Sunflower Land is at number seven this week in DappRadar’s Games rankings
Sunflower Land relaunched in April 2022, after its predecessor Sunflower Farmers was forced to shut down. Happily for the Sunflower Land community, the game has regained its place as one of the most popular play-to-earns on the market. As part of our Games of the Week series, we have a guide for how to play and win this feast of farming and fun.
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Since the launch of its beta playtest in April 2022, Sunflower Land has attracted an average of 6,400 daily unique users. Well over one million dollars have passed through the dapp’s smart contracts. And, most importantly, the game’s in-game economy appears to be sustainable (more on that later). The future looks bright for Sunflower Land.
What is Sunflower Land?
Sunflower Land is a blockchain farming game. Players work their land, extract its resources, and trade them on the open market. It’s a community working together to build something in cooperation.
The game uses the Polygon network, itself a Layer2 sidechain of the Ethereum blockchain. The game has been developed by Thought Farm Pty Ltd, a company based in Sydney, Australia.
Sunflower Land attempts to recreate the conditions of real-life market economics. So the game’s developers have a heavy focus on the supply and demand of in-game resources. Scarcity is built-in and hard work is rewarded.
Each player starts the game with a plot of land, which they can build up from the bottom. They can also put their own money into the game to progress quickly and get ahead of other players.
How can you start playing Sunflower Land today?
Sunflower Land is currently in beta mode and players are invited to sign up, get their free farm and start playtesting the game today.
- Firstly, you’ll need to join the Sunflower Land Discord channel and get verified. The process is simple to go through. If you need help, the Sunflower Land team has put together a step-by-step guide.
- Once you’re verified, go to the Sunflower Land dapp.
- To connect to Sunflower Land, you’ll need a Polygon-enabled crypto wallet, such as MetaMask. You can learn about these with our in-depth guide.
- Switch to Polygon, connect to Sunflower Land and you’ll be asked to sign a few requests. You’ll also need to pay a small amount of MATIC for gas fees. See the current price of MATIC.
- When you’re given the option, you need to Connect to Discord to show that you’re a verified member.
- There are a couple of easy steps that you’ll be instructed to walk through.
- Then you need to donate a minimum of 1 MATIC to play the game. This money goes to charity that you will choose from a list of options.
- Confirm your transaction, wait a few moments, and you’ll be given a farm so you can start your journey inside Sunflower Land.
Are there any in-game NFTs?
Yes, Sunflower Land is a blockchain game that uses NFT. The main one is the farm. This represents a player’s slice of land within the Sunflower Land virtual world. Something to note about farms is that they’re free to mint, but you cannot sell them on the market.
If you look on the secondary marketplace OpenSea, you’ll see plenty of listed Sunflower Land farms with big red crosses through them. These are from people who’ve tried to list their farms to sell. Unfortunately for them, the game’s smart contracts automatically deletes the farm. This is something to be aware of. Do NOT try to sell your farm, because you will lose it!
To mint NFTs in Sunflower Land, follow these steps:
- Go to the Tailor, Blacksmith or Barn.
- Select your SFL token (see section below).
- Click on the Craft option.
- Sign the MetaMask transaction when it appears.
The list of in-game assets is too long to print here, but this page has lots of statistics about Sunflower Land NFTs and collectibles.
Does the game have its own token?
SFL is the Sunflower Land token. It’s the glue that holds together the Sunflower Land economy. It serves as both the in-game currency and the token users earn while playing the game.
For every crop a player harvests or every piece of wood they chop, they can sell these on the in-game marketplace for SFL. Holders can then swap their SFL for other cryptocurrencies or turn it into fiat.
Conversely, players can spend their SFL to purchase in-game items like animals, crops, food and tools. All of these items help players progress in the game. And they all have a real-world monetary value.
Sunflower Land taxes players for withdrawing their SFL from the farm. Part of this tax money goes to the Wishing Well, which accumulates over time. To get your hands on some of built-up SFL:
You put in liquidity, you get some SFL. It’s a gamified way of adding to LPs. Another word for this is GameFi.
DappRadar covered the successful SFL token launch in May 2022. It opened up more in-game utility and allowed committed players to start properly building their Sunflower Land careers. It also helped send Sunflower Land to the summit of our Top 10 Games of the Week list.
You can find out the current price of SFL by visiting a cryptocurrency price tracking platform. And you can learn more about the SFL token by reading Sunflower Land’s Tokenomics document.
How do you make money in Sunflower Land?
Players make money by working their land, extracting resources from it, and selling these on the open market. It’s as simple as that. It’s a farming game where time equals money.
Sell resources
Grow, harvest, dig, mine, build and craft in-game items to sell on the in-game marketplaces. You might grow radishes or sunflower seeds; or you could craft pickaxes and fishing rods. Chicken coops are one of the most expensive in-game collectibles but buying one can help you produce chickens and eggs which you can sell for profit.
Upgrade your farm
Once you’re inside the game, you’ll see some goblins blocking the fields. Talk to the goblin and see what food they want. Find the kitchen and craft the food the goblin wants. Hand this over to the goblin and you’ll get a bigger field.
Once you have a bigger field, you can produce more goods to sell for SFL.
What was Sunflower Farmers?
The tragic story of Sunflower Farmers and its quick descent into oblivion was a cautionary tale for all blockchain games. The platform’s developers, in the spirit of radical openness and heterarchical governance, created a system without limits. The idea was that people would govern themselves and the people would find equilibrium.
People being people, the system went awry. Without rules or boundaries, unscrupulous opportunists developed bots to mint pickaxes on an industrial scale. Soon, with a glut of these tools saturating the market, their value dropped and the bottom fell from the economy.
Sad times for the team behind Sunflower Farmers. Their utopic vision dashed on the rocks of greed and cynicism.
But from that game’s ashes rose up Sunflower Land. The same team with the same dreams approached the puzzle of system-building from a different angle. This time they created levers in the background, which they can pull when things become unbalanced.
Their new game, where the fun is controlled by carefully considered regulations, has been a success so far. Its story began as a cautionary tale for all blockchain games. Now, Sunflower Land has become a blueprint for redemption.
