I came across dCrops a couple of weeks ago by sheer coincidence. You know the drill, surfing around looking for the next big “thing”. In all of the “things” on HIVE it is somewhat hard to find a dapp that offers an edge to become the next great “thing”.
You probably remember FarmVille on Facebook? Farmville is a real-time farm simulation game, developed by Zynga, available on Facebook. In the game, Facebook members manage a virtual farm by planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops. dCrops offer the exact same simulation, the only difference is that YOU own your farm and everything in it – not Facebook. dCrops will built you a farm crammed with NFTs that will earn you the token CROP – which has real value.
I wrote this post yesterday, so I had to change some content today because I had a section with how many packs there where left and how fast they have been sold out lately. For instance when I woke up yesterday it was 10k packs, 8 hours later it was 5K packs left as seen in the below picture:
But when I woke up this morning it was 0 packs left unfortunately. My post was mostly meant as a reminder that one should get some packs now if one wanted to try out the game in alpha stage. Now you need to buy cards from the secondary market to test the farming simulation.
What is dCrops all about?
What is this game other than being similar to FarmVille in terms of simulation and that you can play-to-earn crops? Obviously not a surprise but the game is all about being your own farmer and harvest crops from your own farm, digitally. They basically took a farm, a farmer (you), land and seeds and digitalized it. The only farmer that monitors the farm is you - how cool is that? No monitoring – no crops, just like in the physical world.
Anyways, the main task in the game is to plant seeds as you would do at a physical farm. In order to plant some seeds, you need some land (which you also need in the physical world) and when you have planted your seeds you need to wait for them to mature and then you can harvest them, exactly how you do it in the physical world. When you are done harvesting you can sell your harvest, or as it is called in the game “shares”. When you sell your shares, you get CROP and that’s it. Now, try to get as much CROP you can - it will certainly do you good in the future.
Now, to spice it up a bit they also made 4 seasons – Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. A pumpkin can only be planted during Fall season and a potato can only be planted during Spring season and so on. Each season has a duration of 15 days. Some seeds can be harvested within 2 days, 7 days and 12 days and it is up to you how strategic you want to be here in terms of when you plant the seeds. I can tell you one thing; legendary seeds will earn you heck of a lot more than a common.
In-game NFTs
There are two types of cards that can drop, it can drop land- and seed cards. You need land to plant seeds and seeds will become shares that you can sell to earn crops.
The strongest cards that are now in circulation, and which are legendary is Hi-Tec Land (land card) and Strawberry and Raspberry (seed cards). You may want these:
The reason they are the strongest is that the Hi-tec land offer the most plots (you can place more seeds in them) and Strawberry and Raspberry offers 7 shares every 3 days and that is the most by far. As you can see in the above picture, I still haven’t found a Raspberry but was lucky to find one strawberry in my last pack, lol. The packs can be bought here: dCrops. Buy with Hive if you are a newbie or buy with CROP if you are a pro (now the packs are sold out tho…). It is worth mention that each pack contains 5 cards and at least one rare or better. The drop rate of the cards can be seen in the picture above. Good luck!
How to play
You buy your packs and reveal the cards in the packs which is land or seeds. Then if you got some awesome lands as I did, you put your valuable seeds into the plots in the lands as you can see in the below picture. Note that Legendary land has 4 plots and the common only have 1 plot, that is a huge factor to take into account. Always keep your legendary land plots filled with legendary seeds, but we also need som milk and bread and therefore we need the commons as well - to maximize our production of shares.
Now, after planted – you just wait, 3, 6, 9 or 12 days, depending on the season your in. If you have legendary cards you wait for 3 days to harvest, they can also be used again in the same season. A common seed on the other hand can only be harvested once whilst a legendary can be harvested as long as the season are running (15 days). You do this over and over again until the season ends. You will have different seeds that you would put on your plots with different durations. So here it is important to place the correct seeds at the correct plots – you figure it out and will most likely manage to do the math behind and maximize your returns.
After harvesting you would like to put your shares out for sale so you can compete with other farmers and build your way to the top – being the best digital farmer in the whole world! In the below picture you can see your portfolio of shares that you have harvested. The quality of your crops is determined by stars, meaning that 1 star is poor, and 3 stars is excellent. You would of course want the 3-star crops as they sell for more crops. You will get more stars the more legendary you possess.
There are leaderboards in the game, and the more crops and shares that you possess the higher you rank will be. But of course, if you do not want to compete and try to be the best of the best then you can always sell your crops for Hive and use it somewhere else that suits you better. This is the most user-friendly withdraw overview I have ever seen on Hive:
My opinion of the game?
I like the game, really get the feeling of being a farmer, always looking after my crops watching that they grow into perfection. Selling my harvested shares to the marketplace and earning real value NFTs like crops. It is very similar a real farm, the only difference is that you do not get your hands dirty, and it is obviously not as hard work as in the physical world. If you asked a farmer if he could earn the same amount of money with less effort and with clean hands, he would probably choose the latter, lol.
On the other hand, the game might be a little boring for some, meaning that there is not that adventurous and there is little to no action. The most action you would get is to see how well you produced your crops, because the better the quality the better the price. There are some more functions to the game that I did not mention here but I will leave that for you to explore. We are still in the early alpha stage and if the developers adjust the game over time (which I expect), bringing inn more functions and crops to earn, FarmVille will not be number 1 in terms of farming simulation games.
I hope to see you as a farmer (especially 
Cheers
-Olebulls