Colonize Mars reached a major roadmap milestone this weekend by launching its web-based platform that allows players to generate Martia token rewards with their NFTs. Despite a day delay and predictable server load issues, the launch allows players to explore the new game and assign their NFTs to ownership cards This way players can start earning Martia Tokens, the project’s in-game currency.
Colonize Mars is a relatively new project that has previously held two popular pack sales and introduced a rarity upgrade system. At the time, there wasn’t anything to do with the NFTs besides admiring the graphics. That all changed this weekend – players can now “stake” (it’s not technically staking, more on this later) them to generate Martia Tokens using the online platform available at Mars.cards.
The launch of the new web-based platform was not without issues. The developers initially delayed the launch by one day, with the given reason that they found a bug. The project launched the next day and the community flooded the website, causing issues for most people. However, within an hour or two things were running pretty well and all of my NFTs were earning Martia Tokens.
In the small amount of time since the launch, the team removed a few notable features, presumably for further testing. The most detrimental was the lack of an ongoing Martia balance, along with removing the “claim” button (which never worked for me). I expect that the developers will add these features again soon enough.
It’s worth noting that they consider this release as the Phase 2: Establishment (Beta), and its mainly intended to release the platform and generate tokens. The project’s roadmap states the full release of Phase 2 will come in early 2022.
Now let’s dive into everything you need to know about Colonize Mars to start generating tokens in anticipation of future releases.
Base Cards vs Ownership Cards
As I was lurking the Colonize Mars Discord server during the launch, there was plenty of confusion about base cards and ownership cards. Let’s start by clarifying these two types of cards.
Base cards are most of the NFTs in the game. They represent buildings, infrastructure, tools, power generators, researchers, astronauts, and essentially everything else. Players are required to have base cards to play the game, with the higher rarity cards generating increased rewards. Base cards are used by staking them to ownership cards.
Ownership cards are unique, expensive and the rarest cards in the game. They are the same types of objects as base cards (such as a rover) but match 1:1 with a piece of equipment that you’ll find on the map. Players stake their base cards to the ownership cards to earn Martia, but the player with the Ownership cards earns a fee (set by the owner) for everything players generate. You can consider ownership cards similar to “land” cards in other play-to-earn games.
When a player assigns a base card to an ownership card, all of that player’s base cards of that same type automatically join the assignment. You cannot split cards of the same type between ownership cards – it’s all or nothing. For example, when players assign a cargo ship card to the selected cargo ship ownership card, all cargo ship cards will join.
Now, let’s talk about the use of the term staking. Staking typically means removing the NFT from your wallet and locking it somewhere else (such as R-Planet). That is not what happens with Colonize Mars – the NFTs are not going anywhere. Instead, they remain in your wallet while still generating Martia tokens. Even so, the devs and community tend to call this staking, but it’s worth clarifying that your NFTs are not going to leave your wallet.
How Do You Earn MARTIA Tokens?
Martia Tokens are the in-game currency for Colonize Mars and will be used heavily as more gameplay is added. At present, earning the Martia token is the entire point of the gameplay release.
You can earn Martia tokens by staking them to the ownership cards as discussed above. The amount that you earn is based on the type of card (such as a rover instead of a cargo ship), the rarity of that card, and the fee charged by the ownership card that you stake it to.
Rarity is directly put to use in Colonize Mars by impacting the strength of your collection, which is indicative of how much Martia the NFT will generate. The above readout on the “Profile” page directly showcases the rarity strength of each card. A Dark Matter card generates more than three Epic cards, for example.
The rarity-based card strength system directly supports the rarity upgrading system introduced earlier this year. For example, it takes six common cards to upgrade to an uncommon card. That one uncommon card has 6.5 strength, which is 0.5 strength more than what you had with six common cards. The gains increase as you upgrade, creating continued motivation to buy and burn cards in pursuit of the strongest collection possible.
Right now you can only earn MARTIA tokens, that’s it. But there’s a reason for introducing this feature first. In the next update, which you can see on the project’s roadmap, the team will add resources to the game. Players can generate these instead of or in addition to tokens. These resources can be used to “power up” your existing cards, and undoubtedly there will be plenty of other features in the future.
What About the Colonize Mars Interface?
Everything that we’ve discussed so far could’ve been accomplished with a pretty simple menu. However, the dev team called this a gameplay release, not a “pretty simple menu” release. When a player logs in, they immediately arrive at the beautiful Colony Map. Take it in:
Honestly, there’s not much to do on the map at this point. At launch, you could click on the objects and see the ownership NFT that it corresponds with, but that feature is not available at the time of this writing. There’s no tangible benefit right now to having that information anyway.
You can stake through the “Earn” menu, and that’s where you’ll be spending all your time right now. However, the presence of a robust and persistent colony map with pretty impressive graphics is encouraging. The upcoming steps in the roadmap discuss putting the map to actual use.
The web-based platform is all mobile-first, meaning you’ll be able to play this game on-the-go as features roll out. Even during this launch, I regularly checked the mobile site and it was perfectly fine.
Ultimately, the launch was a success (despite a few hurdles) and it’s exciting to see this project hit a major milestone in an industry filled with delays. I’m looking forward to future releases that expand on the team’s vision. Right now, it’s time to collect and upgrade NFTs in pursuit of generating as much Martia as you can!
What is Colonize Mars?
Colonize Mars is a strategic colony simulation game currently in development on the Wax blockchain. Players use their NFTs to aid in colony development and eventually create land expansions and build player-owned hubs. Players stake cards and maintain them at regular intervals to receive Martia tokens as rewards in the first Phase. Later phases will include expansion, expeditions, and discovery.
