The Forge, Aalloys, Essence, and Smithing - A Massive Proposal

[stedari]

Introducing the Forge:

Situation: The wearables market is in a very difficult position with decreased demand during the bear market, wearables inflation, gaps in items stats, shortage of hand/face/eyes/pet slots, stale rarity farming with no new items, and general lack of ability to engage with the wearable itself. Moreover, the Aavegotchi ecosystem is suffering from low engagement, difficult to understand path towards “leveling up” and, thus, little time spent in the Gotchiverse. Alchemica continues to lose valuation and the liquidity pools are unacceptably low.

Background: The Aavegotchi DAO commissioned a wearables report completed by MikeyJay which can be seen here: http://wearables.report/. There is no easy way to trade wearables and certain slots are far rarer and more expensive than others. Outside of “flipping NFTs” there is no Gotchiverse-based path towards upgrading your gotchi’s equipment. Separately, alchemica values are rapidly declining due to high inflation. This is negatively impacting Gotchi price as UBI is both decreasing in value and contributing to the inflation. Additionally, there have been no new measures of engagement or skill added since inception of the gotchiverse, leading to decreased attachment to the gotchi itself. Ecosystem stakeholders, concerned about further inflation and asset devaluation, have voted to turn off additional wearable sales further entrenching a stale economy, leaderboards, likely reducing overall engagement.

Assessment and Response:

I propose the creation of the Aavegotchi Forge as a powerful tool to address these problems and add further depth and composability to the Gotchiverse and the Protocol assets. The goals of the forge:

• Increase gotchiverse engagement
• Create a clear path towards advancement
• Add significant alchemica sinks
• Provide a non-inflationary path for new wearables
• Tokenize/fractionalize wearables by introducing 10 Aalloys as their composition tokens
• Create a new economy for forge materials
• Incentivize sacrifice of gotchis by creating a new “Essence” token required for Godlikes and all pets
• Add depth to Aavegotchi lore by exploring these base elements, essence, and forging
• Create a sustainable path towards DAO liquidity by Zapping alchemica spent in forging to LPs
• Add the first Gotchiverse skill, Smithing
• Pioneer a reproducible implementation path of DAO ideas and talents

Forging and Aalloys

All wearables will be composed of the 10 Aalloys. In addition to Aalloys, Godlikes and pets will require essence which is obtained by sacrificing a gotchi. Wearables can be melted/broken down into their Aalloys ± essence at the Forge installation. Specific wearables, both new and old (still in discussion) can also be created at the forge. There is an alchemica cost for Forging. Not all forging is successful, however. Higher forge installation levels and Gotchi smithing skill will determine the success of forging. It will feel challenging to successfully forge a Godlike as only the most talented Smiths + high level forges will be able to consistently be successful in forging. If forging is unsuccessful, the required alchemica is lost, however the Aalloys and Essence will not be lost or burnt. Successful smithing will increase your smithing skill. It will cost more Aalloy to forge a wearable than will be obtained when melting it down. This multiplier will serve as an Aalloy burn which will reduce the potential building blocks of wearables. This will create deflationary pressure on wearables and create room for additional wearable sales to fill gaps and create revenue.

The 10 Aalloys

The Aalloys are combinations of two alchemica or concentrated versions of the alchemica. These deserve fun and catchy names for which I need community feedback. Certain Aalloys provide specific trait bonuses and are more often used in specific slots. For example, Alphalpha (Alpha-Alpha), is commonly found it hand items while Fomomo is used for Aggression modifying wearables. See the attached google document for specific trait impacts. I have mapped out a potential composition table for the common wearables. If there is interest in this project, I can map out the Recipes for Uncommon-Godlike. It costs more aalloy to mint a wearable than can be obtained by melting it. This is known as the Aalloy Ratio which can be used as a deflationary tool or provide lootbox contents, raid loot, rewards, etc. I have used 1.1 as the Aalloy Ratio in my model. This can be modified with feedback or perhaps future installations advancements in the technology tree. There is a fixed amount of Aalloy in the gotchiverse unless there is a new wearable sale. Aalloys could be used in the future to mint Skins which would provide additional deflationary pressure on BRS-modifying wearables. Aalloys would be tradeable in the Baazaar and create a fun, secondary commodity market. Aalloys will allow destruction of rare items to create many less common items in a deflationary way. This will help fill wearable gaps while also creating an upwards path towards forging a more rare item. This will allow for composable NFTs creation with a set supply – something that can only be accomplished by Web3 gaming!

