The Hero’s Hold #9 — Jan. 10, 2022

9 min readJan 10, 2022

The Hero’s Hold — A DeFi Kingdoms Hero Report

Introduction

Well met, adventurer — welcome to The Hero’s Hold! In this series, we track the details about heroes in DeFi Kingdoms, with game news, statistics, metrics, and more!

The snapshot for all of this week’s data was taken on 1/10 at 8am ET.

In this Issue:

Heroic Happenings (News)
The Crystal Ball (Upcoming)
The Summoner’s Circle (Stats)
The Adventurer’s Guild (Wallets)

Let’s dig in!

Heroic Happenings

As always, it’s been a busy week in the Kingdoms, as news about DFK has started to hit a wider audience. And, we saw a huge patch land on Beta as well! Here are a few highlights from the week:

JEWEL Mining Hits Beta

Following last week’s introduction of Gold Mining, this week, we finally saw JEWEL Mining Quests release on the DFK Beta testing site, and boy are we all excited!

JEWEL mining with Quarrysmith Gren is now in Beta!

As with Gardening, Hubert gave a lengthy seminar on the way that the Mining reward calculations work, and the details of sending teams of miners to unlock JEWEL. You can also read Samichpunch’s article with commentary, Sarah’s summary, or videos from Tosh and ClimbCrypto.

Most notably, the changes to using teams of miners means that the maximum unlock rate has gone up significantly from what had been previously hinted at (5–8 JEWEL/day if you met the threshold of locked JEWEL). Instead, players with 20k+ locked JEWEL are mining upwards of 50 JEWEL/day if they are running three teams of 6 miners.

And this has been welcome news too, even for smaller fish. As your locked JEWEL scales down from the threshold, you need fewer miners running at a time to mine the daily maximum. For those with 3,333 locked JEWEL or less, you can get the max with only one miner at a time, unlocking up to around 1.4 JEWEL per 25 stamina.

All of these unlock numbers will only go up as miners level and increase their profession skills and related stat values.

We also received some clarification about the reward structure for Mining and Gardening Quests:

Basic item drops (including Runes and Tears) roll for every 5 Stamina spent
Egg drops roll for every 10 Stamina spent (.02%)
Jackpots are available for every 15 Stamina spent (10%)

As Hubert noted, this will make 30 Stamina a sweet spot for Mining and Gardening, resulting in 6 chances for basic drops, 3 chances for Egg drops, and 2 chances for a jackpot.

Alchemist Herbert is Brewing

The other big release this week was crafting at the Alchemist’s shop. Herbert (presumably no relation to Hubert?) is offering to craft a number of potions if you bring him the right ingredients.

Herbert is brewing—and is overseen by the watchful eyes of one owl and one FriskyFox

As Hubert had previously noted, the ingredient lists are balanced for higher level quests with better rewards, and are indeed, quite expensive at the moment.

Crafting List:

Health Vial: 8x Ironscale, 8x Rookroot, 5x Gaia’s Tears, 300 Gold
Full Health Potion: 2x Shimmerscale, 10x Rockroot, 3x Ambertaffy, 4x Health Vial, 20x Gaia’s Tears, 3000 Gold
Mana Vial: 8x Lanterneye, 4x Bluestem, 5x Gaia’s Tears, 300 Gold
Full Mana Potion: 5x Lanterneye, 2x Shimmerscale, 10x Bluestem, 4x Mana Vial, 20x Gaia’s Tears, 3000 Gold
Stamina Vial: 1x Shimmerscale, 1x Swift-Thistle, 2x Darkweed, 2x Spiderfruit, 2x Milkweed, 10x Gaia’s Tears, 2000 Gold

Although none of these potions are available yet for consumption, I know many power-levelers are eyeing those Stamina Vials, which immediately restore 25 Stamina to a hero.

Heroes of the Week

Finally, two new heroes caught our attention this week:

The first is Pudina Maleranda (#85027), who is the 2094th Gen0 hero, and what I believe to the the last one that we can expect in Sarendale (I covered the Gen0 numbers previously). This was one of the 24 promotional Gen0s that were sent to partners and influencers. Congratulations to Deja!

And today’s second hero is this gal: Doro Phannulon, who as many of us know, has been stuck in the Beta version of the tavern for what seems like weeks now, taunting us with the impossibly low price of 28 JEWEL.

No, she is not available for sale, and you cannot buy her at this price.

She does, however, serve as a constant reminder of the current issues we’ve been seeing with the tavern recently, that we all hope will be resolved permanently with the new, incoming API.

The Crystal Ball

In this new section, I’d like to just briefly note a few things that we can expect in the coming weeks:

Tavern API v6 — A number of weeks ago, the team hired Pine Cone, a backend developer, to rewrite the Tavern API from scratch in order to better index transactions from the blockchain, allow new scaleability, and bring the current tavern issues to a permanent end. The new API is currently in Alpha testing, and should be released to Beta soon!
Stamina Changes — Upcoming changes to stamina regeneration will allow heroes who have finished a quest that hasn’t been Completed (i.e. pressing the complete button) to begin regenerating stamina!
Gardening Changes — Mostly hinted at, both Fox and Hubert have suggested that we will see Gardening reworked to more closely match how Mining works, likely meaning that teams of Gardeners can work together in a single LP at once. We are also expecting that Gardening will soon allow a jackpot/lucky roll, just like Mining.

The Summoner’s Circle

Let’s take a look at some statistics for all of the heroes that have been summoned so far.

