Farming for Dragons and Feeding off Whales: Making a Fortune in The Old Days of Castle Mode

Author: Wakaris

Like a lot of people, I arrived on the blockchain scene in December 2017 — chasing fabled 1000% gains and dreaming of a life with a little more money in my pocket. Sometime during that month a number of articles began circulating around Reddit about blockchain-based gaming, with every article highlighting the sale of a collectible Cryptokitty for over $100,000 USD. Feeling I had “missed the moon” so to speak with Cryptokitties, I started looking into other blockchain games that were just emerging at the time. This is when I found Etheremon.

Etheremon is a monster training and battling dapp running on the Ethereum network. When I discovered the game in late December 2017, the website was still pretty simple. There were no battling or adventure modes available yet, just the Official Store where one could buy collectible pictures that promised eventual utility. For me, seeing all of the mons for the first time in the store was like the first time I saw the original 150 Pokemon, and there were instantly a number that I wanted in my collection. Pangrass, specifically, was the one that I wanted the most, but was uncatchable at the time. In fact, I had just missed the gen-0 presale, so most of the mons pictured on the site were uncatchable. Looking back, I think that only made me want them more. I ended up buying my first mon a few weeks later from the store. One of the first generation 1 mons offered, it was a species of holy dragon named Cobrus.

^{photo credit: Steemit user @holoz0r}

A month or two later the first battle mode was released: Castle Mode. The battle mechanics were exactly the same as today’s Ranked Mode (see battle guide), but in the original Castle mode players also fought over virtual property. Let me explain briefly. In this mode, a player could either build a castle or attack a castle, and only a max total of 30 castles could exist at one time. If 30 castles were already built, you had to destroy one to free up a space for a new one. The smallest castle you could build was made of 5 bricks and at the time cost about $40 USD + a network mining fee (in ETH of course). The largest castle was made of 500 bricks and cost about $4000 USD to build plus the network mining fee. A castle owner would set a team of mons to defend their stack of bricks. These mons would earn passive experience as other players attacked your castle. When a player attacked your castle and defeated your mons in battle, your castle lost one brick and the attacker mined 1 EMONT token from the dev’s game pool. Technically every castle attack was a free, 0 ETH transaction, but because every attack needed to be mined by the ethereum network, it would always cost a variable amount of money in mining fees (for more on Ethereum mining fees, see the Etheremon FAQ). In general, the price of an attack transaction cost about $1 USD per gwei used.

This was a beautiful economy. The rich turned their ether into towering castles made of money and showcased their rare monsters. And the masses rightfully and ruthlessly came and tore those castles down, pilfering the EMONT tokens they were made of. And, as this story unfolded, it was recorded in its entirety on the Ethereum blockchain.

^{Planet Squanch: an Old Castle of Mine}

The fact that I was swimming in a pool of whales was evident as soon as Castle mode was released. Gameplay launched during a time of severe ethereum network congestion, with ETHGasStation suggesting gas prices of 10 gwei or more in order to have your transactions mined. Even so, the 30 castle spots filled up immediately, with several 500 brick monster castles among them. And people were out there playing — turning their money, time, and effort into experience points and levels at the absurd price of $10 per battle. Honestly, with those prices, I sat on the sidelines for the first week or two just waiting for the network congestion to die down.

Very soon ETHGasStation began suggesting a gas price of 1 gwei or below, and I started playing. At 1 gwei or less per battle, I was paying 10x less to level up than players were paying at launch. I have to say, the battling climate in the early days of Etheremon was utterly ruthless. The castle system heavily favored the attacker. After all, you could see what mons were defending a castle and what order they were in, and then set a perfect lineup to counter it. The way you “played Etheremon” was: 1. analyze the castles available to attack 2. find one that your mons could beat 3. Queue attacks against it until it is no longer standing. 4. Repeat. You could gain tons of EMONT tokens and experience grinding down castles this way, and it was common practice among all the active players. Castle builders were at a huge disadvantage. Weak castles were destroyed in a matter of minutes — you’d spend $40 on 5 bricks and one player would come by and destroy them all in one go. Speaking as the player who ultimately ranked #2 on the leaderboard for successful castle attacks, I am definitely guilty of this kind of cutthroat gameplay.

