July 26, 2022 - 18 min read
Town Star is an incredibly popular play-to-earn (P2E) town-building NFT-based blockchain game. It’s the first play-to-earn NFT game released by Gala Games, a NFT and blockchain gaming company that’s released a variety of popular titles, including Fortitude, GRIT, and Battlestar Galactica. The game was launched on March 26, 2020 and currently boasts around 28,000 players each month.
Town Star revolves around NFTs that users can purchase from the Town Star Store, which help players farm and build their town faster and more effectively. Users who want to sell Town Star NFTs can easily do so on the official Town Star market on the popular NFT marketplace OpenSea, as well as other NFT marketplaces.
The main developer of Town Star is Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of the mobile gaming giant Zynga and a core developer of the hit game FarmVille. In many ways, Town Star is a new-wave adaptation of the concepts of Farmville, with the addition of NFTs and blockchain technology.
Before beginning to play Town Star, you’ll need to make sure that you have an Ethereum ERC-721 NFT-capable wallet, as you will need to hold both NFTs and Gala Games (GALA) tokens to effectively play the game. Common options include MetaMask and the Coinbase Wallet, though there are a variety of good wallet options on the market today.
Like many blockchain games, Town Star has multiple playing modes and multiple servers. Most new players are encouraged to begin their Town Star gaming journey on the free server, which will allow them to test out the game in an easy way. Accounts on the free server resets in 30 days and does not allow players to gain financial rewards.
One they’ve gotten some experience on the free server, players will generally want to transition to the weekly competition server, where the real game is played. On the weekly competition server, players can enter tournaments to win prizes and earn real money from the game. The weekly competition server is reset every seven days.
There are two in-game currencies in Town Star, the Gala Games token (GALA), which we mentioned earlier, and TownCoin.
GALA is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain which is used as a transactional currency for games produced by Gala Games.
In contrast, Town Coin (TOWN) is an in-game token that rewards players for succeeding on daily missions. Top-ranked players for each week don’t just get more Town Coin, they also get additional rewards.
Fortunately, individuals can play Town Star on both PC, and Mac, as well as Android and iOS devices.
In addition to ordinary gameplay, the fastest way to gain TownCoin, Town Star’s in-game currency (which can be converted to dollars) is to place NFTs that you have purchased in the game. You can only earn from placing 1 NFT per amount of Gala Power that you have, though you can buy as many NFT as you’d like. For example, if your Gala Power level is 1, you can place from and earn rewards from 1 NFT.
The number of NFTs you can use depends on your Gala Power. Every 5000 Gala (or 2500 TownCoin), you go up one level. We will provide a table of rewards and discuss more about Gala Power closer to the end of this article.
The amount of money a player can earn playing Town Star varies significantly, and depends on several factors, most importantly, how much they initially invest into the game, how many hours they play daily, and how efficiently they play. Generally, to earn the most amount of money, players will need to make effective use of lots of bots, and have an efficient way to sell their products, such as a pier. Location also matters, since players in easier locations generally have more potential to generate higher profits.
While it’s hard to say exactly how much the highest earners make in the game, at least one YouTuber claims to consistently make more than $200 per day playing Town Star. However, with the recent reduction in TownCoin prices, that number could now be as little as $50, even for highly-dedicated players
Before starting to play Town Star, it’s important to understand a little bit about how the game is set up. First, when choosing a city, you will need to choose between one of three biome types, (deserts, plains, and forests), as well as consider the surroundings of your town and the proximity to other towns.
Town Star is about two things, using your NFTs to gain rewards, and using NFTs to farm more crops. You can farm a variety of NFT crop types (each of which must be built using money) including:
You can further refine these crop types with farming and cooking buildings, which include:
Industrial building NFTs are also available in Town Star, which include:
And… ranching NFTs include:
As previously mentioned, there are three main types of land biomes in the Town Star universe, including deserts, plains, and forests. Understanding the qualities of each is essential to successfully playing the game.
Desert: The desert is by far the most difficult biome to operate in. It’s nearly impossible to farm here, due to the fact there are few to no water sources and grasses, or trees. However, deserts do have some uses; players can manufacture glass bottles needed for wine production by exploring oil seeps and mining sands, which is notoriously difficult.
According to the Town Star website: “The presence of the oil seep greatly raises your potential for oil production, but lacking a source of freshwater makes things difficult. You also have the option to sell the oil seep for a quick $25,000.”
Plain: The plain biome is a moderately challenging biome to operate within. It contains a substantial amount of grasses, but very few trees or ponds. Plain biomes are the most populated of all biomes, which can make land more scarce. According to the Town Star website, Plains “have only 2 ponds, significantly fewer trees, but a field full of pastures.”
