Herorats | Help Train Herorats to Save The World!

OnBlock Official
OnBlock
Published in
4 min readJul 3, 2019

Herorats, a minesweeping game inspired by APOPO Foundation, will be available to play on OnBlock on July 3rd!

APOPO addresses global issues through research, development and deployment of scent detection technology at its training and research center in Tanzania and seven other countries where they train giant African pouched rats to detect landmines and tuberculosis.

We are very excited for this partnership with Second Impact Inc., and happy to see the collaboration between DApps and NGO projects to create a bigger social impact in real life and help saving lives. This not only endows blockchain with more social value but also represents its potential in future application of blockchain in real life cases.

Help APOPO Train Herorats To Save The World

Every year tens of thousands of people die or get injured from landmines left behind from past wars. As of today, there are still over 110M hidden landmines affecting people across 50 countries, refraining them from freely cultivating their lands. Finding a landmine with a metal detector is dangerous and slow. Herorats which are much lighter than humans can avoid setting off the landmine and can quickly and safely detect landmines and explosives using their enhanced olfactory system. African pouched rats are known to be able to smell the explosives 1.5 times better than trained dogs.

How to Play Herorats

Rules are simple and are the same as any other minesweeper games. In Herorats, however, players can choose difficulty by selecting different countries with different map sizes and varying number of mines. Herorats tried to reflect the actual landmine density of each country. Players can play Herorats in three different play modes, [Gates Mode], [Scrooge Mode], and [Practice Mode]. Each mode represents different amount of rewards and donations.

  • Players can claim larger reward and donation with [Gates Mode] and [Scrooge Mode], but they require Bananas which can be bought or gifted.
  • [Gates Mode](inspired by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation): When players choose [Gates Mode], approximately 18% of the total reward pool accrued at each round will be given to the players. Approximately 21% will be donated to APOPO Foundation.
  • [Scrooge Mode]: If you are interested in maximizing your own reward pool, you can choose to play as Scrooge and claim approximately 35% of the total reward pool accrued at a specific round, leaving only about 4% for the foundation.
  • [Practice Mode]: 1% of the total reward pool, either Gates or Scrooge Mode, will be transferred to [Practice Mode]. Players can STILL donate by clearing the map.
  • 50% of the reward pool will be transferred to the next round.

Donations will be sent to APOPO Foundation to help train their pouched rats to clear landmines in real life. Players can check their total donations made to the foundation by checking the “Donation” tab of the Ranking menu.

The game also implements a hash verification feature to ensure transparency and fairness of a game. The coordinates of the mines are encoded and converted into different colors of a rat. This colored rat will be shown to the players before game play, notifying that they are not playing the same landmine map. Data conversion process will be applied after the game to check if the colors remain the same.

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