Who doesn’t want to get paid for playing video games? This series follows applications, some of which are borderline games at best, that claim to reward users with cold hard cash (or gift cards). In my pursuit of extra cash to blow on games, or Steam gift cards to add to my collection, I have tried a number of these applications. I hope my experiences can help others steer clear of the more dubious of these applications.
This time I’ll be taking a look at Alien Worlds, what I am generously calling a game, published by Dacoco Gmbh in 2020. Alien Worlds is a web-based game where you take up the role of a miner, searching for Trilium, abbreviated as TLM, on one of six virtual planets. Trilium is a cryptocurrency on the WAX blockchain, as are all of the items in Alien Worlds.
To play the game, you need to connect it to a WAX blockchain wallet, to store your items and coins. You can create a wallet for free at Wax Cloud Wallet, if you want to try out Alien Worlds. There are other ways you can set up a wallet as well, but I won’t go into those here as this isn’t meant to be a guide to the WAX network. I just wanted to link to, what seems to be, a reputable wallet site for anyone interested.
Once you have chosen a planet, you will get to see some statistics about the amount of TLM available and how quickly it is replenishing there. Once you’ve chosen a planet, you then get to pick a specific section of land to mine on. Each plot of land is an item as well, so they are owned by either a player or the developers.
Each plot has its own statistics, which impact how much TLM you can mine, your odds of finding an item while mining, and the time between mining attempts. The land owners set a fee for mining on their land, which is set at 20% on the developer-owned properties. This percentage is deducted from the TLM you find and goes to the owner of that plot. Any number of players can also be mining on the same plot of land.
To mine you need to have equipment. You start with a standard shovel and drill, which is sufficient to get mining. You can find additional equipment during mining or purchase it from other players on various markets outside the game. Mining equipment impacts how much TLM you can find, your odds of finding other items, and how often you can mine.
That is pretty much all there is to Alien Worlds at the time of this writing. It is really more of a cryptocurrency faucet, where you can click every few minutes to get some coins, than a game. There is some sort of combat planned to be added in the future, as there are numerous weapon and minion items that can be found.
This seems to be a common theme in a lot of blockchain game projects, where the focus is more on economics than entertainment. But, seeing as this is a series about trying to make money playing games, the big question is how much can you make playing Alien Worlds? The answer seems to be, not a lot.
Right now the only thing to do with Trilium is exchange it for WAX tokens. At the time of this writing, WAX is trading at around $0.09, and about 40 TLM is trading for 1 WAX. After about a week of sporadically mining TLM, I’ve made about $1 in WAX. To actually turn those WAX tokens into dollars, I’d need to sell them on an exchange, so there would likely be additional fees incurred.
You can get lucky and find a rare item, which may sell for a fair amount of WAX tokens. People have recently been selling land plots for about $500 dollars worth of WAX tokens, but most common items seem to be valued at about 1/2 of a WAX token. The WAX value of TLM has also been dropping, as more is being mined.
As a game, Alien Worlds doesn’t have much to offer right now. If you enjoy getting free cryptocurrency, then you might enjoy this application. But, it’s quite unlikely that it is going to be a highly profitable use of your time. If you do want to check out Alien Worlds, you can visit the site here.