Essence

Essence is obtained by sacrificing a gotchi. Each gotchi will give up 100 essence when sacrificed. All pets will require essence for forging. Godlikes will require essence as well. This creates a unique lore opportunity where each Godlike carries the soul of a sacrificed gotchi – a powerful deflationary mechanic and source of lore. Imagine your godlikes giving off the a specific aura which is the essence of all the gotchis inside! Deflationary pressure on gotchis will support gotchi price while, hopefully, creating room for H3. We can decide on trying to airdrop essence to previously sacrificed gotchis or use that essence as lootbox items, gameplay rewards, or possibly a raffle distribution.

Smithing

The Smithing skill will start at 50 and level up every 50 points. Smithing skill increases logarithmically based on the FRENS ratio of the wearable item. For example, successfully forging a Common grants 2 Skill, while successfully smithing a Godlike grants 56 skill. High smithing skill increases the chance of successful forging. A master smith with >450 Smithing has an additional 45% chance of Smithing success. Unsuccessful smithing attempts will reduce smithing skill by the same increment at which it’s granted.

Forge

The Forge is a Gotchiverse installation used for melting (new word?) and forging new wearables with Aalloys and Essence. Leveling up the installation increases the chance of success in forging. For example, a L1 Forge + Gotchi with starting level of 50 smithing only has a 40% chance of successfully crafting a common and a 15% chance of successfully crafting a Godlike. Each installation level grants an additional 5% chance of success. Both the installation and the forging cost will serve as strong alchemica burns. The alchemica required to forge is also calculated logarithmically- ~1500 FUD EQs to attempt forging a common, 50,000 FUD EQs to attempt forging a godlike. Aalloys and Essence are not lost if the attempt is unsuccessful. I have not yet devised the installation and upgrade costs for the Forge or the specific alchemica ratios for forging attempts. We may want to make forging high rarity wearables even more difficult or expensive.

Economics:

Alchemica spent on forging costs will be zapped into the alchemica liquidity pools providing a sustainable path of liquidity. The DAO will provide a base level of GHST (100k to start?) to pair with the spent alchemica which can be replenished as needed and by DAO vote.

Implementation:

I would like the DAO to complete as much of this effort as possible. Ideally, we leverage our DAO Treasury Coffers to produce the smart contract work, economic details, wearable Aalloy recipes, etc. We will certainly need assistance from Pixelcraft as I believe this would best be served as a Gotchiverse installation and not an SDK or separate DAO-run user interface. We have the community talent to push this forward, so let’s do this!

Thanks everyone for your feedback. I had a lot of fun theorycrafting. Please provide feedback on the following specifics:

• Aalloy recipes, including the alphalpha and kekek wildcard plan
• Do we want to airdrop or distribute essence from previously sacrificed gotchis?
• What is an appropriate Aalloy ratio (cost of forging/aalloy obtained by melting)?
• Are there concerns about negative price impact on highly valued common/uncommon wearables? Should we maintain the cap of wearables such as fireballs so as not to devalue them? More could only be created if some were melted for example.
• What do you think about logarithmic alchemica pricing and skill progression?
• What are better and funnier names for the Aalloys?

See my Google Sheet with all details here: Aavegotchi Forge - Google Sheets

DW

[stedari]

I would like to formally coin the term “Composable Fractionalization” for this concept. I’m not aware of another ecosystem using it.

