//State of the Chikn #9

The Loop is Closed! Foraging, Crafting, Equipping and beyond.

Bok bok, cluck cluck, coq-a-doodle-doo, and welcome to 2023! Whether you’ll be celebrating the Year of the Rabbit or, like us, the perpetual Year of the Coq, we’re sure it’s going to be an absolute doozy.

To kick things off, we are taking a brief look back at the end of 2022 to set the scene for what is now upon us.

From there, we cover the full foundational release of our Play-to-Own economy — which is NOW LIVE!

Finally, we look onward to new horizons, daring to dream of what this year has in store for Chikn. So bokkle up — let’s get into it.

The play-to-own era has dawned.

2022 Ends with a Bang

It’s no secret how important 2022 was for our project. It was the year we turned 1, and the year our humble ecosystem took shape. Chikn, Roostr, and $WORM are all now living together symbiotically on our fertile FarmLand, and despite the scarcity of $FEED for hungry chooks, our poultry are fatter and happier than ever.

In November, to celebrate our first anniversary, we published a retrospective on the journey so far. In it, we cover the highs, the lows, and amazing stories that have helped define Chikn to date. It’s a great read, but if we had to sum it up in a few words, the overarching message would be: our community is amazing.

Without your trust and support, there’s no way Chikn would be the bird it is today. So thank you all — we can’t wait to spend the next year continuing with you all ❤️

To celebrate Chikn turning 1, we threw an absolute rager that lasted weeks and had the Discord mods desperately cleaning the server before Mum and Dad got home.

We had a blast, and thank you to everyone who celebrated with us. Of course, it wasn’t just well-meaning messages and empty birthday cards — there were some gifts going around as well! 👀

On November 20, some quick-fingered Chikn NFT holders claimed 1,000 limited-edition party hat NFTs, for free. These pointy pieces of headwear were the perfect attire to rock during the birthday season, and we can say with reasonable confidence that it was the most significant party hat event since RuneScape’s 2001 Christmas celebrations.

All party hats were claimed in 1 hour and 45 minutes, and the first 24 hours saw nearly $30,000 in volume. Not too bad for a free jpeg of a hat. The party hats are currently listed on Joepegs — if you think you’ll be able to convince a lucky holder to part ways with theirs.

During the birthday celebrations, we also sought to give back with something slightly more tangible. We randomly selected around 35 members of our community to receive a special Chikn Care Package, delivered straight to their physical addresses. These care packages include a stack of exclusive Chikn merch letting you show the world how much you love coqs.

All care packages have been sent and should be arriving in your letterboxes soon. We’d love to see them in the wild too — share a post of your swag on Twitter or drop it in the Discord.

2022 ended with the dev team taking some well-earned, and much needed, holiday time to rest and recuperate for the year ahead. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being so accommodating and understanding of the team’s needs and schedules. It’s made all the difference and we finally reconnected with friends and family for the holiday season after almost entirely missing it in 2021. Now we’re refreshed and ready to continue on this wild ride, and what we have to announce next will really kick the year off.

Crafting & Items

The four words we’ve all been waiting to hear: “The loop is closed”. Foraging has reached its full release (iterations and updates notwithstanding) and the Chikn ecosystem has now transitioned well beyond the initial tri-token architecture. Wormbenches across the Chiknverse are feeling the satisfying ‘thwack’ of hammers Crafting coveted resources into something even more tantalizing. This process also results in a slightly morbid ‘splat’ of worms becoming an unfortunate mayonnaise as resources are sandwiched into items. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten 🙏

Before you read on, make sure you are up to speed with the latest article explaining Foraging, blueprints, crafting, and more.

This update is a milestone in our Chikn journey. Just as Prometheus stole fire from the great forge of Hephaestus and gifted it to man so that we could enjoy its warmth, so too have the poultry gods gifted us $WORM, Avaxium, and tungsten — so that we may enjoy the spoils of Crafting.

Mythologizing out of the way, it’s important to highlight the significance of these features and mechanics. Foraging marks the transition to a Play-to-Own economy that has enabled new trajectories of growth and development for the entire ecosystem.

Firstly, Foraging and WormFarming place significant burn pressure on $EGG, $WORM, and $FERT, as well as reducing sell pressure. This is achieved by transitioning the tokenomics away from a focus on fungible token emissions, and toward NFT production. This direction is ultimately more sustainable, fun, rewarding, and equitable for players.

Chikn is renowned for its extremely liquid NFT marketplace with over $30m in total volume in a little over 1 year of trading. This NFT liquidity is now being leveraged as the primary means of participation in the tokenomics of Chikn, rather than emissions and trading of fungible tokens on DEXs.

While tokens like $EGG, $WORM, and $FERT are still critical to the games of Foraging and WormFarming, the path of progression beyond increasing the size of your Coq is through maximizing NFT production. These NFTs, being items and blueprints, have clearly defined utility and decreasing supply through usage.

