A Review of the WAX Play-To-Earn Game Farmers World
Farmers World is a play-to-earn game on the WAX blockchain. The game was inspired by the viral Facebook game Happy Farm which was released in 2008 and at it’s height had 23 million daily active users (DAU). Farmers World was released on August 1, 2021 and rapidly became the number one play-to-earn game on WAX. It now has over 150,000 players worldwide and an all-time sales volume of $195,000,000 (source: cryptoslam.io). This impressive sales volume puts Farmers World at #20 across all blockchains and is the only game on WAX in the top 100.
The game has a very active userbase with 83,000 members in their official Telegram room, 89,000 on Discord, and 116,000 followers on Twitter.
One Man’s Opinion
Since I had never played Farmers World before, I was asked to try it and report back with my thoughts about the game.
The first thing I learned is that you can not play the game without at least one mining tool. So I purchased a bundle of 5 items from AtomicHub for 9.67 WAX ($3.17 USD at the time of writing this article). For that small investment, I received (1) Fishing Rod, (1) Stone Axe, (1) Ancient Stone Axe, (1) Bronze Member (wood) NFT, and (1) Farmer Coin. With no other instruction, I logged in with my WAX Cloud wallet and was presented with the Mining screen.
There are three types of mining available on this screen — Fishing (food), Gold Mine (gold), and Wood (wood). These are the in-game names of the items. Outside the game, they exist as tokens on the WAX blockchain — FWW is wood, FWG is gold, and FWF is food. This is important to know because as you will learn very quickly, it takes a lot of time to generate any of these items. If you are like me and lack the patience, you can simply buy them from Alcor and deposit them into the game. More on that later.
All your game NFT’s are displayed in the Chest, which you can access by clicking on that icon at the bottom of the screen. To actually use them though you have to click on each one and click “wear”. This is a strange term to use since you can’t wear a tool, but it is what it is. When you do click on “wear” you are asked to sign a transaction. This transfers the NFT from your WAX Cloud wallet (WCW) into the game wallet. Now they can be used to mine. I equipped my fishing rod to the lake and my axe to the woods. By default, you can only equip one of each type of tool to each type of mine. But by “wearing” a membership card, you get extra tool slots, increased energy, a bump to your luck stats, and the ability to store your mining. What this means is you can go past the allotted mining time and still claim the reward for it instead of losing it.
With my Bronze wood type membership NFT attached, I gained (1) extra slot for all three types of mining, (200) extra energy, (1) stored mining slot and (+1) reward rate. Every 24 hours I can claim my reward which is called a Farmer Coin. Farmer Coins can be blended with Gold to upgrade to better membership cards.
The fishing rod takes 1 hour to “charge”. When the timer reaches 0:00:00 you can mine and be rewarded some amount of Food. Food is very important in this game because you can exchange it for Energy. Energy is required to do almost everything in the game. I quickly learned that the mining rate was so low though that I couldn’t do much else. To give myself a jump start, I went to Alcor to purchase some FWF Tokens. I exchanged 2 WAX (approximately $0.70 USD) for 5,928 FWF. You then deposit those tokens into the game by clicking on the “Exchange” icon at the bottom of the screen. Just like your NFT’s, when you exchange tokens, they are transferred from your WCW to the game wallet. With the Exchange you can send tokens in and out of the game, but be aware that when you want to withdraw tokens, the game charges a service fee. I saw this fee as low as 5% and as high as 7% while playing.
I should also note that each tool has a durability score. The Fishing Rod for example starts at a score of 250 and looses 5 points for every hour that it is mining. At some point you must repair the tool in order for it to continue mining. Repairs cost Gold and since I did not purchase a Gold Excavator, I didn’t have any to work with. It is available for purchase on Alcor at the rate of 0.001 WAX per FWG.
At this point — I was curious as to what else the game had to offer so I started sifting through their many Medium articles. In them, I learned that there are 3 other types of mining available — Chicken, Cow, and Plant. To enter these sections of the game you must first buy the appropriate building. I purchased a Coop for 1.4 WAX ($0.46 USD), a Farm Plot for .28 WAX ($0.09 USD), and a Cowshed for 1.98 WAX ($0.65 USD). If you have played any of the other P2E games on WAX you will know that this is the cheapest land around by a lot.