[Immaterial]

Wow, amazing proposal ser. This is a far more advanced version of my thread. What I like about it is, first of all, it’s a lot more gamified than my idea (and a lot more fun) and secondly, it allows for much more fine tuning on the economic side through the recipes and Aalloy ratio.

A big issue I see with this though is it seems you’re allowing new copies of existing wearables to forged. I don’t think this is fair given those items are supposed to be fixed supply, if you start increasing the supply of Mudgen Diamonds or Link Cubes I think they’ll be riots Therefore the forgable wearables need to be new items only imo and also have fixed supply so once they’ve all been forged they’re no longer available. This also incentivises a race to forge which will be interesting.

I believe the ratio has to be a lot higher than 1. In my idea I went with 2 which is a little high but if it’s closer to 1 what you will find is they’ll be a huge power creep towards the better items (single-trait items and items in the best 2-trait set items). For an example in myth items, if you only have to burn 1.1 myths + alchemica to forge another of your choice what you’ll find is nearly all the Red Hawaiian Shirts and Jordan Suits will be burnt and the market will be flooded with better wearables. It’s slightly deflationary but introduces a huge power creep. In general, the power to choose a specific wearable is incredibly powerful and should come at a huge cost and and be far more deflationary than 1.1. The alternative is to not allow a choice of wearable to be forged and you get a random wearable from a pool. This does mean that the pools of wearables work better if they’re sets as then they’ll all be desirable even if one item in that set is of much higher value than the rest.

My final concern is just around complexity, we badly need new alchemica sinks now and my feeling is this is months of work. If this idea here is v1, is there some less complex version we can create before that still tests out the economic levers but doesn’t require months of work? Or rather, is there a halfway house between my idea and yours that could be done outside the gotchiverse for now and integrated into the game later? This way we could do all the building on the DAO side and all PC has to do is supply the wearables.

[JG1]

Really love this idea. I’ve made the diagram below to see if I understand it properly and I guess I’ve added the concept of the base garment. Incorporating the base garment allows us some fine tuning of the costs and tradeoffs because as we’ve seen, eye slot or face slot is definitely not as common as a body slot item. We don’t want people smelting body items to craft face items of the same rarity with little cost or trade-off. The crafting of the base garment allows for a low level+cost crafting process with which to level up the initial points of the smithing skill- which by the way, is another awesome concept and easy to implement- as it’s not very different than a kinship scoring if you think about it!

All in all, I am very impressed with the idea and believe it’s the way forward toward a cyclical and sensical economy. We got this far with an economy that didn’t make sense because it created illusory wealth and goods via the dilution and debasement of the assets of the project’s initial supporters.

[coderdan]

Very interesting proposal! Do you also see a role for GLTR in this process? Perhaps forging as a process has a duration that can be reduced by spending GLTR.

So to try and summarize the loop:

• The DAO would vote to create a new drop of Wearables
• Instead of dropping via the old mechanics (Raffle, GBM, FCFS, etc.), the Wearables would need to be forged by burning existing Wearables down to their alloys, and then pairing the Alloys with Alchemica to attempt a forging. If the forging is successful, the new Wearable would be created.
• Forging a Godlike Wearable would also require Essence, which can be derived by sacrificing an Aavegotchi.
• Forging takes place in the Gotchiverse, at a Forge located on a specific parcel, and the forging success rate is based on the Smithing level of the Gotchi doing the forging, and the level of the Forge installation.
• Later, if the Wearable owner decides to melt it down, the Alloy returned would be less than what was initially spent to forge it.
• Alchemica spent on forging attempts would be paired with GHST and zapped into LPs. The GHST could be provided by the DAO.

