As an active player of Splinterlands, Rising Star and dCrops I am always on the lookout for another interesting Play-to-earn blockchain game. That's why the play-to-earn game on the WAX blockchain called Alien Worlds got me interested enough to give it a try.
Alien Worlds is in short another free-to-play idle game like Rising Star, where you are rewarded token (TLM) and NFT's (cards). It looks quite nice and it has a huge active player base, just like Splinterlands. It runs on the WAX blockchain, what was new to me, but I soon figured it out because it resembles the Hive blockchain a bit. I first had to set up a Wax Wallet (https://wallet.wax.io) and then register on Alien Worlds (https://alienworlds.io/). Playing Alien Worlds is dead simple. You select a land on a planet and start mining. You get rewarded a bit of TLM and if you are lucky a NFT. After a rest period you can mine again. So I started mining and everything went well until after a while I was greeted with the message "transaction net usage is too high: 128 > 0"
After a long search I found out that you have to stake WAX in the WAX blockchain in order to make transactions, which is just like staking in Hive Power on the Hive blockchain. You have to stake in resources they call CPU, NET and RAM of which CPU and NET seems to be the most important.
Luckely you can convert Swap.Hive to Swap.wax in Hive Engine and transfer them to your WAX wallet. From your Wax wallet you can stake into CPU, NET and RAM. I followed this advice I found on the Alien Worlds website:
After having staked 20 WAX in CPU, 1 WAX in NET and 2 WAX in RAM I thought I was good to go. Unfortunately after only a couple of mining attempts I am getting the error message "billed CPU time is greater than the maximum billable CPU time ..."
I get the feeling that the WAX blockchain has grown so much in usage that you need to stake way more than the Alien Worlds advice from a few months ago. What bothers me is that very little information is given up front about these problems with playing Alien Worlds. I think a lot of new players get discouraged from starting playing Alien Worlds. Even I am about to give up because I have no idea how much more WAX I have to stake and whether this will increase even more in future. I wonder if Hive might be a better blockchain than WAX, because I have never encountered these problems playing Splinterlands.
The post is appreciated, I have a while looking for some other simple game. I know this alien worlds won't be one of them. It has saved me time and a hard time.