🎮The World of Æthelgard - Gameplay and Mechanics

2.1. The Legend of Æthelgard: Rebirth of a Shattered World

In the beginning, giant Rocktrees supported countless islands floating in the sky. At the center of these islands stood the great world tree, 'Yggdrasil,' the axis of the world. But due to an unknown cataclysm, Yggdrasil was shattered, and its fragments scattered across Æthelgard. The world lost its balance and fell into chaos, and ancient creatures awoke from their slumber.

In this age of despair, players awaken as 'Architects,' possessing ancient knowledge and the power of creation. Their mission is to explore the scattered world, restore lost technologies, pioneer their own territories, and defend the world from the forces of chaos. This is not just a storyline but a device to immerse players deeply in the game world and allow their actions to have a direct impact on it.

2.2. Core Gameplay Loop: Explore, Harvest, Craft, Conquer

ROCKTREE's gameplay is designed to avoid simple, repetitive tasks and provide a deep experience where players' strategic choices and skills are rewarded. The core loop consists of four activities.

• Explore: Players venture into procedurally generated or meticulously handcrafted unknown territories, discovering ancient ruins, hidden dungeons, and rare resource nodes. This exploration system is inspired by games like Rise of the Tomb Raider, where discovering an explorer's satchel or a monolith reveals the locations of survival caches or coin stashes on the map. In Æthelgard, when players discover and decipher ancient

  'Glyph-Stones' (our monoliths), the locations of hidden, on-chain ROTR tokens will be revealed on their map. This provides a tangible and exciting reward for exploration.

• Harvest: Collect raw materials of various grades from all over the world, from basic resources like wood, stone, and crystals to rare flora and fauna. The type and quality of resources vary by region, naturally encouraging trade and territorial disputes to obtain specific materials.

• Crafting: Through a deep, skill-based crafting system, players use harvested resources to create all in-game items, including tools, weapons, armor, buildings, and consumables. Particularly rare and powerful items are all minted as NFTs, becoming the player's true assets.

• Conquer (PvE & PvP):

  • PvE (Player vs. Environment): Hunt monsters roaming the fields or clear dungeons to obtain rare crafting materials and 'Essence,' which is a component for the utility token.

  • PvP (Player vs. Player): Adopting a turn-based strategic combat system similar to games like Gods Unchained or Splinterlands to emphasize strategic duels between players. Players can engage in small-scale 1v1 duels or large-scale Guild vs. Guild sieges over the ownership of resource-rich key territories.

2.3. Asset Ecosystem: True Ownership Through NFTs

The core of P2E gaming is leveraging blockchain technology to tokenize in-game assets and grant players true ownership. Examples include the virtual cats of

CryptoKitties, the Axies of Axie Infinity, and the virtual land of The Sandbox. ROCKTREE expands on this concept by implementing the following core assets as NFTs:

• Land Plots: NFTs that prove ownership of a piece of the world of Æthelgard. Land periodically produces specific resources, and players can construct various functional buildings on it. Land located in key resource zones or strategic chokepoints will have higher value, naturally forming a virtual real estate market.

• Architects: The player's avatar itself, an NFT with a unique appearance and randomly generated initial stats. Architects grow and learn new skills through gameplay, allowing their value to continuously increase.

• Artifacts: All equipment items crafted by players, such as weapons, armor, and tools. Each Artifact is an NFT with unique stats, durability, and enhancement potential, making it a tangible asset that embodies the player's effort and skill.

• Blueprints: Rare NFTs required to craft the most powerful and legendary Artifacts. They can only be obtained from high-difficulty dungeons or world bosses, giving them significant value.

To preserve and expand the value of these NFT assets long-term, they must not be confined to a single game ecosystem. While early NFT projects were 'silos' where assets were only useful within their own game, the value of an asset is determined by how widely it can be used in a larger ecosystem, as demonstrated by CryptoKitties' migration to the Flow blockchain to escape Ethereum's high gas fees. Therefore, ROCKTREE's NFTs will be designed to be 'metaverse-ready' by adhering to universal standards like ERC-721 and ERC-1155. The long-term goal is to enable the display or use of ROCKTREE's land, architects, and artifacts in other virtual worlds or platforms, which is a crucial strategy for securing the future value of our assets.

2.4. Æthelgard Marketplace

The Æthelgard Marketplace is a decentralized exchange where players can freely trade their NFT assets and tokens. All transactions are conducted transparently and securely through smart contracts on the chosen blockchain.

A small fee (e.g., 2.5%) is applied to all transactions in the marketplace. This fee serves as a core revenue stream for the project and an important mechanism for stabilizing token value. A portion of the fee will be allocated to the project's Treasury for ecosystem development, while another part will be used for a 'Buy-back & Burn' mechanism, repurchasing ROTR tokens from the market and permanently removing them from circulation. The operation of this Treasury will be determined entirely by the governance votes of ROTR token holders.