How to Play THREE LEGACY
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The Simple Version
Imagine you're starting a household within a sweeping alien civilization. Your goal is to navigate a closed-loop economy to build a permanent, powerful dynasty. The larger and more accomplished your family becomes, the higher your Legacy Score climbs. Your Legacy Score influences your share of the regular skill-based rewards pool distributions.
That's basically it.
What You Actually Do
Step 1: Endow your matriarch. You contribute a small starting amount (about $1) to create your first alien. She is the head of your household.
Step 2: Expand your lineage. To grow your family, you pay a birthing fee using THREE (the in-game liquid currency), and your alien gets a new daughter. But here's the twist: alien babies need three parents, not two. The Mother. The Sage. The Dowager. The game taps into the community, selecting other players' aliens to help forge the new generation.
Step 3: Build your Legacy Score. Every alien starts with 9 points. You also gain points from the successes of your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. Legacy Score is permanent, the soulbound measurement of your power in the game.
Step 4: Claim Achievements. When your aliens do notable things (like reaching descendant milestones), you can claim achievements to permanently boost your Legacy Score. The progress ritual? Each claim requires an ecosystem contribution of 9% of your total in-game THREE reserves. These contributions are distributed several different ways, depending on what kind of achievement.
Step 5: Build. Achievements are tightly linked to building infrastructure with permanent boosts for your household (in fact, achievements are called ‘blueprints’ and you ‘Read Blueprints’ to claim them and discover what you can build.
Step 6: Secure distributions. When you send household members out to “Search For Blueprints” they never come back empty-handed. If there are no new achievements, they bring back bonus THREE from the rewards pool instead.
Step 7: Climb the Leaderboards. There are three distinct leaderboards, reflecting different strategic ways to play the game. The rewards pool regularly distributes THREE tokens to active players based on their leaderboard placements.
The Strategy Part
Here's where it gets interesting. Every decision is an economic trade-off.
Choice 1: When to have babies
Every birth costs liquid THREE, but every birth eventually grows your permanent Score (and might yield grandchildren who give you even MORE Score). Do you hoard your liquid wealth, or spend it to expand your footprint? Meanwhile, the longer you wait, the higher your alien climbs on the Sage Leaderboard… until they reach the top and get selected as the Sage for somebody else’s birth event! Once an alien has three total offspring, they fall off the Sage and Dowager Leaderboards entirely. Even when their fertility is exhausted, they continue to contribute to Legacy Score forever.
Choice 2: When to claim achievements
Achievements boost your Legacy Score permanently. But they cost 9% of your total in-game THREE reserves right now. If you have 1 billion THREE tokens, between liquid and dowry, claiming an achievement costs 90 million tokens instantly. Savvy players might wait until they've spent most of their liquid tokens on buildings or births, claiming achievements when that 9% represents a much smaller number. Spending on buildings requires claiming particular achievements first, so there are continual trade-offs.
Choice 3: The Dowry game
Remember how babies need three parents? One of those parents (the Dowager) is chosen based on who has the most tokens actively staked in a Dowry. If your alien is picked as a Dowager, one-third of your staked tokens go to the new baby's household as a gift, and one-third goes into the Sage’s dowry. That sounds costly, but your alien just became a parent—meaning that baby's future success permanently adds to YOUR Score. Staking in your Dowry is also the best way to keep your account "Hydrated" (proving you are an active player, which unlocks your ability to withdraw liquid wealth).
Choice 4: Active Mastery vs. Honorable Sunsetting
THREE LEGACY requires proof-of-play. If you want to withdraw your liquid THREE tokens, you must be an active participant (training, birthing, upgrading, claiming achievements). But you don't have to play every day. All players will live in a passive Autoplay mode that keeps you moving steadily forward, while offering plenty of opportunity for you to step in, make strategic decisions, or get your workers moving a little more often. The longer you are away, the less advantageous the Autoplay decisions become (at least one week with no player-initiated action between each activity state change).
The Law of Hydration
Active play is a protection against speculators who would otherwise drain rewards from active citizens. Each household’s economic contributions are regularly measured against their total household wealth, resulting in a Hydration score that determines THREE withdrawal eligibility. Whales are absolutely welcome to play actively and compete on even footing,but we don’t allow ‘Ghost Capital’ to haunt our economy.
The Ripple Effects (The Really Cool Part)
When an event happens—like a birth—it creates an economic ripple through the family trees.
Let's say someone has a baby, and that baby is your alien's great-great-grandchild. Suddenly, YOUR alien's Legacy Score ticks up. If that bump pushes you over a threshold, YOU unlock a blueprint for your worker to bring back. Reading that blueprint might send tokens flowing to your ancestors, triggering their achievements. One baby being born can set off a chain reaction across dozens of players and hundreds of aliens.
Winning (Sort Of)
There's no final "Game Over," but you are mastering the simulation if:
- Your Legacy Score consistently climbs.
- You maintain high "Hydration" by actively playing, keeping your wealth liquid.
- Your Dowry rankings attract powerful partnerships.
- Your family tree is sprawling and active.
The One Rule That Changes Everything
Every alien can only have THREE babies. Ever. No exceptions. Eventually, your oldest aliens "fill up" and drop off the sage and dowager leaderboards. You must keep birthing new aliens to maintain momentum, and carefully choose which aliens become parents in your family tree.
Grow your family, master the economy, and watch the ripples spread. Simple to start, deep enough to strategize for years.
Disclaimers & Terms of Participation
- Entertainment, Not Investment: THREE LEGACY is a skill-based economic simulation and digital entertainment product. It is not a financial instrument, security, or investment contract. You should not participate with the expectation of profit from the efforts of other players or the developers.
- Skill-Based Economy & Hydration: This game operates a closed-loop, skill-based economy. While in-game currency (THREE) flows between players, withdrawals are mathematically gated by active participation (Hydration). Pure speculation or idle hoarding is penalized by design.
- Asset Permanence & Sunsetting: Legacy Score is a soulbound and non-withdrawable. Sunsetting consumes liquid wealth to fund ecosystem achievements that build this Score.
- No Guarantee of Value: The THREE token is a utility asset on the Hive blockchain. There is no guarantee that THREE will hold real-world value, nor any guarantee that any player will profit from their participation.
- Transparency Note: The economic models, mechanics, and marketing materials for Three Legacy were developed and stress-tested with feedback from industry advisors and AI assistants to achieve a balanced, and transparent ecosystem.
- The Golden Rule: Play to build a legacy, play to test your strategy, and play to have fun. Do not play to make money!