Community has long been at the heart of Alien Worlds, and regular players and indie devs have built some of the coolest on-chain games and tools since the metaverse launched in 2020.
From analytics tools like Yeoman and Mission Control to Tool Loaning and MSIG Chat, these freely-available resources have proven invaluable to players.
One highly useful tool approaching its fifth birthday is Alien Helpers, a community-driven bot system that rewards players for in-game activities such as mining and community engagement. Launched in April 2021, Alien Helpers is a valuable resource with many bells and whistles, one worth taking a closer look at as the anniversary of its creation approaches.
How Alien Helpers Supports Metaverse Explorers
A Galactic Hubs grant recipient, Alien Helpers was designed to furnish community interaction and immersion. Originally known as Robotron, the Discord integration was initially mining-focused and intended to “bring on-chain insights directly to Explorers.”
Over the years, though, Alien Helpers has grown arms and legs and become a much more high-powered tool. At a glance, users can now leverage it to:
• track mining results in chat (simply ask a question related to DTAL/land rewards and you will see current daily land rewards, min/max and average)
• earn rewards for posting messages
• view current DAO candidates with their vote decay and vote power, together with the number of voters supporting them
• see candidacy user info including description, image, current status (active/inactive, Custodian status) and a link to the candidate’s voting page
• view land stats (current DTAL, no. of boosts used, commission rate, etc)
• create events on any land and planet of their choosing
• track lastmine and lastmine leaderboard
• assess mining progress, with the ability to specify time range and visualize mining results for that period (TLM earned, min/max/average mine, plotted as a graph)
As well as providing Explorers with accurate data related to mining and DAO candidacy, Alien Helpers has organized several of its own community mining events in the past, some of which attracted over 10,000 participants, with prize pools supplied by GHubs. Interestingly, the Alien Helpers team elected to use its entire GHubs grant to reward event participants rather than take a percentage of the rewards.
This experience of running events led to multiple requests from community members to help them do the same. Consequently, the aforementioned feature was developed to help Explorers run their own events, with the ability to determine land, planet, and TLM allocation. Using the export function, community members can also generate a .csv list with the values that triggered the win, together with the order, enabling them to drop rewards however they please.
An Indispensable Tool
Given the many moving parts that constitute the Alien Worlds metaverse, it can be daunting for Explorers to get up to speed with the various facets of gameplay: mining, missions, events, DAO elections, etc. This is where Alien Helpers has proven to be indispensable.
In addition to the aforementioned features, the tool provides an overview of many different stats. For example, it can be used to review planetary pool data (for all planets or individual ones), current and upcoming NFTs due to be added to the Outpost (including supply, start, end and Shard prices), users’ personal NFT data (inventory, point stats, progress to next level, claimable NFTs from old drops, etc), and mission info (including every type of mission ever made).
Want to know how much Trilium has been staked, how many ships have embarked on missions, the cost of historic ship leases, or Minequest adventure data? Or how about proposal info, mining rig efficiency, or your claimable minebalance? It’s all available through Alien Helpers.
Interestingly, as with any powerful tool, there’s even more going on under the hood, including a database that maintains a list of known scam links and patterns to maintain a safe ecosystem for the community.
Whatever way you look at it, Alien Helpers has made the game easier and more enjoyable for thousands of players over the years. If information is power, it’s a tool you need in your arsenal to level up and ascend to the next tier.
Happy fifth!