Such clearly defined utility means consistent demand from players, coupled with a decreasing supply and plenty of liquidity. Eventually, demand will outweigh supply, further incentivizing players to increase their NFT production and capitalize on the excess demand. This increased production is then absorbed by the demand of players, ultimately with supply diminishing over time as items are worn down and caps are reached. This reignites excess demand, with NFT production increasing to match, and the gameplay loop continues.

Over time, the supply of items (namely Equips and Drips) will approach Zero, and the demand will drastically outweigh the supply. This can introduce gameplay friction which ultimately counters the perpetuating market dynamics. In this case, the dev team steps in to assess the gaps in demand and supply within the P2O ecosystem and pull the appropriate levers with the introduction of new and exciting items.

The levers available to us ultimately serve to impact demand, supply, and time — but now we can be significantly more creative in our implementation. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, NFT production is inherently more gamified and versatile than fungible token emissions. Secondly, the infrastructure underpinning foraging is largely off-chain, making it much easier to iterate.

So, to meet shortfalls in the supply of Items and Blueprints, we supply an appropriate amount of new NFTs into the ecosystem with a utility fit for purpose. The creativity comes from designing the utility of new Items and Blueprints to be more fun, engaging, and dynamic while still meeting the inherent demand of the ecosystem.

This gives us regular opportunities to poke and prod the P2O ecosystem in the right direction, provide regular content updates to engage the player base, and progressively introduce more sophisticated and fun gameplay to foraging and beyond.

Beyond the loop? While it is ‘closed’, it is a strange loop on which entire hierarchies of meta are built. That means craftables will find their way beyond foraging to the broader Chikn ecosystem — from breeding to CoqFight, from the WormFarm to F2P gaming.

Abstracting even further beyond the Chikn ecosystem loop, our Web2 infrastructure has set the coq loose across the entire internet, breaking free of the blockchain shackles. This new infrastructure makes it possible to integrate with any chain, platform, website, application, or device.

For example, it’s entirely possible to see Chikn gameplay brought to mobile, consoles, Discord servers, streaming services, and more — we’ve opened up an entirely new way to integrate third-party projects directly into the Chikn ecosystem.

The first step is testing the theory with our Eggnite partners by enabling them to interact with foraging through custom craftables and resources, as well as built-in upgradeability to burn those $EGG. From there, we look toward an ETH and SOL and bridge the $1 billion worth of static NFTs already there — and that’s not even the end of it.

Beyond the metaverse, we expand across platforms and mediums to bring the Chikn brand to every device, home, and format imaginable. From mobile to comics, VR to cinema, trading cards to PlayStation — there are no bounds on the Chikn frontier. We aren’t shy, we are here to change the whole bokkin game. It is only a matter of time.

But the journey of a thousand miles started with a single peck, and we’re in it together. So on this first step of closing the loop, we turn to you, our faithful community, for help.

Play, poke, prod, and dissect this latest release and tell us all your feedback — bugs, UI issues, and suggested improvements are all welcome. This will be an ongoing process as we adjust spreadsheets and move the Foraging levers to optimize engagement and token burn.

We’re very open to feedback and encourage the whole community to get vocal! The support channel in Discord is a great place to voice this feedback. Bok booooooooook!

Brief UI Guide

We’ve covered everything there is to know about Blueprints, Items, and Crafting in our last article — we highly recommend you check it out to get up to speed with where the game is heading. But, if you’re looking for the Cliff Notes, Foraging goes a little something like this:

• Forage for resources on your FarmLand
• Dig for blueprints in your WormFarm
• Craft items using resources, tokens, and blueprints
• Use items to improve foraging by equipping them to your birds and FarmLand
• Trade items and blueprints on the marketplace
• Decompose items into resources
• Create the biggest, boss-est, most bustling-est Farm you can! You’re going to need it…

Everything you need to succeed at Foraging is found in the UI, although (spoiler) the interface is going to see some upgrades.

Notably, this latest release has enabled Multi-FarmLand Foraging, so our ambitious farmooors can truly eggspand their empires. 👀

• Every resource available on your FarmLand (based on its tiles) are shown here:

• Click on a Resource to see the percentage change of it being found during a Forage. This is based on your tile rarity, FarmLand fertility, and any equipped items.

• Select the Inventory tab to check out your Sips and Equips — and soon — Drips, too!

• Equip items to your FarmLand to forage for new resources, and harvest some sweet bonus percentages

• Click on the Forage loadout below your FarmLand to check out what birds you have and the bonuses they carry. Select the ones you want to send to forage and get pecking.
• Match your bird traits to your FarmLand tiles to optimize foraging success.

• Equip items to your bird before they go foraging for an extra bonus!