Questions

• If this new mechanic were implemented, do you envision that the cap on new Wearables would be lifted? Since minting new wearables would require old ones to be burned. We could theoretically have an unlimited number of Wearable designs on the market, because the market participants would decide if they want to mint a design or not.
• Is there a case for attaching Smithing level to a player (wallet address), instead of a Gotchi? Because Gotchis can be rented, those with higher Smithing would naturally fetch a higher price on the market, but at the cost of a sense of player progression, i.e no differentiation between new players and old players.
  I believe as we continue developing the Gotchiverse, we’ll want to start introducing some player-specific mechanics that give players a sense of progression and achievement in the game.

@stedari

Should we maintain the cap of wearables such as fireballs so as not to devalue them? More could only be created if some were melted for example.

This would make sense to me. Wearables would essentially become templates that can be crafted if someone desires to spend alloys on them, but each of these templates has a maximum number that can be crafted.

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I’m curious about how the larger community views these types of RNG-driven drops in general. There have been several suggestions for RNG-driven lootboxes, gacha, forging, etc.

My main concerns are:

1. Too complicated. Our ecosystem is already quite complex, and another layer of complexity adds to that. However, I do like the approach proposed above because it theoretically seems to support an unlimited number of wearables, with the main limitation on the supply of alloys.

2. Players losing to negative RNG. This is prevalent in all lootbox/gacha-style games, and already exists in a mild form in Aavegotchi with portals and land. However, in our version the player at least gets something for their attempt. Leaving empty-handed after spending money might feelsbadman, so might be worth addressing.

---

Otherwise, I think this is quite an interesting game mechanic, and appreciate the time that @stedari has put into crafting it

[JG1]

@coderdan

Is there a case for attaching Smithing level to a player (wallet address), instead of a Gotchi? Because Gotchis can be rented, those with higher Smithing would naturally fetch a higher price on the market, but at the cost of a sense of player progression, i.e no differentiation between new players and old players.

There’s different ways to go here. You could attach it to the gotchi, creating a loop for gotchi appreciation and secondary market dynamics. There would be those who power-level crafting gotchis, harnessing their knowledge of the ecosystem to acquire (arb) the different ingredients at the lowest cost possible, then reselling said gotchis to users with deeper wallets and less time or appetite for complexity. Renting said gotchis would be an additional issue/consideration, with different ways to address it like access rights or rental limitations on crafting.

Another route is doing it by cartridge/console, depending on how that dynamic develops.

@coderdan

My main concerns are:

1. Too complicated.

While this proposed forge system is complex, it is simple in the sense that follows the template of crafting in most RPGs. Users will have naturally come across crafting of this sort in other games already, if not our existing crafting process for installations.

@coderdan

Players losing to negative RNG. This is prevalent in all lootbox/gacha-style games, and already exists in a mild form in Aavegotchi with portals and land. However, in our version the player at least gets something for their attempt. Leaving empty-handed after spending money might feelsbadman, so might be worth addressing.

There definitely have been said RNG proposals surfacing lately, but I believe having a natural fail rate in crafting does not make it a game of chance. It is a virtual skill progression with quantifiable chance of failure, that is reduced via increasing smithing skill and forge level. In my understanding, a failed crafting will not cause loss of any alloy or essence, only alchemica. Users power-leveling their crafting skill will purposefully account for failed attempts in their journey towards mastery of the craft.

edit: a “failed” crafting could result in alchemica spillover instead of alchemica burn, to address the concern around feelsbadman and crafting being a game of chance

[Xeko]

I think as there are so many different ways this can go (essences being retroactively airdropped, the forge being an installation vs a landmark, “burn” ratio, costs in general, etc, etc), we need to have multiple votes rather than just 1 about how this should go. Just having 1 vote for all the different elements seems limiting to me.