Forest: When it comes to farming, the forest biome is by far the best place to start. Forests contain ponds, woods, and various craftable materials. However, operating in the forest biome still has some challenges due to the high cost of clearing forest land, which can make it tough for a player to grow their town. According to the Town Star website: “Early money in forests comes from being able to sell your ponds for $5,000 each and the abundance of trees provides a steady source of income in wood.”
In addition to your biome, the surroundings of your biome are also important.
Mountains: Mountains block wind and cast shade, just like buildings, but on a much larger scale. Mountains exclusively allow players to build mines that produce iron and steel.
Rivers: Rivers provide extra fresh water to towns that are next to them.
Oceans: If you’re close to an ocean, you won’t be able to grow nearly as much on the outskirts of your town that are closer to the ocean. If you are surrounded by ocean plots, your town will effectively act as an island, meaning that you will need to send your products over water, which usually means that you will need to construct a Trade Pier. If you want to carry more products for the same amount of cas, you can buy a Freight Pier. Oceans also increase the production speed of brine.
BoxCoin Mines: BoxCoin mines differ from the conventional mines that users can build next to a mountain. Unfortunately, users can only mine a BoxCoin mine if they have a Farmbot, one of the rarest NFTs in the game. You can purchase a Farmbot for a premium price, win one at a weekly competition, or purchase a variety of parts at the marketplace to build one yourself. Another way to potentially acquire parts is to receive rewards by running a Gala node. If you have a Farmbot and have a mountain nearby, you can build a BoxCoin mine, which allows you to mine BoxCoins, one of Town Star’s in-game currencies. Oddly, when you’re in your town, nearby BoxCoin Mines show up as Forests.
In addition to land biome and nearby surroundings, the distance between your town to other towns is another essential factor in Town Star gameplay. Greater distances between your town and other cities mean longer transport times and higher gas fees. Being directly next to a large city is the cheapest and easiest option, while being on a faraway island can be the most expensive. Transport times from faraway islands can range up to $20,500 and 5 gas. Players only start with $25,000 and 40 gas, so just one transport trip from a faraway island would eat up a majority of player’s startup money.
Below, we’ll detail the initial steps you’ll need to take to begin playing Town Star:
One of the best places to purchase Town Star NFTs is the Town Star marketplace/store, which can be found on the Gala Games website. Just click “Visit Store” instead of “Play” to enter the store. In the store, you can sort through NFTs by the rarity levels Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, and Ancient.
In addition to purchasing Town Star NFTs in the Town Star marketplace, you can also purchase a wide variety of Town Star NFTs on OpenSea. Buying Town Star NFTs on OpenSea is an identical process to purchasing other NFTs on the popular platform. Just as you will need a ERC-721 capable wallet to effectively play Town Star, you will want to use this same wallet to buy any Town Star NFTs that you want to purchase from OpenSea. Prices are denominated in ETH or GALA tokens. Note that you can purchase NFTs directly from Town Star from their official OpenSea page, or from other OpenSea users on the secondary market.
Earlier in this article, we discussed crop types and basic farming building types.
Below, we’ll review all of the other basic types of NFTs you’ll find inside the Town Star game and store, sorted by types including bots, resource stands, storage, and water towers. There are a variety of other types of specialized NFTs, but these are the basics.
Bot characters help players achieve in-game tasks faster than the standard workers. Due to the extreme popularity of Town Star NFT bots, players generally have to buy them on the secondary market.
Saltybot: The Saltybot helps players move and harvest basic crops, with a specific emphasis on salt-related items.
Mr. Puddles: Mr. Puddles is a multi-service bot that helps players do tasks involving water, such as water-related building tasks, giving water to animals, or watering crops.
Buggy Mr. Puddles: Buggy Mr. Puddles is an alternative, albeit slower version of Mr. Puddles.
Elfbot: The Elfbot is another basic farming bot, which helps players farm crops like wheat, cotton, and sugarcane, with a particular emphasis on sugarcane and other sugar-related crops and items.
FarmBot: The FarmBot is a very rare farming bot that allows you to access and utilize BoxCoin mines (as mentioned previously).
Cranebot: Perhaps one of the most useful bots, the Cranebot replaces your Town Star Builder, but moves approximately three times faster.
Resource stands can make a major difference in the functioning of your town, as they provide a regular source of a certain specific crop. This reduces your need to farm fields, at least to a certain extent. The major types of resource stands in Town Star include:
Sugar Stand: The Sugar Stand creates passive sugarcane units that are delivered to nearby windmills. The amount of sugar cane delivered to the windmills is determined by the individual sugar stand’s rarity level. Sugar Stands come in five different rarity levels, Standard, Rare, Epic, Legendary and Ancient.