But after a while this style of gameplay, coupled with the high gas prices at launch, took its toll on the playerbase. The number of people building castles died down and dwindled until we reached a week where only about 4 castles at most could be found built on the 30 available hills. I believe it was around this time that multi-accounting became a common practice. Since there was nobody around to attack, if you wanted to play and train your mons, you needed to build a castle with one account and attack yourself with another. If you attacked your own castle with a squad of mons that was sure to lose, you could battle without destroying your own bricks, keeping all experience gained to yourself. You sacrifice mining EMONT for battle wins, but the experience gain was unparalleled. While many might consider this unethical, at the time it was the only way to play. For the players still remaining, this became the premiere way of leveling up.

Despite the grizzly way we treated each other on the battlefield, I found the community of Etheremon players active on the Discord channel to be quite friendly. Everyone was just trying to turn their gameplay time into money — trying to live that revolutionary concept enabled by blockchain gaming. I can say now, months after castle mode has closed for good, that a number of us from Discord banded together with a cease-fire agreement against one another’s castles. We would take down castles together to open up slots for one another, and farmed anyone and everyone who had the misfortune of not being part of our group. The teamwork and camaraderie we had going on in the shadows was quite something — sorry if you didn’t get the invite.

At this point you may be wondering how I could afford to attack and build so many castles, and swim with the whales so to speak. The answer is simple: I analyzed the economy that had been created here and found two ways to cycle a moderate initial investment into endless experience points for my mons.

The first way I recycled my money was through the mining and sale of EMONT tokens. I would only attack castles if I was sure to win, and would therefore mine 1 EMONT token for every battle. I would also only attack if the total cost of the transaction came out to less than the price EMONT tokens were trading for on decentralized exchanges. This lead to periods of heavy gameplay when ETHGasStation suggested gas prices below 0.5 gwei, and periods of absolutely no gameplay when the suggested gas price was above 1.1. The 500 brick castles made the best targets for mining; even with several players attacking at the same time as you, you could still walk away with 100 EMONT easily. In this way, I mined EMONT and sold it for profit to 3rd parties, thus funding my next round of battles in a perpetual cycle. But eventually the amount of people buying EMONT decreased, the buy walls disappeared off the exchanges, and I had to figure out a second way to efficiently cycle my money through the economy.

The second method I came up with to cycle my money was through the breeding and sale of Cobrus — the gen-1 dragon mon that I had bought as my very first purchase. Many Etheremon, including Cobrus, are capable of sacrificing a few of their levels in order to lay an egg, which then can hatch into a new level 1 version of that same species. By the time castle mode was released, Cobrus had been made Uncatchable from the official store. This meant that new ones could only be created by players who laid Cobrus eggs, and players who wanted one would have to buy it from the free market. With these conditions in place, I set about farming as many dragon eggs as I possibly could. Whenever I built or attacked a castle, I did so with a Cobrus on my team. In this way, I would continuously be leveling a Cobrus from 30 to 35, so I could spend my 5 levels on a new egg and sell the hatchling on the free market. To date I have hatched and sold over 30 dragon hatchlings.

By utilizing the above tactics to fund my gameplay, I power leveled a number of mons and obtained several #1–3 medal catches of the evolved forms of mons pretty much for free. These medal mons and high level 3rd form evolution monsters are blockchain verified proof of my gameplay and make up the bulk of my Etheremon collection’s value. By my calculations, my total initial investment into this game has been ~3 ETH. Today, I have a wallet containing ~10 ETH made entirely from in-game sales, and a diverse portfolio of mons that I believe could be worth anywhere from 10 to 20 ETH. So I guess in a way, you could say achieved my dream of 1000% gains in crypto just by playing Etheremon. Who knew making money could be so fun?

If you want to find out more, join the Etheremon Discord and become a part of the community! https://discord.gg/3Jwsf9f

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