The Sandbox is an Ethereum-based gaming metaverse. The decentralized NFT platform allows non-tech savvy users to create, sell, and monetize their own virtual reality NFTs. This crypto metaverse uses SAND, its native token, to underpin the entirety of the in-game economy.

NFTs have changed the ways we collect art, build communities, earn, and play. Many NFT-based projects are slowly evolving into full-blown metaverses. The Sandbox is sitting front and center. It is unique from other crypto metaverse projects because of its user-generated content ecosystem that makes contributing to the metaverse simple and intuitive for people without any coding skills. 

This guide will explore The Sandbox project, its roadmap, how to play Sandbox, and the utility of various tokens in the Sandbox ecosystem.

Welcome To The SandBox

The Sandbox ecosystem consists of three crucial integrated products and services for facilitating user-generated content creation: 

• VoxEdit – a program for creating NFT game assets.
• A decentralized marketplace for selling and buying those assets.
• Game Maker, which players can use to build their own game experiences without coding.

The Sandbox Crypto VoxEdit

The building blocks of The Sandbox game come in the form of 3D pixels called voxels. This term isn’t native to The Sandbox. In The Sandbox, players construct in-game assets and experiences using these lego-like pieces with the free Sandbox VoxEdit tool. This works similarly to other popular voxel editors, such as the popular Magica Voxel.

Items, characters, and other in-game assets created in Voxedit are referred to as assets and can be turned into NFTs. This standard allows creators to mint any number of copies of the same asset. This enables the creation of unique NFTs that are ERC-1155 standard, with the possibility of multiple copies being minted within the same smart contract.

The project uses two tokens related to assets: gems and catalysts (both fungible ERC-20 tokens). Gems can be used to provide asset attributes; the more attributes assets have, the more valuable they become. One gem can give up to 25 attribute points to an asset.

Catalysts define assets’ tier and scarcity within four tiers: common, rare, epic, and legendary. These tiers may have up to as many as 25, 50, 75, and 100 attributes, respectively.

After creating the assets, gems, and catalysts, they can also be defined in Voxedit.

Making Your Sandbox Avatar

Players engage with the metaverse using avatars, and technically speaking, a Sandbox Avatar is an asset that can be created in Voxedit. 

Recently, the Sandbox introduced a new tool for direct customization of avatars without the use of VoxEdit by mixing and matching various body parts and clothes. It is still in test mode, though.  

The Marketplace

Understanding the difference between creators and players in The Sandbox is essential. Only the asset creators who the Creator Fund accepts are able to upload assets to the project’s marketplace. 

The Sandbox marketplace allows players to monetize digital assets and sell them to other Sandbox players. 

Before importing these assets to the marketplace, creators upload them to the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System).

Players can buy assets from verified creators from the marketplace to build game experiences. 

Game Maker

The Sandbox isn’t just a single game. It consists of a variety of standalone games, environments, and various other experiences. 

The Sandbox team has left the universe open-ended for creators and players to ultimately create, own, and monetize the metaverse platform.

You can use the Game Maker feature to create three-dimensional game experiences within the metaverse. Because no prior coding knowledge is needed, even inexperienced game designers can start building games.

Building Applications On The Sandbox

The experiences you can create with the Game Maker range from action-adventure games to puzzles, art galleries, homes, and social hubs. These are just the starting points. Users can also test other genres.

The Sandbox Crypto

There are three important components used when creating experiences with the Game Maker.

Blocks:

To construct the actual topography of your experience, you use blocks. One meter in The Sandbox is the equivalent of 32x32x32 voxel cubes. 

Blocks can be solid or transparent and come with several variables. By combining variable types, you can create different surfaces, such as a body of water. You can also create custom blocks with the VoxEdit program. 

Assets:

As explained above, assets like trees, vehicles, and buildings are created in VoxEdit and uploaded to the marketplace by their creators. Once assets have been added to the library, a player can drag and drop them to the world they’re building in the Game Maker.

Logic:

You can assign behavior to assets using Game Maker’s ready-to-use plug-and-play LOGIC bundles. For example, you could customize objects to be collectible treasures.

You can create gaming experiences with the Game Maker for free, but if you want to publish them so other players can participate, you’ll need land (a digital piece of real estate in the Sandbox metaverse). Each parcel of land is a unique non-fungible ERC-721 token.

If you’re interested in purchasing land, you might want to first familiarize yourself with the entire landscape of The Sandbox on the map. The public sales are announced on the official community channels on Telegram, Twitter, and Discord. 

The Sandbox Crypto Token SAND

SAND (an ERC-20 token) is the native utility token used in The Sandbox.

To buy land from public sales in-game, you will need to have SAND in your wallet. Game assets, gems, and catalysts are all purchased from the marketplace using the SAND token. Asset designers upload their creations to the marketplace using SAND. 

SAND is also a governance token, and when the Sandbox DAO is launched, SAND holders will be able to participate in governance decisions such as feature prioritizations. SAND owners can either vote themselves or delegate voting rights to other players.

You can purchase or sell SAND on third-party cryptocurrency exchanges like Gemini, Crypto.com, and Kraken.

The Sandbox team occasionally hosts contests and events whereby users can earn SAND tokens playing games. In the past, SAND was distributed to the community via airdrops. In the near future, landowners have the option of staking SAND onto their land to earn gems that they can sell to asset creators.

The Future Of The Sandbox’s Crypto World

The Sandbox has partnered up with more than 165 brands, including The Walking Dead, Smurfs, and Atari. The partnerships take the form of virtual concerts by Deadmau5 and Snoop Dogg and also a Walking Dead game. The Sandbox project has raised over $93 million so far, and the team is dedicated to continuing building its suite of products and metaverse platform.

In 2022, new metaverse features will be offered to landowners who have built excellent game experiences.

The mobile version and new community tokens are scheduled for release in Q4 of 2022.