Crypto Raiders: A Pixel Art RPG Dungeon Crawler on Polygon

This cute pixel game has conquered the blockchain gaming world by storm and is surprising players and investors with their innovation and development updates. The Cartel is already sending its own Raider into dungeons for loot and glory. In this article we are finally presenting you our comprehensive overview of the this fun and promising game.

What Am I Looking At?

Crypto Raiders is a pixel art RPG dungeon crawler built on the Polygon (MATIC) sidechain for Ethereum. With so many dungeon crawler mobile apps rising in popularity, it's difficult to compare any one game to Crypto Raiders, but the basic mechanics for the genre as a whole remain the same:

1. Enter dungeons
2. Kill bad dudes
3. Find sweet loot
4. Get new gear
5. Tackle harder dungeons
6. ???
7. Profit

Where things get interesting is the "???" part, as that's when most dungeon crawlers try to put their own "stamp" on the genre.

Crypto Raiders distinguishes itself from its peers by allowing players to participate in both sides of the dungeon crawler experience. More active players can use "Raiders" to collect loot from dungeons, but anyone looking for passive gains can also acquire "Mobs" which serve as the enemies for Raiders in dungeons. If your Mob defeats another player's Raider, you'll earn loot based on the value and equipment of that Raider.

This changes the dynamic by introducing an alternative way to participate in the loot generation process. Players aren't just "farming" dungeons, they're farming each other, and to the victor go the spoils!

Crypto Raiders has also formed a partnership with Galaxy Fight Club! that allows players to use their Raiders in their PvP NFT Arena and gain access to the Genesis Gear Whitelist. This is the first of many potential partnerships with an overall goal of further integrating Crypto Raiders within the Polygon ecosystem.

Everything Until Now

Crypto Raiders came crashing onto scene with a pre-sale announcement at the start of summer 2021. These Raiders began selling for hundreds of dollars apiece and have only steadily increased in value as subsequent "generations" of Raiders have been introduced.

Shortly after its inception, Crypto Raiders put forth a collaborative effort to design the Genesis Crypto Raiders Sountrack by requesting submissions that would be voted upon by the community to determine the top five soundtracks chosen for the album. The music was then auctioned off with 75% of the value being payed directly to the musicians/composers that submitted them. As if that weren't enough, both the owner and the composer of each track now receive regular AURUM rewards based on how often it is played in Crypto Raiders.

Continuing to double down on the community, Crypto Raiders has provided streamer sponsorships, PvP tournaments through the Duels Alpha Invitational, several community poker nights(!!) and both Halloween and Christmas seasonal events.

On the development side of things, progress towards a mobile launch is ongoing, multiple liquidity pools are being utilized, and a steady release of new dungeons, features and game modes have been both promised and delivered. There's even been two additional generations of Raiders released and an airdrop for both Mobs and Mounts!

Tokens

AURUM (Latin for "gold") serves as the primary in-game currency with a variable supply the can be increased or decreased to maintain a balanced game economy. It will be earned by completing dungeons/quests and used to pay for activities such as running certain dungeons and recruiting new Raiders. Activity prices can also be adjusted to maintain practical price points players can reasonably afford. AURUM will be the default currency for the Crypto Raiders marketplace when it launches.

RAIDER is a fixed supply token intended to provide staking opportunities based on how long (3-12 months) players are willing to stake it for. Players will earn a share of all AURUM spent in the game through daily payouts based on their in-game activity. Staked RAIDER will also provide access to future governance, unique dungeons/gear/releases, and airdrops.

50% of the original pool will be reserved for incentivizing the staking of various Sushi LP. This reserve will be split evenly between all pools and distributed over the course of four years at a rate of 17,123 RAIDER per day. Players will receive RAIDER proportional to their contribution relative to the total size of the pool.

NFT's

Raider	Mob	Mount

Raiders begin as blank character slates with a visual skin (Human, Elf, etc.) determined by their rarity. This rarity has no impact on the Raider's effectiveness other than increasing it's value due to scarcity. Gear acquired through play changes the visual look for each Raider, allowing for unique character appearances.

After acquiring your first Raider, it can recruit another Raider of the next generation (i.e. Gen2 => Gen3) every 28 days. By spending AURUM (-10% per generation) to temporarily "stake" your Raider(s), you'll receive a new Raider with a random rarity influenced by the gear and level of the recruiting Raider. Each subsequent recruitment from the same Raider will yield later generations until the current maximum of Gen10. For example, a Gen4 Raider will only be able to recruit six additional Raiders from Gen5 to Gen10 with a 28-day cooldown between each.