[stedari]

Schematics
I propose that all wearables require a schematic to be forged. The schematic will place a hard cap on the number of that specific wearable. There will only ever be a maximum of 1000 fireballs, for example. To forge a wearable you will require the following: its specific schematic, the required aalloy, essence if it’s a pet/godlike, and the alchemica required to fire up the forge. If you melt down a wearable in the forge, you will receive the underlying aalloy + its schematic. Schematics can be traded in the baazaar. They would also be available for distribution in GBM auctions, as loot, or even as future templates for non-BRS modifying wearables. Let me know if you have good names other than schematic. I thought recipe was confusing since we use that term elsewhere in the gotchiverse. We could also consider the term “blueprint.” Alternative to the schematic approach could be a design where a wearable could be forged if someone else has melted it down. Perhaps the schematic could be transferred to a forge smart contract and then anyone could then reforge that item. Again, I’d appreciate feedback from technical folks on the best and easiest implementation.

[MarvinP]

Crafting Installation:
Similar idea already presented in original post, trying to make more clear
Leveling up Crafting Installations to craft more rare wearables:

Have to level up a forge to forge more rare items.
Level 1, only Common wearables can be forged,
Level 2, Common and Uncommon
Level 3, Rare, Common and Uncommon
…

Level 6, Godlike, and all the rest

The higher the probability of success the higher the level, for example a Mythical Forge will have a very high success rate when forging a common wearable. This will persuade users to upgrade their forge even if they only want to forge common wearables. When forging a Mythical wearable on a Mythical Forge the user’s smithing level will really play a role (as discussed in original post)

I like the idea of having one forge per district and have District DAOs management, upgrade them. But that might be a bridge too far at this point. Forging is a great idea to bring back liquidity in the wearable market. It also allows users to have more freedom with their wearable collection and allow more release of wearable forge patterns (read below). Essentially there could be infinite patterns release, in GBMs or raffles, cuz wearables would be constrained by the amount of Aalloys in existence. love the idea.

Building Blacksmith Skill:
How about a new Blacksmith NFT, users have to obtain this NFT to be eligible to run a Forge. This would make the ability tied to the user instead of a gotchi. The NFT can be leveled up with forging experience. It could be a non-transferrable NFT.

Sacrificing Gotchis:
For sacrificing gotchis, I think the amount of essence should be the BRS of the gotchi, instead of a flat 100 each. As gotchis age they gain spirit points, as they gain experience they gain spirit points. These time and effort mechanisms need to be valued when sacrificed.

I agree that complete loss on unsuccessful forging will deter users from trying and leave users bitter. Unsuccessful attempts should cost the user 40% of the alchemica, like trying to make something IRL, but failing, usually you can reuse most of the material.

For names of schematic or blueprint. I like Wearable Forge Pattern, WFP
Pattern seems to be a common term for sewing and welding

Pattern layout:
Diagram found on instruction sheet, which indicate how to lay out pattern pieces on the fabric.
(Sewing pattern terms and what they mean - The Pattern Pages Sewing Magazine)

Pattern welding is the practice in sword and knife making of forming a blade of several metal pieces of differing composition that are forge-welded together and twisted and manipulated to form a pattern (Pattern welding - Wikipedia)

[JG1]

Considering that so far the main critique by Pixelcraft has been that of complexity, I tend to agree that 10 alloys in a grid of combinations is unnecessarily complex:

I would propose reducing to 4 alloys+ essence- that’s it.

What we’d establish instead is a grid of fixed ratios such as all legendary hand items have a minimum alloy requirement which happens to be a certain ratio higher than a legendary body item or a rare weapon and so forth. The complexity is addressed by these ratios in the background while the UX for the end user is simply around the materials needed for (or smelted from) their particular item from a list of 4 alloys +essence.

[Rikige]

I love the idea very much.

Only think I want to mention is that this opens possibilities for “vanity wearebales (no BRS)”; schematics as a reward in dungeons, and so on.

[Mori]

I think this is a great proposal, but I have concerns regarding the economics of the smithing level mechanic. This mechanic in essence would lower the production cost inputs for higher level smithers in a probabilistic way. It is hard to imagine this mechanic incentivizing anything but a monopoly by a high level smither. IMO, the costs of production, or in this case the chance of successful crafting, needs to remain constant for all participants to prevent this from being the case. The cost of production is an important invariant to keep constant.

