Verdant Vault
game paper

The promise

Verdant Vault is a calm farming game with a visible economy. Blockchain is used only where it adds proof: wallet ownership, deposits and withdrawals.

The farm itself is intentionally off-chain. Watering, timers, item purchases and marketplace trades are validated by the SvelteKit server and recorded in SQLite. That keeps play fast and avoids asking players to sign or pay gas for routine actions.

The game loop

1. DepositSend testnet BNB from the connected wallet to the public pool. Confirmed value becomes coins at the active economy rate.
2. PrepareBuy a mystery seed, hourly water charges and scarecrows from the shop.
3. PlantChoose one of six plots. A species is selected immediately and committed with a secret salt.
4. TendHydrated time advances growth and harvest clocks. Dry soil pauses progress. Crows reduce the next payout until removed.
5. Harvest or tradeCollect a species-based reward, or list a revealed plant for another player.

Plants, not tiers

Every mystery seed draws from the same first collection. Plants have names and personalities instead of “common-to-legendary” badges.

A seed needs 24 hydrated hours to reveal under production settings. Mature plants complete at most 30 harvests. Watering is hourly, but dry time simply pauses the clock; it never deletes the plant. A crow penalty grows linearly with its time on the plot and is capped at 50% of one harvest.

A closed reward loop

A fixed redemption promise plus endless emissions will always become insolvent. Verdant Vault therefore treats solvency as a hard invariant.

Player coin liability + pending payouts must never exceed finalized pool reserves, and harvests can only transfer coins already held by the reward vault.

Deposits create player coins backed by pool BNB. Shop purchases remove coins from the player balance and place them in the reward vault. Harvests transfer from that vault; they do not mint an uncapped balance. A productive lifetime prevents perpetual claims.

Starter hypothesis

The initial tuning targets roughly 1,000 COIN for a starter-sized deposit. A seed costs 500. Thirty days of hourly hydration costs about 360. Expected crow protection is about 48. The four-species expected gross is about 927 over 30 productive harvests. This narrow margin is deliberately conservative and must be simulation-tested before mainnet.

Marketplace burn

Each sale charges exactly 5% (rounded up to the smallest coin unit). It is written to an ownerless burn account and cannot be withdrawn by the developer. Seller and buyer changes are committed in one database transaction.

BNB and game coins

BNB is measured in wei and coins in integer minor units. Floating-point numbers never touch a balance. Deposits are credited only after the server independently verifies the chain, successful receipt, sender, pool recipient, actual value, confirmation depth and unique transaction hash.

Testnet withdrawals are direct treasury transfers with an idempotency key and a 2% default fee. This is an MVP mechanism, not the intended mainnet custody architecture. The production design moves funds to a non-upgradeable PaymentVault and lets players claim short-lived signed vouchers.

Hidden, but committed

The plant is selected with cryptographic randomness when a seed is planted. The server stores its species and a random salt, while the player sees only:

SHA-256(plant ID : species : secret salt)

After growth completes, the species and salt are revealed. Anyone can recompute the hash and confirm that the outcome was not swapped during the waiting period. The commitment hides the answer; it does not prove the quality of the random source, so future special seeds are a candidate for a verifiable randomness upgrade.

What this does not promise

No game can promise profit, a stable fiat price or permanent liquidity. A public pool is observable but still custodial while off-chain coins are redeemable. Smart-contract audits, isolated signing infrastructure, backups, economic simulations and legal analysis are all mandatory mainnet gates.

• Never use mainnet BNB with the test deployment.
• Never share a seed phrase or private key with Verdant Vault.
• A login signature contains the domain, chain, nonce and expiry and never authorizes a transaction.
• Randomized redeemable items may attract gambling, consumer-protection, tax, sanctions and age restrictions depending on jurisdiction.

The technical threat model and launch checklist also live in SECURITY.md in the project repository.