Artifacts and Altars: The Backbone of the Economy
As you’ve perhaps read, spells are the primary game mechanic in Cryptic Conjure. Not only do they comprise the vast majority of in-game combat, but trading and selling their Essence tokens are the primary economic transactions in the marketplace.
But how, exactly, are spells created?
In total, you’ll need four things: a recipe, spell components, a crysta, and finally, a runic altar. We’ll get into a bit more detail on the mechanics of spellcrafting in a future blog post, but for now, let’s focus on those altars. What are they?
Runic altars are normally dormant objects, but when activated by using an artifact, become a tool that lets players craft a spell. Artifacts are normally consumed when activated, and last exactly one week from the moment of activation. Players can search a list for all active runic altars, choose one, and use it to craft their spell.
Since crafting involves creating and transferring unique Essence tokens, this has an inherent gas cost that the spellcrafter is responsible for paying. However, players who have activated an altar may charge any fee they wish for players to utilize their altar. And this is where it gets interesting.
When used, all artifacts also confer an additional property to their altars. Many of them are elemental enhancements; for instance, if a fire-element spell is crafted at that particular altar, it will receive a boost in power. Another might slightly reduce the MP cost of a spell. Still another may increase the area of effect radius. In addition, if a player wants, they can lay down multiple artifacts onto the same altar, stacking their bonuses and creating an extremely valuable altar that players will strongly want to use.
Artifacts are rare. They can be sold and traded via the blockchain, but they’re earned in-game only as rewards for exceptionally impressive feats: being at the top of the leaderboards for how quickly a dungeon can be conquered, being the first few players to achieve something unique, or unraveling riddles and secrets we plant occasionally within the game.
Players may see a particular niche: there’s only one lightning-element altar active at the moment, it’s expiring in a day, and it doesn’t have any additional benefits. They might decide to spend some ETH and purchase a lightning-boost *and* an MP reduction artifact, drop them both, and set a relatively high fee. Soon, rabid demand gets them their ETH back, and then some. A constantly changing economy and paying attention to what spells players need at the moment can go a long way in successful market transactions.
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