Some ideas for an alternative for higher smithing levels:

• Unlock schematics
• Increase the amount of alloys used in crafting per day
• Decrease some sort of cooldown to crafting

I think a combination of unlocking schematics + a cooldown reduction/alloy allowance increase would be ideal. The unlocking of schematics would incentivize crafting level, essentially creating a layer of sybil resistance for higher level schematics. And there would be continued incentive to raise smithing level so that production rate can be increased. But crucially, everyone would be able to produce items for the same cost which should prevent any sort of smithing monopoly to emerge.

[diddlypoo]

In this proposal the production cost inputs do remain constant, the only change is the likelihood of failure. It makes sense that the more you gain experience in performing an action, the better you are at it. I’m not sure where you are seeing potential of a monopoly.

[MikeyJay]

At a high level, I would support a “forge” type of idea because it addresses the NFT dilution dilemma, which is a systemic issue that I believe should be addressed at the protocol level. On one hand, adding new types of wearables (and other protocol NFT’s) adds variety to the gameplay experiences built on top of the protocol. On the other hand, doing so in an additive way without burning existing NFT’s is dilutive to asset holders.

Variety can be a very powerful tool to create additional revenue. Supermarket shelves (particularly in the US) are the perfect example of how important variety can be in providing value to customers. (Think the cereal aisle) I think adding wearable variety alone, all of the other benefits aside, would be beneficial to the wearables market when the issue of dilution is removed.

The “forge” idea so thoughtfully laid out by Dr Wagmi here introduces a lot of new ideas to the protocol. It also attempts to address a lot of problems all at once. If anything, I wonder if the idea could be simplified a bit to optimize it to solve for a fewer number of problems, to make it a little more intuitive and frictionless for players, and to avoid “mechanics bloat” in general in the protocol.

Without getting into all the nitty gritty of the mechanics, here are some high level ideas that come to mind for how the idea could be simplified:

• Make only newly issued wearables “forgeable” - so that the market dictates the supply of future wearables from the start and the forging system doesn’t need to carry the weight of the existing wearable supply - in this case, basically the forge replaces the need for future wearables raffles. The forging of the wearables could perhaps be time limited to create sense of urgency and also a permanence to the supply of new wearables.

• Gating new wearables behind a Gotchiverse installation feels to me like it might be making an important underlying protocol function too dependent on the Gotchiverse game. We could instead have a single “The Forge” at the protocol level, and still require players to deposit alchemica to “power” it to provide the desired alchemica sink.

On that note, I think we should set realistic revenue and alchemica sink expectations for a “forge”. The value captured is limited to whatever value players place on having the ability to change up their wearables from time to time- whether it be for aesthetics, gameplay, or rarity farming.

Personally, I would definitely use the forge… I would expect to pay a premium for the privilege of trading in my old wearables for new ones, but only up to a point. I think defining the value players might place on this ability is critical so that it’s well priced (or somehow market priced)- so that a giant “sink” on paper doesn’t become something that is just rarely utilized in reality.

Overall, I feel this is the start of a very promising concept- many thanks to @stedari for putting what is clearly many hours of thought and care into this!

[Mori]

An increase of success chance in crafting is, in effect, a decrease in cost of production over the long run. Let’s suppose that two smiths want to craft 1000 of a wearable each costing 100 FUD. And let’s say that one smith has a 25% chance of success while the other has a 50% chance of success.

Smith 1 should expect to pay about 400,000 FUD for 1000 wearables. They would break even selling these at 400 FUD each.
Smith 2 should expect to pay about 200,000 FUD. They would break even selling at 200 FUD each.

Of course if there were only a few wearables, the math would probably not work out this way. But in the long run, smith 2 has an undeniable production advantage over smith 1. Because of this, smith 2 can basically always undercut smith 1’s price. This would likely end up snowballing in smith 2’s favor, because neutral buyers would always buy the cheaper option from smith 2, thus allowing smith 2 to level up their smithing level even further and creating a larger discrepancy between smith 2 and smith 1.