Wheat Stand: Operating much like the Sugar Stand, the Wheat Stand creates and delivers passive wheat units to nearby buildings such as feed mills and windmills. Like the Sugar Stand, the amount of wheat varies based on the unit’s rarity, with stands coming in five different rarity levels, Standard, Rare, Epic, Legendary and Ancient.
Epic Wheat Stand: The Epic Wheat Stand is a rarer version of the wheat stand, even rarer than the Ancient Wheat Stand, and can only be found in the Town Star store (while supplies last.)
Cotton Stand: Cotton Stands are, by far, the rarest type of stand that can be found in Town Star. Like other types of stands, a Cotton Stand provides passive resource units to other nearby buildings, except this time, they come in the form of cotton.
In addition to resource NFTs, there are a variety of specialized NFT storage units that allow you to store more resources. The most basic type of storage in the game is a silo, which is relatively generalized, but not necessarily particularly suited to storing any one type of crop. All storage unit NFTs, like most other NFTs in the game, come in several varieties. Storage unit types by increasing rarity include standard, rare, epic, and legendary units.
Specialized storage units in Town Star include wheat storage, sugarcane storage, grape storage, and brine storage.
As you might have already realized, access to lots of water is essential to your success playing Town Star. While ponds (if you have them) do provide water, the water a pond provides is limited. As you grow your town, you should consider adding additional water-providing units, which include fountains or water towers. Like many other types of in-game NFTs, water units are easily replaceable and removable. The main two types of water units include:
Water Towers: Water Towers can be purchased in the Town Star store (when they’re not sold out). Like most other in-game NFTs, Water Towers come in varieties based on rarity and function, starting with the Standard tower that provides the least water, and including the Rare, Epic, and Legendary towers, which provide increasingly more water to the surrounding land squares.
Alfa Fountains: Like Water Towers, Alfa Foundations provide additional water to nearby land squares. Unlike Water Towers, however, the Alfa Fountain types are denominated in the older rarity identification system, with OK Alfa Fountains providing the least additional water, and Good, Great, and Majestic towers providing increasing amounts of additional water to nearby land squares.
Express Depot: If you decide to upgrade your account to Gala Gold, you can receive a variety of perks, sneak peeks, and extra features. One of these is an Express Depot, which makes deliveries significantly faster than a traditional depot.
Solar Panels: In a similar way that ponds and water supply units (like Water Towers) provide water to nearby land squares, Solar Panels provide passive energy to nearby land squares. Unlike most in-game NFT objects, Solar Panels can be immediately picked up and moved to other locations, without destroying them and having to purchase new ones. Unlike other in-game NFTs, Solar Panels can only be purchased with TownCoin.
Getting Town Star rewards is another important part of succeeding in the Town Star universe. In general, the more NFTs you own and the more you play, the easier it is to obtain new and valuable rewards. The three main methods that are used to gain rewards in Town Star include:
Daily Challenges: After completing daily quests (limited to a 24-hour time frame), high-performing players can earn daily rewards.
Gala Power: As previously mentioned, players can gain more rewards based on a ranking called “Gala Power.” Gala Power is calculated using a variety of factors, including the amount of TownCoin and GALA tokens in a player’s wallet, as well as how many NFTs they own (as well as the rarity and price of these NFTs). In addition, older accounts will generally have more Gala Power.
Season Pass: A Season Pass is a special key that can be used to get more TownCoin for an entire season.
Below, we provide a NFT spreadsheet list of the rewards you can earn from various NFTs in Town Star. This information is accurate as of late April 2022 and was provided by Whale Journal.
(These will be placed in a table in WordPress.)
