Town Star Guide: How to Play, Features, Pros and Cons

The winner of the Blockchain game of the year award, Town Star is a mix of a city sim and a farming sim game with NFT and play-to-earn features.

Quick facts

  • A concept similar to Farmville, Town Star is a farm simulator strategy game focused on town planning and resource management.
  • Town Star includes competitive play-to-earn elements and is built on the Ethereum blockchain.
  • Playable on any modern web browser, Town Star is compatible with PC and mobile devices.

Town Star Review

What is Town Star?

In Town Star, the objective of the player is to build the most efficient and profitable town by producing and selling goods. After the major success of Zynga’s Farmville, their co-founder, Eric Schiermeyer, brought Town Star to Gala Network in an attempt to attract gamers already familiar with Farmville concepts. Players can use their creative minds to choose their desired plots and personalize their town with in-game NFT resources.

A player can raise crops, harvest them, mix them with other ingredients, sell them, and use the profits to upgrade their farm and buildings. Eventually, they will be running a prosperous town. Progress is made when the town has more buildings. Each week there is a contest over who makes the most progress, and the winner is awarded rare in-game items.

History of Town Star

The history of Town Star dates back to the launch of Gala Games by Eric Schiermeyer on July 21st, 2019. Gala Games was created to give more power to the players of a game and use blockchain technology to do so. Gala Games has a native token called GALA that is used for network governance, node operator incentives, and in-game awards. Town Star was the first major launch of GALA games.

The private beta of Town Star was launched in March 2020, and in June 2020, the game was opened for the general public to play. Just a month after the public launch, Town Star NFTs were available to be purchased on OpenSea. In October 2021, the Town Star in-game currency, Towncoin (TOWN), was launched. Currently, Town Star is one of the most popular Gala Games, with TOWN token holding a market cap of $10 million USD and a daily trading volume of close to $500,000 USD.

How does Town Star Work?

Even though Town Star has simplistic-looking graphics, the game has great depth. A player engages with the game in an isometric perspective where their gaming experience starts with a plot of land from the world map.

The game starts with the player having a small number of assets, and the goal is to build a farm with crops, staff, infrastructure, and buildings. There are many things to be considered, like the landscape, surrounding towns, how close you are to the nearest city, and so on. The customizations can be done by the player’s preference.

Choosing a particular geography like a city will give the player the advantage of good transport routes, while the choice of building in a mountain will give the player access to good resources.

Each location that a player selects comes with its pros and cons.

Forest: Forests have abundant resources to start off with. However, it is hard to expand at later stages, making the dynamics suitable for beginners.

Plains: Plains have average difficulty to start but become easier over time. Easily available pastures make it easy to feed animals.

Desert: Lack of trees and water makes deserts hard to start off with but easy to expand at later stages.

In Town Star, the primary goal is to generate resources by raising crops or animals and combining various materials to make commodities. Players can earn points by selling these commodities to cities in groups of 10 units. They obtain stars in the game in this manner. The more stars the player earns, the faster they can complete a challenge making their ranks higher.

Town Star NFTs

While there are enough buildings in Town Star’s free-to-play mode, these are the default choices. Another layer of builds can be acquired from other players, purchased through the Gala Games store, or found as NFTs on platforms like OpenSea.

Here, NFTs are used to provide a variety of perks and advantages, such as expediting tasks, creating extra storage, and so on. They are scarce and valuable in the real world too.

To make sure that the gaming experience is not too overpowered by the NFT users, there is a certain threshold to which NFTs can be used. These limits are determined by “Gala power,” which is calculated by keeping factors such as account age, number of stars earned, and referrals in mind.

Here are a few examples of NFTs available on Town star:

  • Resource Stand NFTs to generate passive crops.
  • Bot NFTs that can do the jobs of workers.
  • Storage NFTs give extra storage space for a specific product.
  • Solar panels and Tesla coils for NFT skins.
  • NFT skins to customize the looks of the town.

The easiest way to purchase these NFTs is through the Gala Games store. Although they accept several cryptos as payments, the player always needs to hold ETH in their account to cover network fees when they mint or transfer. Town Star NFTs are also available on secondary markets like OpenSea and Looksrare.

Town Star cryptocurrency and tokens explained

TownCoin (TOWN) is an ERC 20 token with a Maximum supply of 1,000,000,000,000,000. Currently, 27% of the total supply is in circulation, and as more players earn rewards, more TOWN comes into circulation. Transferring TOWN from the Gala account to a wallet outside the ecosystem costs the players gas fees in ETH.

The players can use Towncoin to purchase NFTs, town upgrades, and increase Gala power. Holders of TOWN also receive discounts when purchasing a town star node. Nodes provide computing power to the Town Star ecosystem. Apart from enhancing the gaming experience TOWN, holders get special access to exclusive Discord channels.

Town Star price

Town Star is a free-to-play game, however, the in-game NFTs range from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars, depending on their utility.