[Lululute]

As far as skill and success chance are concerned, it would be interesting if forging itself was more game-like than a simple VRF roll. Perhaps inspired by common card games that could be played solo or against a very simple deterministic dealer (poker, blackjack, hanafuda, etc.).

There is still the element of chance, but the player has some determination over the outcome both in terms of success and in terms of how much Alchemica they salvage in the event of a loss. Smithing skill could grant access to certain abilities (such as the ability to redraw a card once a day, for instance). Naturally this introduces more complexity for players and more overhead for the devs tasked with creating the game, but it could mitigate the buzzkill UX of a failed craft.

I’ll add that I don’t think smithing skill should be reduced in the event of a failure. Either no change, or a small chance at a skillup.

[jarrod]

Really interesting idea, I like the idea of deflationary wearables and a fun crafting mechanic to mint new wearables.

[letsgobankless]

Love this idea. Some possible solutions to problems discussed above:

• High level forges monopoly, feeling you’ll never make it against the whales => in every district there is one forge. Every time aalloy is spent on it, it gets closer to a level upgrade. 250k aalloys are are required to be burnt there to reach L2, 500k to L3,… Districts with higher forges should earn a good reputation over time.
• Bad luck, rekt feeling. A very common problem of variance is players thinking the computer is cheating against them, that it’s buggy. A funny quote from Sid Meier sums this up well: ✂️ sid - YouTube. Here this is Civilisation, but others like DOTA2 (https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/k176tf/the_truth_of_pseudo_rng/) have implemented similar approach: a frenly RNG system. We could have a system giving you have a 10% chance to forge a godlike on your first trial, your second trial could have a 15% chance, the third trial a 25% chance,… narrowing the variance to a much more favourable outcome, and actually being more fair to every one.
• No GLTR sink? => it sounds like a recuring GLTR sink should occur here: either on the time required to forge a wearable (1 day for a uncommon, 2 days for a common,…), and/or on the time required to upgrade the forge to a higher level. I’d argue for the 2nd option, as the first one would limit the arbitrages opportunities (tho the frenly RNG would incentivize spending GLTR). District DAOs could aim to gather GLTR (LP: spillover alchemica + a GHST allocation from the DAO) to reduce those upgrade times.

[actaeon]

This seems quite easy to avoid by not making the alchemica lost in a failure a large % of the total value of the item.

If someone loses 100 fud compared to someone else to craft the same wearable, how is that a problem? That’s 35 cents. And the higher-level forge had to be paid for with, guess what, a bunch of alchemica (hopefully worth it? In which case, the worse crafter should level up his forge!). The worse crafter in your example will sell each of his wearables for less than 1 ghst more than the better crafter to break even.

There won’t be an infinite amount of schematics, nor alloy. It’s not a free-for-all with mass crafting, and it’s impossible for two people to craft 1000 wearables each as in your example.

Not only won’t your worry play out in reality, but conceptually we want people who engage with the core mechanics of the game and level up their stuff to have an advantage, just not an overwhelming one.

[MikeyJay]

One other thought I just had about the issue of capping the wearable supply is to think of the forge as a “thrift shop” instead. You can trade in your wearables for (insert some type of credit / resource system). The wearables that are traded in are held in the smart contract where they become the inventory of the “thrift shop” and can be claimed by others using the same credit system (with a net gain to the thrift shop- by means of a markup or a ghst or alchemica fee on top which can then be burnt/zapped/etc)

When new wearables are added, they are minted to the “thrift shop” contract so that they become part of the thrift shop’s inventory and are unobtainable without trading in old wearables.

I know something like this doesn’t seem quite as complex or sexy as the full idea laid out above, but it’s one way to deal with the NFT dilution problem in a clean way that is easy to understand and implement.