How I Became a Landowner (in the Metaverse)

I was introduced to NFTs in general whilst perusing Twitter, particularly Crypto Twitter content after having rediscovered a wallet I had created a few years earlier. Why would anyone buy these JPEGs, I wondered, just right click and 'save as' I thought. I just didn’t get it. Forward on 6 months and boy, now I get it!! These are more than just digital art some of this stuff is revolutionary. That is when the Rabbit hole led me to the metaverse and The Sandbox.

The Sandbox is a Voxel-based Metaverse with NFT's which aren't just a JPEG but a parcel of Land in which you may build out environments for games. A number of well-known organisations such as Atari, The Smurfs and The Walking Dead have bought Land for this reason.

So this could be a good purchase, a parcel of Land in The Sandbox, I needed to know more. Specifically, what can I do with it, hang on to it and sell it in 12 months and hope for a profit? Possibly.

However it turns out you’ll probably be able to rent your land out to game makers. I like that idea as a form of passive income.

Could I build on the Land myself? How big is a Parcel of Land? Is it big enough to do something with?

The Sandbox state, “A single 1x1 plot of Land is 96 metres in width by 96 metres in length, making it a perfect square. They are also 128 metres in height. In The Sandbox's metaverse, 1 metre is the equivalent of 32x32x32 voxels.” 

96 metres by 96 meters, it still didn't sound that big to me. Then I came across a ‘The Sandbox 1 Week Challenge’ run by Boop Goop & The Sandbox’s Andy Richy. The actual Tweet that got my attention started with “How big is a @TheSandboxGame 1x1 Land?” The actual challenge was to split a 1x1 parcel of land in the Game Maker into 4 segments and build a different Biome/Landscape on each.

The Game Maker is a program you download and build your experience in, ready to publish to a parcel of Land. You don't actually require a piece of Land at this point.  

Although I had never tried anything like this before I decided to give it a go. So, I downloaded and Installed Game Maker from The Sandbox website, installed it, watched a few tutorials, read the official Sandbox documentation and got to work.

There was a week to build, learning as I went and it turned out quite easy to use the Game Maker if you followed the tutorials.

I started by building out a desert scene for my first quarter with oasis, a pyramid, and a temple and dropped a few camels in.

My 2nd quarter became a snow scene with wolves and a snow mountain. My 3rd landscape was a volcano and now I was getting ambitious. For my final quarter, I dug down and built a platform-style maze which actually felt so much bigger than it was once you jumped in.

Once finished I published my attempt in The Sandbox gallery. I didn’t expect much from my first attempt but was obviously interested to see who would win and see what I could learn from the other entries. To my surprise when the results of the competition were revealed I had come second. So here I am pretty pleased with myself and my second place, and the accompanying prize, of course. But this was more about having some fun. It was showing what you could do with a 1x1 parcel of land.

So, I did buy a parcel of land, or 2. That’s how I became a landowner...in the metaverse.

This article is part of The Gaming Metaverse Writing Contest hosted by HackerNoon in partnership with The Sandbox.

Submit your #gaming-metaverse story today for your chance to win up to $2000 in SAND tokens.