Alien Worlds is a great play-2-earn mining game on the wax blockchain. During the last week a new development has been released that allows tool loaning. That is, people with expensive mining tools can stake them to Mission Control , which will in turn loan them out to players on a per mine basis using a smart contract.
I first posted this on 3rd Aug 24 - but updated it on 4th Aug 24 to fix a couple of aspects:
- Tool cool down times - I had interpreted that wrong,
- I have reduced the forecast on tool incomes for owners as I may have over-estimated the number of times they can be rented out each day (reduced it from 10 times a day to 5 in order to be more conservative).
Its quite a huge development for the game, as its something that has been requested by players for years now.
It allows those with expensive tools to earn an income when they are not being used, and people without expensive tools to make more from mining by renting tools.
How Tool Loaning Works
The smart contract is the key to it all. It means its safe for the person who owns the tools, and it controls who gets what from the mine. It is done on a per mine basis. That is, if I want to rent a tool - I use it for a single mining task (which in my case takes around 11 to 12 minutes).
Mission Control, who implemented this development put out an article on it, on the 27th of July 2024 explaining it and how it works - You can find that article here. That article included the following diagram which is pretty important to the whole process:
[Credit/source - Mission Control article 'Feature Spotlight: Tool Loaning' posted on 27th July 24 - link ]
The diagram above explains who gets what when a mining operation is undertaken with one of the tools. The main thing is that everyone gets a cut and everyone profits from the TLM. Only the person who rents the tool in order to mine gets shards, but everyone shares the TLM from the mine. Importantly that means - the tool owner will profit, the miner renting the tool will profit, and Mission control offering the service will profit - everyone is a winner.
A couple of key points:
- You cant select which ground you mine - it is locked to Geothermal Springs - I understand that that is because it is TLM efficient to mine that type of ground - "The only exception are Certified Kol Digger, which are always three of a kind on Sandy Coastline for ranking up",
- The downside of mining Geothermal Springs is that it does not yield a lot of shards, so if you are after shards, its probably not a great option.
- If you are the person renting out the tool(s) you can get them back anytime - so you can even rent them out for short periods, ie, overnight when you are asleep.
- Not all tools are rentable - its fairly expensive ones that fall into the rare, epic, legendary and mythical categories - with aprice range from $54 to $3217 on the date of posting (3rd Aug 24). I dont know if that will be expanded or not.
My Experience (inc gains/stats) from using Tool Loaning
I've only started playing Alien Worlds in earnest quite recently, and as such I dont yet have any expensive tools, hence this development was quite attractive to me as it allows me to earn more TLM per mining operation I undertake.
Since it has started I've been very interested in what the earning opportunities are for both the people loaning out their tools, and for the miners renting the tools. As such, I started to collect the data - which is the main focus of this post - presenting my findings on the earnings potential.
So I collected the following data:
- Tool costs (for the basic 'stone' level tools). I collected this using Nefty Blocks , a popular NFT sales site on Wax, on the date of making this post (3rd August 2024),
- I rented out as many of the tools as I could, again at the stone category, on the date of making this post (3rd August 2024), and recorded the results of each mine undertaken with them. N.B. I only did one mine task with each of the tools I rented - the actual results will vary with each mine (I think), and ideally I would have recorded say 20 or 30 mining tasks with each tool in order to get a decent average TLM mining payout - but that would have taken days to do. As such, the results presented in this post will be subject to an error bar, but will give a good indication of the likely returns,
- I didnt manage to try each tool. You are limited to renting which ones are available when you go onto the tool loaning page - and also by the tool cooldown time if you have recently mined. I tried to rent as many as I could for this article, but due to some having cool down times in excess of an hour, I didnt have the time to try them all,
- I've also collected some data with my usual mining tool setup (1 x draxos axe) on both the same ground that tool loaning uses (Geothermal Springs) and then on my standard mining ground (Sandy Coastline on Veles) in order to assess if its worth my while or not,
- At the time of posting, the price of WAX was $0.03387, TLM was $0.00956 giving a figure of 3.54178 TLM per WAX (as per the prices at the time of posting on the CoinMarketCap website).
I've then used a spreadsheet to calculate a number of aspects including; cost per mine to rent, profit per rental, profit by time, shards by time, and potential earnings for people putting their tools up for rent. I've presented a number of different views below which focus on different aspects.
N.B. I have only done this for basic level 'stone' tools. Higher level tools can be rented - but it would have made this post much more complicated to present, so I just stuck with the basic level.