How to play Town Star

The game world

The map of the game world resembles the real world. The game world is split up into different plots of land on which players can build. There are three biomes available, including forest, plains and desert.

Town Star

The game characters

The characters in this game come in the form of workers that you will use to work in the town. There are three primary characters, the farmer, rancher and the lumberjack. Farmer is the first of many workers who will inhabit your town. When the town is low on wood, you have to build a Lumberjack. When the player is ready to tend livestock, a Rancher will be necessary for all the animal work.

Town Star

Game mechanics

As in the real world, cash flow runs Town Star. You’ll need money along the way to develop a prosperous town, and while points are what determine competition winners, money is what allows for expansion. Developing a good cash flow strategy is the key to getting ahead in this game.

Town Star

How to get ahead in the game

For a beginner, a “Wool Rush” strategy might be the best way to get ahead in the game. For this strategy, the town should be located in a forest near a river. The player has to sell all the resources and destroy the farmhouse, silo and wheat fields. Build a sheep pen on the edge of the river, followed by a storehouse, a trough, two feed mills, two ranch houses and a lumberjack.

Then place a road and a Bitrue Wheat stand near the feed mills. With this setup, the ranchers will fill up automatically, the lumberjacks will offer wood, and the ranchers will provide food for the sheep. This guarantees a good initial cash flow.

Town Star

Game economics

Although the issuance of TOWN is very high now, eventually, the token issuance will taper, making the asset increasingly scarce.

Town Star

How to install Town Star

Town Star is a browser-based game and doesn’t need installation on your devices. Just visit the website, and you can play the game on most modern browsers.

How to earn money on Town Star

In Town Star, players can earn TownCoin from playing with NFTs. Players can earn TOWN rewards as long as they meet the following requirements.

  • Daily Challenges: Once a player completes the in-game daily challenge, they can be eligible for the daily reward.
  • Gala Power: For each level that Gala Power increases, a player can play one additional NFT eligible to earn TownCoin rewards.
  • Season Pass: Players who wish to earn TownCoin will be required to hold a season ticket which is an NFT.
  • Running Node: Additionally, Node operators receive TOWN in a daily distribution for running Town Node. Although this is not a necessity to earn TOWN like the above-listed factors.

The TOWN token acquired can be left in the Gala wallet to boost Gala Power or can be withdrawn. TOWN can be moved out of the Gala wallet and swapped on Uniswap for USDC or WETH. TOWN is also listed on exchanges like OKX and CoinEx to exchange for fiat currency. However, a player should remember that moving the funds out of the Gala wallet will require them to pay Gas fees in ETH.

Pros and cons of Town Star

Pros

  • Familiar gameplay for beginners
  • Part of the Gala ecosystem
  • Older accounts are incentivized

Cons

  • In-game NFTs are expensive
  • Daily quests can be tedious
  • Earning TOWN is hard for new users

Pros

Familiar gameplay for beginners

Millions of people have already played farming games. So many of the people playing Town Star have some familiarity with the gameplay even before they start playing. The in-game tutorials guide beginners to get used to the game fast.

Part of the Gala ecosystem

Gala Games is one of the biggest names in blockchain gaming, and being part of the ecosystem helps the game attract other users from the ecosystem and strengthens the utility of GALA tokens.

Older accounts are incentivized

Town Star rewards loyalty. The more Gala points a player has, the faster they can earn TownCoins.

Cons

In-game NFTs are expensive

The average price of a Town Star NFT is $300. The most expensive NFT of the game was sold for over $50,000. These NFTs make the game too expensive for most gamers.

Daily quests can be tedious

Daily challenges can be too time consuming, repetitive, or too hard for many users. Many users have complained of dropping off from the game as a consequence of the tedious nature of these tasks.
Earning TOWN is hard for new users

A new user has to buy an NFT, which many hesitate to do. Even when they do, older accounts are incentivized to earn more TOWN. Even if a beginner dedicates more time to the game, it’s hard for them to earn tokens at a rate older accounts can.

Getting started

To begin your Town star quest, go to the Town Star website and create an account.

Step 1: Once the account is created, the user can click on play to launch the web application.

Town Star

Step 2: Once the game is launched, you have the option to choose the server you want to play on. The population on each server and the time left for the competition to get over will be displayed.

Town Star

Step 3: Once the server is picked, players can choose their favorite location on a map based on their desired strategy. It’s advisable to stay close to other towns while being near natural resources.

Town Star

FAQs

How do you make money on Town Star?

Playing the game and completing daily tasks is a way to earn TOWN tokens. Additionally, node operators can earn TOWN tokens for running Town nodes.

Is Town Star worth playing?

This question is for a player to decide. If a player is looking for exciting gameplay, then Town Star might not be the best game for them. However, if they like games like Farmville, then Town Star can certainly be an interesting game to play and earn some money while doing so.

Town Star Game Info

  • Genre: Farm Simulator Strategy
  • Free to Play: Yes
  • Platform(s): PC / Mac / Mobile
  • Blockchain(s): Ethereum
  • Token(s): TOWN
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