Running multiple accounts… for fun and profit!
This is a follow-on article to a guide I wrote earlier on getting started in the online Ethereum-based distributed app (dapp) game of 0xUniverse. If you haven’t already read it, please do so, as this article will assume that you are up-to-speed on what 0xUniverse is, how to get started and established in the game, and hopefully to have already reached the point of becoming self-sustaining… where you’re making more Ethereum playing the game than you are spending on it.
Because of the mechanics of how the game works (namely, the fact that each ship invention requires triple the knowledge of the previous invention), it’s inevitable that players will fairly quickly reach a point where it is taking an inordinately long amount of time to invent your next spaceship… and inventing spaceships is the key to success in this game. Just when things really started to get fun, you “hit the wall”, and need to wait. And wait. And wait.
Further, there is also an issue which the developers acknowledge (and are currently unable to fix) which prevents almost every account from ever inventing a 17th ship… and in some cases, people will even struggle to be able to invent a 16th ship. If you want to keep playing 0xUniverse for an extended period, you are going to have to run multiple accounts. There’s simply no way around it.
The developers recognize this, and have no issues with players running multiple accounts (and the nature of Ethereum would make it effectively impossible to stop it even if they did). Given that reality, this guide will set out to teach you what I believe is the easiest and most efficient method to move out of the beginning stages of 0xUniverse and into the mid-game, by showing you how I multi-account in 0xUniverse (some of the players have chosen to call this process “shapeshifting” in the game). There are multiple different approaches to doing this, and I’ll try to share why I choose to do it this way. I’ll also share the various tweaks I apply along the way to make things smooth.
In 0xUniverse, your account’s identity is tied to the Ethereum address that you use to play the game. All of your planets will be stored at that Ethereum address while you own them (they will be temporarily transferred to the game contract’s address if you list your planets on the in-game marketplace).
When the game sees a new Ethereum wallet address when you connect to the game, it assumes that you are a new player, and it will begin the process of introducing you to the game in the same way it did the first time you joined, with Astrodog R0x walking you through the steps. We’ll cover that all in detail later… the key take-away is this: New Ethereum wallet address, new account.
In a moment, I’m going to walk through the process that I go through, step by step, whenever I want to create another 0xUniverse account. But first, I want to talk briefly about why I do it this way. I think there are some big advantages down the road to doing it this way, even though it might be briefly inconvenient to get a new account set up… it makes it much easier and cleaner to multi-account with this setup later, and in my experience, those benefits make it very, very “worth it”.
I exclusively run 0xUniverse on the Chrome Browser, with the Metamask wallet extension (and one other I’ll point out later). I do this in order to take advantage of a very nifty little feature that Chrome makes available, which we can leverage to good effect when trying to “shapeshift” in 0xUniverse. That feature is called “Manage People”.
Second from the far-right on the Chrome address bar, right next to the “ three vertical dots” button (Customize and control Google Chrome) is an icon representing your current identity. It may be an icon you use on other sites, or just an initial. That’s actually a button, and if you hit it, you’ll be given the opportunity to add additional users, above and beyond your base browser.
Near the bottom of the menu you’re given an option, “Manage people”. Select that, and you’ll be given a screen showing all of your current identities on this browser. In the bottom right corner, select “Add person”, and we’re off to the races:
Type a short, unique nickname for this account name (more details on why later) but don’t press enter yet… click on the icon that you’d like to represent this new account, and if you like, you can clear the check box for “Create a desktop shortcut for this user”. Then click the Add button, and the way that Chrome works for you will be changed fundamentally.
A separate window will be launched for this new user, and all of the settings for this user will be managed entirely independently of the settings for your main account. In addition, on your task bar, you’ll now see separate icons for the Chrome browsers of each user that you have running at the moment, badged with the icon from the upper-right. Each user’s browsers run independently, and they stack independently if you spawn multiple browser windows from each user’s browser.
Your cut-and-paste buffer, however, is shared across all of the different instances you have running, so you can seamlessly move information back and forth between the windows.
More importantly, if you set up Metamask on this new user’s browser, it is a fully independent copy of Metamask, with its own unique wallet. That will be important later, and it’s why we’re doing it this way… we can have any number of different user account browser windows open, each with their own independent Metamask wallets, each in the game at the same time. That opens up lots of possibilities for making Shapeshifting easy and fun.
But, since it’s an entirely independent browser process, you’ll need to configure it to make it useful. Here are some initial things that I set up to make life easy for me later. I start by hitting the three-dots button in the far-right of my new browser window and choosing Settings. I then scroll down (if necessary) and turn on the “Show home button” option under Appearance, and verify that “New Tab page” is selected there, and at the bottom under “On startup”:
While on that same page, I then hit the button to the right of Themes (under “Appearance”) to open the Chrome Web Store, and then hit the “Extensions” menu entry on the right. We’ll install two extensions: Metamask, and the Ethereum Gas Price Extension by neildlr.