Once purchased, these NFT’s showed up in my Chest. I then had to “wear” them to get them into the game. But, you still can’t reach these new lands. Not until you perform the required amount of builds. The Coop for example requires 8 builds at a cost of 250 Energy and 30 minutes of time per build. This is the reason I had to go out to the market to buy Food tokens. Building requires a lot of energy. When you run out of energy, an error message pops up telling you the build can not be completed. To replenish your energy, you must convert food. Click on the red “+” at the top right of your screen. The default energy is 500 but with the bronze membership card my energy was increased to 700. One cool thing about the energy purchase function is you can not go over. For example, if my energy is at 382/700 I can click on the “+”, type in “700” and the game will convert it to 318 for me automatically.
Coop Builds Complete
After 400 minutes I had finished my 8 builds required to enable the Coop. This turned it from gray to full color on the map. But when I tried to go there for the first time, I got a message that I didn’t understand. It said, “You need NFT game cards to start minning!” (Yes, it’s spelled incorrectly). Your two options at this point are “Go to Atomic” or “Go to Smithy”. Clicking on the Atomic link leads you to the AtomicHub Market and the farmersworld collection, but gives no indication of what is needed to continue on. Clicking on “Go to Smithy” brings up a menu with all the tools, lands, and membership cards that can be crafted in game — another dead end.
I headed back to AtomicHub and saw there was a category under farmersworld called “farmanimals”. It was here that I discovered there was a Chicken Egg NFT, a Chick, and a Chicken. I purchased a Chicken for 4.49 WAX ($1.47 USD) and a Chicken Egg for 0.39 WAX ($0.13 USD) and returned to the game. Again I went to the Chest, and clicked “wear” for the chicken and the egg. Now when I clicked on the Map and then on Coop, the error message was gone and I could use my Chicken and Chicken egg to farm. The reward for farming a Chicken is a Chicken Egg but to earn that reward, you have to go through 28 feeding sessions at 3 hours each and 1 Barley NFT per feed!
Unlike all the other game NFT’s that you keep and use continuously when you feed your chicken Barley, that NFT is burned (gone forever). I could purchase 28 Barley from AtomicHub for a total of 1.4 WAX in order to farm a Chicken Egg NFT or I could save myself 84 hours and just purchase a Chicken Egg from AtomicHub for 0.34 WAX.
The reward for farming the Chicken Egg is a Chick but to earn it you have to perform 9 hatch sessions at 3 hours each. I don’t have a chick, so I may go through this process just for fun. I’m curious to see if I loose the Chicken Egg NFT in the process of claiming the Chick.
There are similar requirements for farming Corn and Barley in the Plant section and Cows sections. If you own Corn Seed or Barley Seed NFT’s you can farm them into fully grown Corn and Barley (which are needed to feed your cows and chickens).
If you hold a Cow and A Bull NFT you can breed them to get a Calf NFT.
Final Thoughts
After two days of play, I had managed to unlock all 4 lands, farmed 29.3227 Wood, and a bit of food. Had I not bought my way ahead I would have very little to show for the hours invested. With the current prices of the 3 game tokens (.00029 WAX per FWF, .00063 per FWW, and .00107 per FWG) and the prices of the game items it would take a great many hours to earn even a few dollars. With the proper membership card NFT’s and enough tools I suppose it could be worth it, but that would require a large WAX outlay in the beginning and a very long ROI (return on investment). As P2E games go, this one is a very low earner but it is enjoyable watching your supply build up and if you put enough time in to it you can blend into some decent items such as a Silver Member NFT and upgraded tools.
Here are all the game’s communication outlets: Medium, Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Facebook, YouTube.
This game review article was brought to you by the team at Wizards Guild — A WAX Block Producer.
Wizards Guild on Twitter • Wizards Guild on Telegram • Wizards Guild on Medium
Written by subterranean
