Introducing: The Sandbox Transportation system
Introducing the basics of The Sandbox transportation system, Portals and more information about LAND value.
TLDR: We are introducing the basics of The Sandbox transportation system, which will be more detailed in the future. Players will arrive directly within worlds through spawn points and portals. They will be able to move to adjacent LANDS and use transportation portals to allow fast-travel between distant LANDs. Portals will allow visitors to easily explore the game experiences in their LAND — similar to the benefit of having a subway station next to your place of business.
1. Overview
2. Basic Transportation system
3. Portals and LAND Value
4. Getting Visitors to Your Neighborhood
1. Overview
The Sandbox is a virtual world where players can build, own, and monetize their own voxel gaming experiences on the Ethereum blockchain. The Sandbox Metaverse is made up of LANDs, which are creative sandboxes owned by players to create and monetize games. There are 166,464 LANDs (408*408) in the metaverse, and each LAND is a physical space that comes with a pre-built, default terrain that can be terraformed and modified by the owner or another player authorized by the owner. LANDs are used to publish your game or can be rented to game creators who want to publish theirs.
Since LANDs will be hosting games made by Creators, an important question that arises is, “How will players be able to discover fun LANDs and play great games?”
This question can be answered by looking at our Transportation System and Portals.
2. Basic Transportation system
A basic transportation and movement system, which we have not yet announced, will be available for any player, enabling them to reach any point in the world without using the fast-travel network.
Don’t worry. This basic movement system will be simple, intuitive, and still fun.
In a nutshell, Players can go to the edge of the LAND they are currently in, and jump to the adjacent one. In other words, they will be able to access any adjacent LAND via exits, represented by edges of your LAND(s). In the destination LAND, the entrance is a “spawn point” fixed by creators.
(see illustration below)
However, basic transportation within The Sandbox will take you time. Hence, portals will be scattered around the map and give an opportunity to travel across huge distances in a flash.
To layout the basic ground, the very first time you ever visit The Sandbox, you will spawn in the center and you will be able to move to adjacent LAND OR use Portals.
3. Portals and LAND Value
With our fast-travel network, we aim to preserve the value of LANDs with regards to their coordinates. As part of this, we have lightly gamified transportation between LANDs. Players can reach any point in the map directly using transportation points we are calling Portals.
Think of them like subway stations around the metaverse.
In many ways, the concept of LAND ownership in The Sandbox metaverse is very much like LAND ownership in the physical world. The mantra of “location, location, location” is strong. Be where everyone wants to be, and your real estate investment will pay off.
These aspects aren’t necessarily something you consider when building a standard, centralized game. But, when you sprinkle in “user-generated content” (UGC), that changes the calculus. Instead, it makes the overall experience more like many scattered, individual games, all operating within each others’ sphere of influence.
It quickly becomes like shopping at the local farmer’s market for some fresh tomatoes, and before you know it, you’ve stumbled upon the best mustard you’ve had in your life!
That serendipity is compelling, and the LAND adjacency phenomenon powering it is important. You might never have seen that mustard booth at the market had you not gone there for the tomatoes. Similarly, you may not have ever seen that NFT art gallery had you not been nearby checking out Atari’s virtual arcade classics.
As the tomatoes/mustard analogy illustrates, similar goods and services traditionally do well when they are clustered together and within an easy jaunt of each other. That’s when these clusters start to form into neighborhoods. You can see this in everything from shopping districts to neighborhoods filled with arts and entertainment. When you want to see a play in New York City, everyone knows you book a ticket on Broadway.
In order to help facilitate these neighborhoods — and the LAND value they foster based on their sense of shared adjacency — we’ve enabled the same concept with our Portals on the map.
Think of the Portals as instant transportation into the hearts of these neighborhoods. It both gets you close to your destination, as well as encourages the kind of discovery serendipity that will build a strong community. After you drop into the right neighborhood, you can walk that last couple blocks to your final destination, just like a subway system in any large city.
4. Getting Visitors to Your Neighborhood
These neighborhoods mean, as a LANDowner, your property value will be tied to the success of your neighborhood. This, of course, is the alternative to simply enabling teleporting into any specific location you want, instantly.
And, just to reiterate, we are going to have a method of directly traveling from any LAND to any other LAND, but it won’t be nearly as efficient. For example, sometimes you want to take the Queens Walk when you’re heading over to the Globe, but often, you’ll just want to take the Tube. Or even both!
Initially, these Portals will show up primarily on the LANDs owned by The Sandbox in the manner of public transportation, but eventually, we’ll all want to have the ability to fast-travel to all corners of the map. In doing that, we plan on making available Portals to put down in your LAND.
Keep in mind that players can always just pop next door through the local gates that will take them to the nearby adjacent LANDs. They even work for exploring the different regions of a single, large Estate like Atari, where players can use those same local gates to zip between the various game instances the team has created.
Once you’ve built up your LAND with an amazing experience, you can set the precise spot they’ll teleport into.
When the players start arriving on your LAND, either through the fast-travel Portals or through the scenic route, they’ll be able to hang out with their friends or chat with the locals or even get a personal tour from you before diving into any interactive experiences you’ve planned — all because we are building the Metaverse to funnel people toward the content they will find the most fun.
And as a LANDowner, the more people chatting on your LAND, the more people wandering in from an adjacent LAND or wandering throughout your neighborhood looking for additional exciting things to do — the better it is for your LAND value and your opportunities to entertain your visitors with your creation.
We can’t wait to transport you into The Sandbox!
Meanwhile… join our community:
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- Email: https://community.sandbox.game