The second extension will give you an at-a-glance indicator of current Ethereum gas prices (per EthGasStation.info) which I find helps save me lots of time in the aggregate. After these two are added, the right-hand edge of the address bar should look something like this:
After installing the Metamask extension, you’ll want to configure it as a brand new wallet from the separate tab that pops up for it. Good security policy is to use a separate password for each wallet you create. Write down your 12 seed words for this wallet, and the password, just like any other wallet. Protect them just like you would money. Remember: “not your keys, not your Ethereum”!
Once I’ve installed a new Metamask, here’s how I like to configure it for ease-of-use later. First, I pick a short nickname for the account, making it match the short name I chose for the new identity when creating it in Chrome. To set that name, I click on “Account 1” in the Metamask window, and in the pop-up, click on the pencil icon to the right of the name. Highlight Account 1 in the entry field, type the account name you want, and click the check mark to the right to save it. Afterwards, hit the X to leave the popup.
Then I click the abstract icon (in the upper-right of the window) associated with this account, to get to the menu, and select Settings. First, I select the option to “Use Blockies Identicon”, as I find these more visually distinct than the default. Then I click on Advanced, scroll down, and turn on the option “Advanced gas controls”, to show us the gas price field directly in every applicable Metamask window (another big time saver).
I consider it paramount for every 0xUniverse player to manually set their gas prices to the lowest value that gives them the desired processing time for their transactions. Failing to do this wastes a LOT of Ethereum! This option makes that painless to do, ensuring you always save as much as you can.
After turning on Advanced gas controls, I exit the settings dialog by hitting the X in the upper-right. If I haven’t already done so, I click on the address for this new account on the left side menu to copy it to the clipboard, and add it to the list of info I preserve for each account. This is also useful because we’ll need to send this new account some ETH from our main account to get it started. I generally try to start each account off with 0.1 ETH, but if you’re constrained, 0.05 will almost always work out just as well. I can then close out of the Metamask tab entirely. We’re ready to rock and roll!
Open a new tab and point it to https://play.0xUniverse.com to launch the game. This should also automatically create a shortcut to 0xUniverse on the New Tab page, so it will be easy to get back to later.
We now get a new option at the beginning when we hit the Person icon to begin registering: which wallet do we want to use?
Choose Metamask. The setup is not nearly too complicated for someone at this stage of the game, and we’ve already done it anyway!
Metamask will prompt you to to connect to this new account (you should see the short nickname you configured earlier in this window), and will prompt you to sign to establish a relationship with the game.
You’ll need to choose a nickname for the account, and supply an email address. I recommend using a short but unique name for every account, to help keep entries in the logs straight and to facilitate easy sending of planets between accounts (you can gift a planet in-game to a nickname rather than having to supply an Ethereum address, which makes things easier… that’s why I like short, unique nicknames!)
Another nice trick if you want to assign a unique email address to every account: if you have a Gmail address, you actually have a whole boatload of aliases to that address that you can use, because Gmail strips out all dot / period (.) characters out of any incoming email before processing. This means that if you had a gmail of JohnSmith@gmail.com, then anything sent to John.Smith@gmail.com will also show up in your inbox… as will J.ohn.S.Mith@gmail.com and j.o.h.ns.m.i.t.h@gmail.com.
This trick can be leveraged in many ways outside of 0xUniverse, for any system which tries to tie an account to a “unique” email address. If you use this for 0xUniverse, be sure to jot down exactly which combination of dots you used on this account, along with the rest of your account info.
Once you hit Submit, you’ll be back with Astrodog R0x, and here’s where we’ll take the first real departure from when you set up your first account: instead of buying a planet off the market, you can gift one or more planets from your main account directly to your new account, getting it started at next-to-no cost! You can also deliberately choose which worlds you want to gift over in order to optimize the early going for this new account.
I recommend sending over whichever high-population worlds you can afford to spare, to give this new account as much population as possible. If you can, try to include a variety of rarities of worlds as well, covering as many of the different resource types as you can, if it’s not a problem to do so. While it hasn’t been proven one way or the other yet, there are strong suspicions that the ranks of newly invented ships may be influenced by the resources the planets on that account are creating.
We know that the initial case is directly tied in this way: Your first ship should always be a rank 1, using a common resource that is made on one of the planets that you own (this is likely to help ensure that you can always launch your first rocket without having to make additional purchases). If, for some reason, you wanted to guarantee exactly what resource your first ship would use, you could do so by gifting only one world to the new account: a rare planet that had a common resource listed. Since there is exactly one common resource you make, your first ship will use that resource.
This is where the approach we took starts to pay off: you can have several different browser windows open at the same time, and compare the resources that you have on the worlds of one account with what you have (or don’t have) on a different one in a separate window, and when you decide what you want to send from one account to another, just hit the Gift button, type in the short account nickname you gave to that account, set the appropriate gas price and away it goes! Simple and painless. You can compare and contrast between whichever accounts you like.
