SteemCity: The Basics

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I've been playing SteemCity lately, and I've really enjoyed it. I don't know that it's fair to use the word "playing" exactly, because as of now it's pretty passive. This is changing with future releases, but right now it's just fun to collect buildings and earn some passive income. It's also interesting from a tech perspective because it makes use of Non Fungible Tokens.

**Aside: NFTs are a topic for a whole other post, but in general, think about it like the difference between a new silver eagle vs a poured silver bar with a serial #. The eagles are pretty much all the same as one another, but the serial makes each poured bar unique.

In this post I thought I would document the basics of interacting with the steemcity.io site. You can log in with keychain, much like pretty much every other steem-based game. Once in, this is what I see.

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There's a lot to digest here, so let's look at some items in closer detail. This blob of circles represents my city.

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Each small circle is one NFT, and each large circle is 10. NFTs are used to represent buildings and sometimes people in the city. If you prefer a list of your tokens, that can be found to the right of the graphical representation.

How do you get buildings? The easiest way is to purchase them with STEEM, STEEMP, or SIM(in game currency discussed later). For each card purchased, you get a randomly allocated building, each type of which have differing attributes, which then affect the attributes of your city. More on this later, but the specific attributes of each card type are a topic for another post.

Let's look at some other things:

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  1. This is your income, which is calculated by adding up the total income of the buildings for which you have enough population to staff. This is paid out once a day. It is paid out in SIM, which can be bought and sold on steem-engine, or can be used to buy buildings, as previously stated.

  2. The higher your popularity, the higher the chance that Immigrants and Homeless folks will choose to call your city home. Every two hours the virtual dice are rolled and you see if you get to add any population to your city. Your city's popularity increases as you add more buildings, but decreases as more Immigrants and Homeless flock to your city.

  3. To Hire is the number of people still needed to staff the buildings in your city that are not yet full of workers. If you have more people than buildings for them to work in, this box displays the number of unemployed workers in your city.

  4. Crime Rate is the odds that your city will be robbed on a given day. This number increases as your population increases. It is also impacted by the buildings contained in your city. Banks and Shopping Malls increase your crime rate, while Police Stations, Gyms, and Cinemas decrease it.

  5. This box appears if your city was robbed last night and tells you how much SIM you lost. The robbery roll takes place each day alongside the SIM distribution. Rather than take from your SIM balance, it is deducted from the income payout you would have received.

That's the high level overview of the composition and daily workings of your city, but there are a couple extra features that have been added: the auction and beer fest.

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An auction is always in play at SteemCity. So far it has been high value cards like Bank (high income), or Apartment (high population boost). Clicking on the button above gives you this screen, where you can place your bid.

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As you can see, auction ending times are randomly determined to try to deter sniping. There is no in-game bid bot, where you can set your max and walk away, so you have to keep coming back and checking and rebidding.

The last feature we're going to talk about is beer fest.

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By paying 5 BEER (another token that can be traded on steem-engine), your city hosts a beer fest, which can attract a certain type of NFT called a Worker. A Worker counts as extra population for your city, but without the negative impact on popularity. And if you're really lucky you might attract a Hard Worker, which provides both population and income without the popularity decrease.

But the really interesting thing about the beer fest is that it provides utility to a token that, to my knowledge isn't officially associated with SteemCity. This opens a lot of possibilities for using Steem-based tokens in the game. I believe there are plans in the works for events using other tokens as well.


This was just an introduction to SteemCity. There is a lot more to be said about strategy, the underlying technology, the discord channel, the newest functionality, and the market.

For official updates, follow @gerber.

Posted via neoxian.city | The City of Neoxian



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