NFT | $TOWN Earnings | USD Value (as of Jul. 2022) | USD Value (as of Jul. 2022) |
---|---|---|---|
Ancient Bitrue Wheat Stand | 3,075 | $50.02 | Passive Wheat +6 |
DigiFinex Cotton Stand | 2,832 | $46.06 | |
Legendary Bitrue Wheat Stand | 2,577 | $41.92 | Passive Wheat +5 |
Legendary Tesla Coil | 1,155 | $18.79 | |
Legendary Solar Panel | 666 | $10.83 | |
Legendary Lolli and Pop Shop | 350 | $5.69 | |
Into the Galaverse 2021 | 202.1 | $3.29 | |
Elfbot Home | 200 | $3.25 | |
Haunted Main Tower | 140 | $2.28 | |
Rare Tesla Coil | 140 | $2.28 | |
Epic Bitrue Wheat Stand | 120 | $1.95 | Passive Wheat +4 |
Cranebot Home | 100 | $1.63 | |
Rare Solar Panel | 100 | $1.63 | |
Rare Simplex Sugarcane Stand | 100 | $1.63 | |
OKEx Barter Station | 91 | $1.48 | |
Haunted Front Porch | 79 | $1.28 | |
Alfa Fountain Majestic | 75 | $1.22 | |
Saltybot Home | 75 | $1.22 | |
Legendary Water Tower | 72 | $1.17 | |
Legendary Wheat Stand | 72 | $1.17 | Passive Wheat +5 |
Rare Bitrue Wheat Stand | 70 | $1.14 | Passive Wheat +3 |
Haunted East Wing | 60 | $0.97 | |
Haunted West Wing | 60 | $0.97 | |
Tesla Coil | 60 | $0.97 | |
Rare Lolli and Pop Shop | 55 | $0.89 | |
Alfa Fountain Great | 50 | $0.81 | |
Legendary Brine Storage | 45 | $0.73 | |
Legendary Grape Storage | 45 | $0.73 | |
Legendary Sugarcane Storage | 45 | $0.73 | |
Alfa Fountain Good | 35 | $0.56 | |
Legendary Stylin Ride | 32 | $0.51 | Passive Iron +2 |
Broken History (Curry Flow Shoes) | 30 | $0.48 | |
Lolli and Pop Shop | 25 | $0.40 | |
Bitrue Wheat Stand | 24 | $0.39 | Passive Wheat +2 |
Simplex Sugarcane Stand | 24 | $0.39 | Passive Sugarcane +2 |
Epic Wheat Stand | 20 | $0.32 | |
Epic Water Tower | 18 | $0.29 | |
Epic Wheat Storage | 18 | $0.29 | |
Rare Wheat Stand | 17 | $0.27 | Passive Wheat +3 |
Solar Panel | 16 | $0.26 | |
Epic Stylin Ride | 16 | $0.26 | Passive Iron +1 |
Haunted Crypt | 14 | $0.22 | |
Rare Brine Storage | 14 | $0.22 | |
Rare Grape Storage | 14 | $0.22 | |
Rare Sugarcane Storage | 14 | $0.22 | |
Rare Water Tower | 14 | $0.22 | |
Rare Wheat Storage | 14 | $0.22 | |
Wheat Stand | 14 | $0.22 | Passive Wheat +2 |
Epic Basketball Court | 13 | $0.21 | |
Grape Storage | 11 | $0.17 | |
Water Tower | 11 | $0.17 | |
Brine Storage | 11 | $0.17 | |
Wheat Storage | 11 | $0.17 | |
Buggy Mr. Puddles | 10 | $0.16 | |
Mr. Puddles | 9 | $0.14 | |
Alfa Fountain Ok | 8 | $0.13 | |
Rare Basketball Court | 7 | $0.11 | |
The Lab (Curry Flow Shoes) | 7 | $0.11 | |
Death Row Records | 5 | $0.08 | Passive Water +2 |
Uncommon Basketball Court | 3 | $0.04 | |
Water Tank | 3 | $0.04 | Passive Water +1 |
Gala Turntable | 3 | $0.04 | Passive Water +1 |
Basketball Court | 2 | $0.03 | |
Express Depot | 1 | $0.01 |
In addition to the rewards above, a new reward system is coming to Town Star. Previously, the pool of players who would receive rewards was only the top 400 finishers for each gaming cycle. Now, this will be expanding to the top 1,000.
The new reward structure will include:
Much like many other blockchain projects, but unlike many NFT games, Town Star allows players to operate nodes. Players who run a Town Star server node can gain additional TownCoin. In addition or instead of running Town Star nodes, players can also run Founder’s nodes, otherwise known as Gala nodes, which govern the entire Gala Games ecosystem.
Right now, players start out with $25,000 in in-game dollars via which they can purchase NFTs, therefore, these NFTs can be considered free.
As previously mentioned, there is a hierarchy of rarity of Town Star NFTs. From least rare to most rare, most Town Star NFTs are ranked as either Standard, Rare, Epic, Legendary, or Ancient.
Currently, the cheapest Town Star NFT is a Cotton Field, at just $250.
While this article outlines the basics, there are a variety of Town Star guides online that delve into the nitty gritty of each resource type, NFTs, and the various methods of earning money in the game. One of the best guides we’ve found is Learn Town Star. Learn Town Star includes beginner’s guides, gas guides, building guides for each type of structure, competition information, and event schedules.
While Town Star is incredibly popular, unfortunately, it’s one of the tougher NFT games to learn. Starting out can be complex, and it can be confusing to understand how different resources and the transportation process works. However, if you do begin to get the hang of it, the game can be fun, and potentially financially rewarding. Despite this, to gain real financial rewards from Town Star, a big time commitment is required.
Overall, the popularity of the game seems to be only expanding, particularly due to its strong online community, despite fluctuations in the overall NFT market. However, only time will tell if Town Star can stay the course and truly become the next Farmville, or if it will eventually fade away like many other early NFT-based games.
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