Total Heroes: 91,155 (+6,187 / 7.28%)

Note: Going forward, the charts in this section and the next will continue to update with each new week’s data, rather than remain static in time.

Hero Growth

This week’s hero summoning numbers continued to climb, reversing the rut that we saw at the end of the year, and bringing back us to a weekly total that we hadn’t seen since mid-December. This is likely due to a combination of factors: the lowering price of JEWEL, the increased utility of heroes through quests (mining especially), and the announced CRYSTAL airdrop that applies to heroes held. The total number of heroes increased by 6,187 this week — 7.28%, with an average of around 884 new heroes summoned every day.

Total Heroes (Weekly Change / % Change)
• Jan. 10: 91,155 (+6,187 / 7.28%)
• Jan. 3: 84,968 (4,125 / 5.1%)
• Dec. 27: 80,843 (4,948 / 6.5%)
• Dec. 20: 75,895 (8,161 / 12.0%)

Hero Stat Breakdowns

This week, we saw the number of Level 4 heroes greatly expand (up to around 5.5%)! Meanwhile, the other three levels nearly equally split the rest of the hero population.

Interestingly, we’ve seen quite a gap open up between the number of Knights and other Basic classes, especially when compared to Archers, which have the smallest numbers. The total of Knight rose all the way to 9,666 this week, while there are only 8,830 Archers.

The Adventurer’s Guild

In this section, we track heroes as they’re held in various Harmony wallets.

Total Hero Wallets: 14,638* (+1,065 / 7.85%)

* Due to continued API issues, we’re unable to track the owners of 169 heroes this week (most of which are likely stuck in the Tavern), so the numbers in this section do not include those heroes.

Hero Wallet Growth

Hero wallet growth continued this week, increasing by 1,065 (+7.85%), a bit higher than last week’s +828, and good to be back in the four-digit range.

Total Hero Wallets (Weekly Change / % Change)
• Jan. 10: 14,638 (+1,065 / 7.85%)
• Jan. 3: 13,573 (828 / 6.5%)
• Dec. 27: 12,745 (1,227 / 10.65%)
• Dec. 20: 11,518 (961 / 9.1%)
• Dec. 13: 10,557 (1,166 / 12.4%)

In terms of overall DFK profile stats — recall that these are the number of profiles created in the game, not necessarily all wallets that have interacted with it — that number increased by a significant 15.33% this week. However, the share of hero wallets to profiles dropped again to 15.5% (down 1.0%), as new players tend to initially join by depositing into the DEX rather than by buying heroes.

Hero Wallet Stats

This week the average number of heroes held per wallet decreased again very slightly to 6.22 (-0.6%), while the median wallet held steady at 2 heroes.

There was relative little movement again this week among the Top 50 hero wallets, and accordingly, the share of hero holdings by them dropped again, this time by 5.3%. The share of wallets holding only one hero also increased again this week by 3.4% to 34.8%. An additional 526 wallets have one hero from last week, an increase of 11.5%.

Wallet Rankings

Please note the logarithmic y-axis scales of the charts below, and that this first chart groups wallets holding 100–124, 125–149, 150–199, and 200+ heroes. If you have better ideas for how to display this data, please let me know!

Gen0 Wallet Stats

We’re also checking in on Gen0 wallets, in order to keep an eye on potential consolidation.

Total Gen0 Wallets: 864* (+6 from last week)

Note: There is one Gen0 (#1052) whose ownership status is unknown. Given that it’s been like this since before the current API issues, it is likely that it is held in a hardware wallet. Going forward, I’ll be counting this one as held by an individual user.

This week, we saw a continued shift toward greater distribution, as the number of Gen0 wallets continued to increase slightly (+6) — one of which is the newly summoned Gen0 owner. While it looks like a lot of this is related to shuffling around between wallets, the sharply dropping prices of Gen0s has likely given a few new buyers the opportunity to enter the market.

As noted above, it’s hard to tell which changes are from sales vs moving heroes around, but notable movement included buffy (-6), Arby (-5), Space Cowboy (+4), and Hero Harem (-4). Also, FTC swapped all 17 Gen0s to Boek.

Whale Watch

Finally, let’s check in on our hero whales. One particularly notable change here as we welcome DmblDoresNutsack to the Top 10 by adding 87 heroes. And Wouter, one of the consistently largest accounts in recent weeks, dropped by 131 heroes. We start to get the impression that over the past few weeks, there has been some shuffling around between accounts.

Despite this movement, the number of heroes held by the Top 10 remained exactly the same. The number of wallets with 100+ heroes also increased by 3 again this week to 45.

Account Name / Hero Count (Change) / Gen0s
* New this week in bold

Veilvi / 415 (+3) / 16
Pikul / 290 (+14) / 6
Almost / 271 (+4) / 0
leon / 269 (+5) / 8
Le Ogre / 236 (+9) / 27 (+2)
holmes / 233 (+11) / 12
ぷでぃんぐ / 219 (+8) / 0
DarkSaga / 209 (+4) / 1
DmblDoresNutsack / 202 (+87) / 0
Dunsparrow / 197 (-1) / 2

Total heroes held by Top 10: 2,541 (+0 / +0%)

Thank you Hero Whales for your support of DeFi Kingdoms!

That’s it for today! Thanks for reading, and please subscribe and stick around for future editions of The Hero’s Hold. If you like what you’re reading here, I’m happy to accept tips at: 0xf543311360d1072873D627B06ffe85587e8fc41a.

Questions, comments, suggestions? Send them to me at MrZipper#7564 on Discord or @MrZipper7 on Twitter.

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