Mobs come in 13 types with 7 rarities and 33 possible Special Moves. While they currently have no function in the game, they will eventually serve as enemies in certain dungeons for Raiders belonging to other players. When your Mob defeats a Raider, you'll receive AURUM and a portion of the defeated Raider's loot.

A bestiary has been provided for keeping track of what's available.

Mounts come in 5 types and are used by Raiders to speed up travel times between cities, locations and quests. Future potential features include jousting, races, and horse breeding. After the initial aidrop, they can only be acquired through in-game events and activities.

What's Happenin'?

It's been a VERY EXCITING start of the new year with Raider stakers receiving free NFT Mounts in a surprise airdrop. Unfortunately, the Cartel hadn't staked any RAIDER yet, so we didn't qualify. In retrospect, it's a shame we didn't buy some, but acquiring a Raider was probably the most important thing to secure.

While largely speculative, RAIDER has experienced considerable volatility pumping all the way up above $13 before correcting down to the $6-$7 range along with a wider settling of the crypto market.

Jan. 12th features an opportunity to recruit Gen 4 Raiders and introduces Olgo's Demise, the final dungeon in the Act 1 series. Also, the Crypto Raiders LP pools are also migrating from their original contract to a newly update one intended to patch out a potential security issue discovered by @RugDocIO. Players are advised to migrate as soon as possible to protect/preserve their earnings.

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Week 1 - Getting Started

The cartel began with a working budget of ~$300 and a goal of acquiring the cheapest Raider on the market for (at the time) 0.06 ETH. We'd then use AURUM to reset it, as it had a terrible stats balance—a Raider's stats affect its chances of completing Raids, and you can reset them by spending AURUM—but technical problems prevented us from buying the chosen Raider.

Instead, we looked at more expensive options and found a level 7 Raider with 42 points piled into intelligence—which is exactly where we would have put it—and really nice gear from previous raids. We ended up paying 0.08 ETH for this catch at only 33% more than our initial budget.

Presenting . . . 30 BASH!

With his best gear and current stats, the raid simulator shows we have a 95% chance for completing normal Guardian's Lair and a 60% chance for heroic. We've definitely got a good raider, as these are currently the two hardest dungeons with the best loot.

@revisesociology took Bash for a spin and is delighted to report a 100% success rate! We found okay gear, but nothing useful to our particular "intelligence build".

Week 2 - Growing Pains

Our second week of raiding had disappointing luck in terms of loot gained, and @revisesociology had to navigate the congestion on Polygon caused by bots abusing the sunflower game until it was disabled. On the flip side, valuations continue to rise on the back of exciting developments, announcements and teasers, so it was far from being all bad!

Bash, was again able to successfully complete normal Guardian's Lair for 700 XP but was rewarded with more useless gear. Worse, Bash ventured into the heroic version where he was pummelled for no loot and a reduced 200 XP. It appears heroic Krok received a stats boost (they do this weekly) that forced us to stay in normal for the rest of our raids. Our total haul was another 2100 XP and "meh" gear.

Bash's First Quest

Sending Raiders on Quests is now possible and behaves like short-term staking. Your Raider is removed from your wallet, temporarily, for a duration of your choosing. They'll earn a certain amount of a given token in cycles. In the case of the first quest, you earn 1 Grimweed for every 8 hours of questing.

Your Raider can't enter dungeons while they're questing, as they're "staked". After returning, the Raider enters a cooldown period where they need to rest for ~1/7th the amount of time they were questing for. In other words, a Raider sent out for 7 days would need roughly a day before they were ready to raid dungeons (or be sold).

Given you receive 5 free raids a week that resets every Wednesday, the efficient format would be to quickly finish raids before questing for 5.5-6 days. This would allow enough time for your Raider to rest before needing to raid again the following week after the reset.

Asset Update

The cartel account is currently sitting on an unrealized gain of ~$390 after just two weeks of owning the account with enough AURUM to recruit our second Raider. While we don't yet know the value of our extra loot, we'll also have those to trade once that feature is released.

	Investment	Current Value
GEN 3 Raider	$365.00	$744.00
3650 ARUM	$130.00	$142.35
TOTAL	$495.00	$886.35

Prices recorded at time of writing.

Looking Forward

With multiple roadmaps and frequent updates, it's getting hard to keep track of all the fun and exciting things Crypto Raiders has in store of us! We know small things like team raiding and the continuation of Duels tournaments are on the way. Larger announcements like the search for new hires and a request for information from developers wishing to build modular content on top of Crypto Raider's API indicate an ongoing effort to expand gameplay.

Long-term goals still include adding permadeath as an optional risk players can expose their Raiders to for the chance at improved rewards; implementing AURUM rewards and Mobs for dungeons; and adding skill trees for Raiders. A new, unknown game mode is also slated for Jan. 19th, but the date is tentative pending any potential delays.

