What is the Anima Genesis Drop?
Anima’s Genesis drop is on the surface a collection of 3,333 dNFTs. The collection leverages functionality that is unique to Sui. However, while individual mints are limited to 3,333, each mint is between 18 - 19 composable NFTs, including an Avatar (on your first mint).
When a user mints their first avatar they’ll receive one avatar with 18 equipped cosmetics. These cosmetics are 15 pieces of armor, including a chest piece and helm, and 3 weapons.
These objects are ‘equipped’, or in the language of Sui, these NFTs are owned by the avatar. Objects that are owned by the avatar will not be shown separately in the wallet or appear individually in a marketplace; this the equivalent of a house that’s made of bricks, simply being shown as a house. Equipped armor and weapons can however be seen in the attributes of the avatar at any given time. Items can also then be unequipped via our platform, changing what’s in your wallet and your avatar’s attributes; this is the equivalent of now removing a brick from a house or a car from a tire and it becoming a separate item.
For every object minted - 18-19, depending on how many times a user has minted in a given wallet - a user will receive a PNG of the object, a 3D model - FBX - and textures.
How Do Dynamic NFTs Work and What Are They?
Dynamic NFTs are NFTs that are upgradable. What does this mean in our case?
As noted above, on your first mint you’ll receive 19 NFTs, with 18 being NFTs that are owned by or equipped on the Genesis Avatar. If you go into our platform, you’ll be able to unequip your NFTs. The avatars attributes will update, and you will then see the unequipped NFT separately in your wallet. The unequipped NFTs are also tradable.
If you mint multiple times, on additional mints you’ll receive cosmetics and weapons that are unattached in your inventory. You can go into the platform and equip these new NFTs. When you click ‘Update Avatar’, the attributes on your avatar will change. Previously equipped items - now unequipped - will appear in your wallet as separate NFTs and newly equipped items will no longer be seen independently.
As far as we have been told, this is the first dNFT that comes with equipped items - items that are owned by an NFT - that are then also unequippable / un-attachable. There is some complexity here, so please ask questions and any bugs that you find, please report them to us. We’re trying to make this as good an experience as possible. Now, your PFP / image for your Genesis Avatar is also dynamic. If you update the chestpiece or helm on your avatar, your PFP will change to reflect this.
How Minting Works and Why - Cosmetics, Weapons, Avatars and Dynamic PFPs
This drop was designed to be a cosmetics drop and showcase the power of dNFTs. We wanted people to log into the platform, see equipped and unequipped items, and update their NFT, with changes being represented on-chain and in the future, in virtual worlds that use these items. This is an experience we wanted to give people and reflects how the mint works.
If you mint only once, you will receive 1 avatar NFT with its items equipped. They can be unequipped in-platform and traded.
If you mint more than once in the same wallet, you will receive 18 unequipped items for every subsequent mint. In your wallet, you will see 1 avatar - from your first mint - with all its equipped items, and then separately in your wallet, you will see your newly minted weapons and cosmetics. You can then log into the platform and play around with the avatar’s onchain state, and update your PFP. Attributes will change, and what’s in your wallet will reflect what’s equipped. Ultimately, this was not intended as an avatar drop, but a cosmetics drop and we wanted people to experience the power of dNFTs. The cosmetics are what’s rare.
An avatar is the primary unit for Anima’s gaming ecosystem. They’re required to play ACT: Ground War and we are not token gating our ecosystem. After the Genesis drop, anyone will be able to mint an avatar, but it will not be the Genesis version, this is limited to the Genesis drop itself.
What We Recommend
We recommend people mint multiple times in the same wallet and have 1 avatar, with different cosmetics and weapons. They can update their avatar and have the experience of dNFTs.
You are welcome to mint in multiple wallets and have multiple avatars, but it’s not our recommendation. Mint in one wallet, and if you want more Genesis avatars post drop, we will airdrop them to you in-line with the number of times you’ve minted.
Marketplace and Selling Your Items
We recommend buying and selling cosmetics and weapons, not trading avatars at this point. However, TradePort does not currently fully support the collection.
This is the first collection that TradePort has listed that has an NFT that owns other NFTs that are then detachable. This has caused indexing issues. Please be patient whilst we work with them to get items preferably listed.
If you mint multiple times in the same wallet, the items in the second or additional mint(s) will be tradable as long as they're not equipped.
What to Look Out For On External Marketplaces
If you choose to buy an avatar on an external marketplace such as TradePort, go ahead. But, be aware that you need to check what is equipped.
To see what is equipped on an avatar, check the attributes section on TradePort. The attributes section shows the avatar slots, including chestpiece, left pauldron, helm, etc… If you see the name of an item, it means that item is equipped. If the space on the attributes is blank, the items are unequipped.
We recommend, instead of buying additional Genesis Avatars, either mint, or if you want a specific item, buy that cosmetic. At this point, not all cosmetics are indexed, but they will be over the course of the next few days.
Rarity is a little difficult to show right now. We have a wear rating on every item, but we’ll need to work with TradePort to show these. Additionally, not all items are currently being shown on TradePort, nor have they been minted.
Anima’s Nexus Platform
Anima’s Nexus platform is designed to allow you to view your avatars in 3D and update the equipment that’s attached. It’s intended as both a showcase for dynamic NFTs and also a central hub for our burgeoning platform.
Before I go on to explain more about the platform, an important note at this stage, the platform only supports single avatars in your wallet. If you want the platform to function, have 1 avatar per wallet. Multi-avatar support is on the roadmap.
Now, on the platform, you will see a profile. We are currently working on a broad piece of infrastructure for Sui. We are building a game discovery platform and marketplace, and in the longer term we will have social features. This is simply the beginning. Equally, we are currently running only on the web. This comes with some latency, particularly when we have lots of concurrent users. Rendering 4K models on the web with baked textures is not straightforward and has required some creativity. Latency will only improve over time, and we will be porting to the desktop with Electron.
We’ve noticed some issues and latency with specific geographic regions. Please be patient as we work these out and please report any issues as you go. However, it’s important to note that the first time you load your avatar, it’ll be the slowest. Our servers are building the models. Every variation of cosmetics has to be built, but only built once. Overtime, the system will get faster and we will be looking to make efficiency gains.
If you go to mint tomorrow and there is a queue, please be patient and expect some latency. It’ll only improve over time. When you check back into the platform later, it’ll be faster. Minting 19 NFTs per person and then rendering them in the Web3 in 3D, and doing this concurrently with 100s to 1000s of people is a little complex.
What’s Next?!
We have games and infrastructure that we’re developing and will use the Genesis avatars, but that’s not what we want to share here. This was to some degree about prototyping technology and making something with a long term use case. We see a bright future for dNFTs, particularly as they relate to virtual worlds.
We have a backlog of rare and limited run items that we want to share with the community. We have publicly said this is the only paid NFT drop we will ever do, and we’re going to stick to that. Expect airdrops with large varieties of weapons and customisation.
Bugs and Missing Items
The more you try and do something novel, on the frontier or something complex, the more margin of error there is. Particularly in Web3, the scope for error is large as you’re effectively only able to test at scale in Prod. We are aware of one small bug in particular that is currently being patched.
But, if you come across any additional bugs, please let us know. We want to give our users and future players the best experience possible, but we ask you to be understanding that sometimes things go wrong. Nonetheless, we will get everything as smooth as possible and as quick as possible.
URLs and Navigation
If you have an avatar and you login via anima.nexus, you will head straight into the platform and into your inventory system. However, if you want to mint additional items, you can go directly to https://anima.nexus/drop/genesis