custodian of Neri and thus part of the Syndicates has given me the ability to help Alien Worlds evolve by mainly funding tools and games. The potential of the Syndicates I would say they are the means to shape the future of Alien Worlds.
Summary
Alien Worlds team has made many promises over the years, and some of these have been delivered. We are however still waiting for big parts of what we expected from the start (e.g. The main game, Thunderdome?) , while other aspects of the ecosystem is present (Syndicates, mining, missions, Minecraft). Some argue that Dacoco, the team behind Alien Worlds, have failed to deliver the game the community expected. I guess time will tell if we ever see Thunderdome come to life, and if it does.. Will it meet our expectations? However, in the mean time, the community is actively adding more tools, websites, communities and games in the ecosystem. it's growing, even during a long bear market, and things are happening and taking shape. Much thanks to both some back-end tools Dacoco and community members has built and maintain, as well as The Galactic Hubs and the Alien Worlds Syndicates.
This first version of Beyond Horizon, is an introductory post into the world of Alien Worlds. The coming ones will focus on Ghubs, Syndicates and community activities. If you have any ideas, thoughts or opinions you want me to lift, discuss, showcase in some way, don't hesitate to reach out over at telegram: Alienw Telegram or Twitter: Alienw Twitter.
Perhaps you have some questions, or something you would love to see created. Perhaps you are working on something that you would love some feedback on, or a way to reach users.