If you want to open up 0xUniverse on an account you set up previously, if you didn’t create a browser shortcut for that account, you just click the user picture in any Chrome browser you have open, and just click on the short nickname you gave to the account on the presented menu.
That will launch a browser tied to that user account, and since you already set up a unique Metamask on that account, 0xUniverse will always recognize the account for who it is without having to do any signing in and out from 0xUniverse (as is required in some other approaches). You should automatically see a shortcut to 0xUniverse listed on the New Tab page when the window comes up, so it’s one click and you’re on your way!
In addition to the Chrome windows, any generated Metamask windows will also be badged to match the user account that generated the window. This can help in sorting out which Metamask window you’re interacting with.
When you get several accounts to the stage where they have multiple rockets you want to be launching, you can use this approach to have several different account windows open at the same time, and cycle between them so you can accomplish something while waiting for the transactions to confirm and the game to catch up. This is especially useful when gas prices have been high for a while, and you have a brief window of low gas prices to capitalize on. Having multiple accounts all ready-to-launch simply by clicking on their icons on the task bar is a very efficient way to use that window to its greatest effect.
Since it only costs a few pennies to gift a world over to another account, and it takes nothing but time to allow an account to invent additional ships, that’s the basic strategy that I recommend for your second, third, and all later accounts: send a new account as many high-pop worlds as you can spare (to speed up how fast you can keep inventing), and just keep inventing spaceships. Don’t do any launching initially. Just invent a ship on that account every opportunity you get.
By doing this, you can avoid spending gas on launching lower-end ships with weaker engines, that are less likely to find worlds, and instead spend that same gas money later on launching much better ships, which give much better results!
Once the wait to invent another ship on your new account gets to an intolerable point, it’s time to consider moving almost all of your worlds to yet another account, and keep repeating the process as often as necessary.
Once you really get your 0xUniverse empire rolling, I recommend using OpenSea.io to transfer your worlds between accounts, because you can pretty painlessly do so in groups of up to 30 worlds at a time, in a single transaction. There’s a one-time setup gas cost, but it’s actually slightly cheaper per-planet to send them in bulk than it is to send them individually, so with enough traffic you’ll eventually save money doing it via OpenSea instead of individually in-game… and even if you don’t, the difference is so marginal that the convenience far outweighs the small cost differential.
At the advanced stages, I recommend putting together one or more “inventor squads”: groups of thirty high-population worlds that you just move from new account to new account, driving your invention engines forward.
I recommend always sending one additional world to each new account as well, and I’ll generally send some crappy common that I found recently, because the new planet number stands out visually from the inventor squads, which are typically much older worlds with lower planet numbers.
When you go to send groups of 30 worlds via OpenSea, they’ll generally be sorted for you in planet number order, so when you’re done with your invention cycle for this account, and you’re ready to send your squad on to the next account, you can just send the first 30 worlds that show up in the list.
Always, ALWAYS leave at least one planet on every account that you create, at ALL times. NO EXCEPTIONS. Trust me on this one. You’ll thank me later, when I finally choose to publicly discuss why I always do this. Send in an inventor squad, start inventing rockets, then send in one crappy recent world early on in the process. Make 100% sure that the extra world is there, and is listed in your profile count (31 worlds, not 30!) BEFORE you have your inventor squad move on to another account!
If your inventor squad has moved on from an account and you’re ready to start launching ships, you can identify which resources your good ships need, send only worlds with high counts of those resources, and a couple of high-pop worlds at your desired launch locations, and you’re ready to produce high-quality results from that account with minimal fuss.
Using these tactics, you should be able to ensure that you’re consistently finding worlds more than 50% of the time, if only by concentrating your launches on ships with Engine 10 and above (when you have several ships that have already produced over 65% find rates, you can consider adding in Engine 8 and Engine 7 ships as well if you like). Since these will be higher-ranked ships, you’ll also find proportionally more epics and rares, since these ranks of ships all have much better radar on them.
Spend your money on launches that will tend to give you good results, rather that spending it on the lower-ranking ships, and I think you’ll find your inventory and the associated sales it can generate catapulting you ever upwards, and you’ll eventually have earned enough that you’ll be ready to start contemplating the more advanced 0xUniverse tactics: things like market flipping, and “farming”: buying the best worlds off of the market when they’re first listed for cheap, letting them grow until they are well-stocked, and then selling them off for large profits!
Give The Discord Server for 0xUniverse a visit if you have any questions, it’s quite active and there are plenty of folks there able and willing to answer almost any question about the game you might have!
Related Links
0xUniverse — The game itself
The Discord Server for 0xUniverse — A one stop shop to get questions answered and discuss anything and everything related to 0xUniverse. You’ll find me there as @VekTor#8173.
