Crafting and lootboxes

As a game builder, you are familiar with game mechanics like crafting and lootboxes. We are building a set of tools to help you executed these on-chain easily.

Our philosophy

We believe any transfer or burning of items, to get or to transform another item is considered crafting. We also consider lootboxes to be an augmentation of crafting.

When dealing with on-chain assets in crafting scenarios, a number of things are important to consider:

Timeliness: whether the crafting and item distribution (into wallets) needs to happen in real-time, for example, during game play (in game play or out of game play).
Gas cost: whether cost minimisation is the priority, or is timeliness more important.
Finality and immutability of consumed assets: whether there need to be checks and balances to ensure consumed items are effectively "used" before the new item is created or allocated. Also, does the burning and the creation need to happen at the same time?
Transparency of the crafting logic: whether you need to have crafting recipes and randomisation on-chain.

Relevant Immutable products and features

At Immutable, we've built the following features to power your crafting and lootboxes:

Crafting contract (coming soon) is our feature to help your game to do atomic mints, supporting immersive in-game crafting and enriched transaction confirmation screens.
On-chain recipe support (coming soon) is the ability to have crafting recipes on-chain and interact with our crafting contract.
Minting API is our feature which abstracts away the complexity of minting and allows you to do it in a much more efficient way.
Oracle partnerships (coming soon) will be available to help you introduce concepts like randomness into your lootbox logic in a perpetually fair way.

Core benefits

Some key benefits of utilising our crafting solutions include:

In-gameplay crafting: In scenarios where you need to provide crafting within play, Immutable offers the ability to incorporate crafting mechanics without breaking player immersion. For example, this is where the avatar consumes a powerup within gameplay and its weapon powers up in real time.
Gas efficient consumables: With our support of ERC-1155, we allow you to create web3 consumables in a gas-efficient manner.
Composite flexility: We also give you the flexibility to exercise your full creativity to build any crafting experience you wish. This means allowing you to combine any number of on-chain, or off-chain items or currencies.
Incorporating secondary market trading with crafting: Ability to search the Global Orderbook for missing crafting ingredients and allow you to create the front-end experience to surface to the player.
Guaranteed crafting finality to ensure player certainty: Atomic crafting solution ensures players can be certain of crafting outcomes. This also reduces the operational overheads of resolving incomplete crafting requests.
Randomisation algorithms: Our lootbox products use random algorithms based on multiple factors including future time. This means we are able to offer you true randomness with the random seed based on the time that the lootbox is opened. The items leverage this randomisation seed as well as your pre-determined rarity weights.