All Data
The table above shows all data sorted by tool cost (from low to high, top to bottom). From left to right you have; tools, tool cost, set allocation of TLM mined, cost of mining and mining income, income rates from mining, and then projected profits for tool owners.
Then at the bottom are two rows showing what I can mine with the tools I own, in order to make a comparison.
The coloured formatting on the right is intended to show best (green) to worst (red) in the various columns.
N.B. Rental tool availability is affected by the speed of the tool you want to rent, the last time you rented a tool and the tool you currently have equipped. The column titled 'Tool Availability Time' shows the time in seconds you have to wait between using those tools to mine when renting them.
The table may be pretty hard to read due to the size, so I've made some specific focused cuts below.
Profit per tool, per mine
The table above shows:
TLM profit per mine undertaken (right most column) colour coded to show best (green) to worst (red). Particle Beam Collider, Exilan Staff and AI Excavator gave the best TLM profit (in that order),
Shard income per mine undertaken (column 3rd on right) colour coded to show best (green) to worst (red). Mining with my own tools on Sandy Coastline gave more shards compared to mining with any of the tools rented on Geothermal Springs (which is no surprise). In terms of rental, the top 3 in order for Shard income were (Particle Beam Collider, Barrel Digger and then Exlian Staff.
So based on the above - my preference for tool renting going forward, when just down one of rents here and there, would be Particle Beam Collider and then Exlian Staff. But if I want to earn shards, then I'm best sticking to my own tools and mining ground that is better suited for shard income (N.B. - there are grounds that offer more shards than Sandy Coastline - its just good for my setup and some other reasons that would detract from this post).
Profit per tool, by time
The table above is a variation on the last one and adds a section on the right that accounts for cool down time, and as such calculates the most profitable tools for TLM and shard income, by time.
The table shows:
- That the best tools for TLM income per time are the AI Excavator, the Lucky Drill and then the Exilian Staff,
- That the best tools for shards income per time are the AI Excavator, the Localised Attractor and then the Barrel Digger, although mining with your own tools on appropriate ground is more than likely going to get you more shards.
So taking tool cool down time into account then my preference for tools to rent out switches to the AI Excavator, the Lucky Drill and then the Exilian Staff, for when you want to use tool loaning repeatedly in a session in order to generate more TLM.
Owner Income
The table above shows:
Owner income and effective APR (right hand section) - again colour coding has been used (green best to red worst) to help identify the best tools easily.
In terms of TLM income per tool to the owner, the top 3 are AI Excavator, Particle Beam Collider and then Exlian Staff - in that order.
In terms of APR % income based on tool initial cost, the top 3 are Localised Attractor, Particle Beam Collider and Exlian Staff. N.B. These estimates assumes that the tool gets rented 5 times per day for the year - I have no idea if thats an under or an over estimate. I've heard that some are not getting rented much, and I dont know if that will get better or worse. I guess it depends on the uptake of renting and whether more people flood the market with more tools to rent.
Change in Tool Price over the Week
Purely by chance I had actually trawled Nefty Blocks the night before this development was released and noted down the price of the top tools (because I was looking at potential future investment options). As such, the table above shows the change in price of the rentable tools over the week since tool loaning has become available.
Looking at the table above, the majority havent really changed by much, apart from the bottom 4 which are the most expensive. On the bottom 4, I dont think the changes seen are actually as a result of tool loaning coming on stream - I think its more the case that not many of those change hands on a weekly basis, and accordingly the price of them is simply more volatile. So my conclusion would be that the implementation of tool loaning has not really impacted tool price yet - possibly because the rentable tools are fairly expensive in general.
Summary
Its taken me quite a few hours to pull this data and post together, but I'm glad I've done it because I really wanted to know if it was worth while renting out tools for mining, and also if it was worth while buying tools with a view to earning from them via tool loaning.
My thoughts, having conducted this exercise are:
- If you dont have great tools (ie, like me !) then tool loaning is a great way to earn more TLM per mine, and its profitable, each and every time you use it,
- If you are after shards, then you can probably gain more shards using your own tools (as long as you have a half decent setup) - using appropriate ground,
- If you are a tool owner/tool-loaning-investor, then it certainly looks like tool loaning can make you some nice APR returns - but more data would be needed to confirm and understand exactly what income levels really are. However - I'm actually positively surprised by the outcome for some of those tools (assuming my calcs are atleast ball park correct - if they are).