• Dig up Blueprints from your WormFarm, or buy some from the marketplace. We’ll release new Blueprints regularly, so the deeper you’ve dug and deployed, the more likely you are to uncover them!
• Select the Crafting tab to make consumable items (Sips) or equipable items (Equips).

• When you begin your crafting journey you’ll need to approve the contract for minting NFT items. This is a one-off transaction but will have to be signed again if you switch wallets.

What might seem like a simple addition to the game is actually an enormous leap for the ecosystem. Foraging, WormFarming, Crafting and Equipping is going to be paramount for the landmark releases that lay before us. We now have the broader gameplay meta required to ensure games like CoqFight have the best possible environment to succeed — with the ability to consistently engage and challenge players through a dynamic landscape of strategy and variability.

What’s Cluckin’ Ahead

By now you’d know that we like to keep our beaks zipped on announcements, preferring the thrill of a surprise drop over a heavily teased (and often underwhelming) roadmap. That said, there are some ecosystem features and changes that we’ve been talking about for some time, and 2023 is the year we’ll start to see some of them come to life.

First, we’re getting a glow-up. The recent spike in egg prices (real egg, that is) means that hard-working birds can finally take some time for a little self-care. At chikn.farm, this means a fresh look for the project: a redesigned website, a reskinning of the game, and a nice polish of the brand. Don’t worry though — your NFTs will remain unchanged and under the hood will be the same old Chikn you’ve come to know and love.

Well, not exactly the same old Chikn.

You’ve been asking ‘wen’ and we’ve been saying ‘soon’ for what seems like forever, but, Roostr enjoyers, it’s finally here.

Well, with the reskin, so… soon.

Roostr Daycare will drop with the new-look website allowing you to automate the $FERT squirt and get more bang for your Roostr buck. We’re not joking this time — it’s really coming.

Someone to watch the chooks and a fresh look will be important because we’ve got an important date later this year. The Chikn team will be heading to the Avalanche Summit in Barcelona from May 3–6. We had a great time last year, and this year we’re looking forward to ruffling some feathers all over again. Keep an ear out in Discord to stay involved with our plans, especially if you want to help us make some noise. We won’t say too much more, but if you’re thinking about attending the conference, you won’t have too much trouble tracking your fellow Coq enthusiasts down.

If you have burning questions about existing gameplay mechanics, we’ll probably refer you to our updated docs on docs.chikn.farm. We’re in the middle of overhauling them with detailed explanations of all gameplay features, as well as a starter guide for new players looking to start their Chikn farming career and touch digital grass. The new documentation will be ready by mid-February and will include a detailed appendix of spreadsheets and data for the hardcore strategists out there to digest.

This will be a great resource for our Mods &and caring community members to direct newcomers to. The easier we can make the on-boarding process, the better!

All that talk of mingling brings us to our next focus for the year: Breeding. As with most countries around the world, Breeding in the Chikn ecosystem is important to our long-term growth strategy. Breeding brings us from the existing structure into one that allows new users to enter with a Play-to-Own system. This will once again lower the barrier to entry, designed to simultaneously provide the spoils to the astute Farmer, while bringing the next wave of users into the game.

Finally, this year, crafty coqs and hefty hens will finally be able to prove who truly rules the roost.

CoqFight is coming, and much like our Coqs, it’s going to be big.

CoqFight gameplay will be a refreshing blend of nostalgia and innovation; of brawling and strategizing. Optimizing your coop, and your odds, will require using all parts of the ecosystem. The more involved you are now, the bigger jump you will have on the rest of the flock. Within reason, of course. Oh, and expect a heavy dose of our trademark Chikn humor. The current build is mobile-compatible as we look to make the ecosystem more mobile-friendly overall, and tap into that juicy mobile gaming market.

There’s a lot more to say about CoqFight, and we’ll save it for its own article down the track. Just know that it’s going to be fun, intense, and significantly less illegal than doing it in real life.

Keep Your Beaks High

Over the next few months we’ll complete the current tranche of blueprint rollouts, with regular releases every few weeks. Keep an eye out for those announcements so that you can rush to your WormFarms the moment they drop.

While there’s been a (perfectly natural) pullback in floor prices , rest assured that from our end, nothing has changed. If anything, we continue to pick up pace and momentum with every passing day, ensuring we capitalize on every opportunity left in our wake. So while early entrants offload some of their poultry, enjoy the discount, and let’s work together to welcome new scores of players into the Chikn Fam. We remain entirely unfettered and amply-feathered: determined to build this brand into the bustling empire we all deserve.

In case you can’t tell — we’re incredibly excited about what this year holds, and we hope you are too — keep hanging out on Discord and share some love on Twitter when you can. On our end, we’ll make sure the Roost is the best it’s ever been ❤️

Bok Bok,

The Chikn Team