Where Do I Sign Up?

The initial step of getting into Crypto Raiders can be a bit of a doozy, so we recommend reviewing the starter guide before beginning the process. The steps involve acquiring a MetaMask wallet, "wrapping" Ethereum for use on the Polygon Network as WETH, swapping for enough MATIC to cover gas fees, and then buying your Raider(s)/Mob(s) from OpenSea.

When looking at Raiders, it's important to note that earlier generations have built-in value in the form of increased AURUM drop rates (still in the works) and recruiting discounts (different each time) for future Raider generations.

If you've only purchased a Mob, sit tight for now, as their intended use hasn't been implemented, yet. For those that have Raiders, let's walk through how, exactly, you play Crypto Raiders.

	➡		➡
Raider	kills	Mobs	for	Loot

The central game cycle involves exactly what you expect: Sending your Raider on dungeon raids to kill Mobs in order to obtain more and (hopefully) better loot. The more Raiders you have, the more raids you can do, overall, yielding more usable loot, on average. It's especially useful to diversify the "builds" of your Raiders by giving them different stat weightings in order to increase the number of items that are useful to you.

Each Raider has six stats to choose from:

Stat	Benefit
Strength	Health, Damage and Attack Resistance
Intelligence	Health, Damage and Hit Chance
Agility	Health, Damage, Crit Chance, Crit Damage and Evade Chance
Wisdom	Hit Chance, Crit Chance and Attack Resistance
Charm	Hit Chance, Crit Resistance and Evade Chance
Luck	First Strike, Crit Chance and Crit Damage

How you allocate your stats determines which weapon(s) you'll benefit most from and what gear you're hoping to acquire.

Patches are rolling out frequently enough that it's strongly recommended you venture over to the Crypto Raiders Discord to keep up on the latest changes and most effective builds. This includes things like which skill runes to use and when to use them in battle. There are also multiple community tools such as the Crypto Raiders Companion extension found in the Community Projects section of the Crypto Raiders discord.

Wen Play2Earn?

While AURUM isn't yet rewarded for completing dungeons and the in-game marketplace is pending, both will provide the first source of active earning available to beginning players. As seen above, there are tools available for approximating your chances of success when attempting a raid, both in-game and out. Make use of them to gauge when you're taking risks rather than playing to your Raider's strengths.

Once you can obtain AURUM through dungeons, recruiting new Raiders will steadily expand the core value of your investment by providing you with new Raiders you can either sell or begin building up for increased loot acquisition. The weekly free raids are per Raider, and eventually team raids (and possibly guilds!) will be implemented for additional interactions between Raiders. As such, acquiring a decent team of Raiders seems like an worthy goal for any newer player.

Additionally, Duels have arisen as a competitive mode Raiders can participate in. You can either submit your Raider to a passive pool of those pulled up in Duels or seek out random Raiders from the pool to duel. There have also been periodic tournaments that pop up with decently large prize pools for those skilled enough to win out. Previous prizes have ranged from 1000-5000 AURUM for top spots and access to the Duels Alpha Invitational when its gearing up for another round.

Passive Earnings

RAIDER can be staked, directly, to earn periodic AURUM payouts and qualify for future airdrops. Mobs and Mounts are two strong examples of airdrops that have already provided significant returns to those lucky enough to receive the rarer versions. Keep in mind that your returns are based on the lockout duration you choose which ranges from 3-12 months and a 100%-400% reward rate. This currently puts the RAIDER APR at 3.97% - 15.89%

Sushi LP Tokens represent a less binding form of "staking" in that you put a specific combination of tokens into a Sushi LP pool to earn the tokens you'll stake in Crypto Raiders. No matter which combination you use:

• RAIDER/WETH
• RAIDER/MATIC
• AURUM/MATIC
• AURUM/USDC

The payout is returned as RAIDER, daily, and you can freely withdraw your stake.

With all the information we've just thrown at you, don't be alarmed if you need time for it to settle! The Crypto Raiders Discord is a great place to "absorb" the finer details of Raiding, and you can reach out to the team on Twitter.

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This article was written by @revisesociology and @entrepidus, edited by @spiritsurge, and proofread by @flauwy. Our Cartel operator for Crypto Raiders is @revisesociology.

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What's The Gameplan?

With a 2nd Raider in tow, @revisesociology will continue to run BASH through raids in order to keep pace with the moving level cap and source gear for our fledgling hero.

He'll also watch out for opportunities to trade extra loot (when that comes online) while preparing for duelling, further recruiting, and adapting to the rapidly evolving complexity of the Raider economy.

If you're interesting in more Crypto Raiders content, feel free to check out his latest post or watch this week's game play.

In the meantime: Game On!