The short version

What RobinCity is

RobinCity is a shared isometric pixel world you walk around in your browser with everybody else who is in it. No download, no install, and no wallet needed to look around.

It is one map, 112 tiles square, with a day and a night of its own. In it are venues: buildings that belong to people. You buy one in ETH on Robinhood Chain, choose the piece of ground it stands on, and watch the builders put it up. From then on it is yours, it is on the map, anybody can walk up and see whose it is, and it earns you $CITY.

Getting in

1 · Just walk in

Open the world. You are in it as a guest, with a character of your own, and you can walk anywhere, talk to anybody and watch what is going on. No wallet, no signature, no account.

2 · Connect a wallet, when you want to own something

RobinCity supports MetaMask and Rabby. Connecting asks your wallet for its address: it is not a transaction and it moves nothing. The world runs on Robinhood Chain (chain id 4663); if your wallet is on another network it is asked to add or switch to it, once.

Your wallet is also your identity: whatever you choose in the wardrobe is kept against that address, so you are the same person on any machine you come back on.

3 · Move about

• Click where you want to go and your character walks there, round whatever is in the way.
• Chat in the box at the bottom. What you say appears over your head as a speech bubble as well as in the log.
• Zoom with the scroll wheel or the + and − buttons.
• Click a building to see whose it is, and the Casino to open the tables.

The world

One map, and you walk it. There is no travel menu and no room list: getting somewhere means going there. It is 112 by 112 tiles, which is a good few minutes corner to corner.

What is where

• The centre · a round square in slab and cobble round a pool, a canal round the whole thing with a timber bridge on each of the four avenues, hedged gardens in three quarters and the Casino on its own forecourt in the fourth.
• The commons · open ground round the middle, hedgerows, copses, a ring of standing stones, and two building sites with cranes working on them.
• The riverlands · a river down the east side, widening into a lake with a boardwalk, a pier and rowing boats. Three crossings: a stone bridge, a timber one and a line of stepping stones.
• The highlands · rock and a stream to the north west.
• The gardens and the orchard · laid out ground to the south and west.
• The wilds · the thicket that closes the map in on every side.

Day and night

The world has a clock of its own: a twenty four minute day, running dawn, day, dusk, night. It is the same clock for everybody, so if it is evening for you it is evening for the person standing next to you. At dusk the street lamps come on, the Casino lights its sign and its windows, and every venue lights its own; each of them throws a pool of warm light onto the ground.

It is not empty

People live here who are not players: anglers on the shore with their floats bobbing and the odd fish on the line, a gardener, a postie and a tourist walking their own routes through the world, cranes turning over the building sites, boats on the lake, birds crossing the sky. None of it is sent from the server: it all comes off the same clock everybody reads, so the angler is at the end of the pier for everybody at once.

Your character

One body, eight directions, walking at the cadence it was drawn at. What you choose is what is on it, from the Clothes button in the world:

• Hair, shirt, trousers, shoes · a colour each. These are real recolours: every shade of that garment moves with the colour you pick, so the softened edges come with it and the face, the eyes and the outline are never touched.
• A hat · cap, beanie, straw hat, top hat, crown, bandana or headphones, in any of the cloth colours.
• A backpack · rucksack, satchel or hiking pack, in any of the cloth colours.
• A name · or leave it blank and your wallet is your name.

The hat and the bag are drawn onto every frame of the sheet against that frame's own head and shoulders, so they move with the walk in all eight directions rather than floating over it. Your choice is saved against your wallet the moment you press Save, and everybody in the world sees it at once.

Venues

A venue is a place in the world that somebody owns: a kiosk on a corner, a bakery on the avenue, a museum off the square, the tower you can see from anywhere. There will only ever be 6,540 of them across twenty kinds.

The twenty kinds

Read live from the catalogue, so this list is never out of date:

The kind decides three things

• Supply · how many of that kind can ever exist. 900 kiosks; 8 towers.
• Price · what it costs in ETH, from 0.01 for a Kiosk to 0.1 for the Tower. The ladder follows the crowd a venue draws, with uneven steps between one kind and the next.
• Footfall · how many visitors an hour it draws, which is what it pays out on.

The token id decides the rest

Everything else falls out of the id you happen to get, and none of it is stored anywhere: it is derived, the same way, by the site and by the contract.

• District · Plaza, Club, Market or Garden. It decides what the ground under it looks like on its card. Where it stands in the world is where its owner put it.
• Frontage · Brick, Stone, Glass, Timber or Neon.
• Hours · Day, Night or Round the clock. A place that never closes draws a bigger crowd, and earns more.

Tiers and merging

Every venue starts at Tier I. Merge two of the same kind and the same tier and the older one absorbs the newer: it keeps its id and its traits, gains a tier, draws a bigger crowd and carries another light along its roofline. The newer one is burned. Five tiers, and because merging destroys a token the number of venues only ever falls.

Buying one

You pay in ETH, the native currency of Robinhood Chain, in one transaction. Prices run from 0.01 for a kiosk to 0.1 for the tower. Nothing to approve, no token to buy first: a wallet that already has gas on this network has everything it needs.

The collection is not on chain yet, so today that transaction is a plain payment to the project wallet. It cannot say what it is buying on the transaction itself: Robinhood Chain refuses a wallet-to-wallet transfer that carries any data at all. So the shop draws a ticket first, which says who is paying, what they are buying and exactly what it costs, and the payment that follows is bare. The server then reads the receipt off the chain and matches it to the ticket by the payer, the amount and the block it landed in, and spends the ticket once, so nothing about the purchase is taken on the browser's word. What you hold until the collection is deployed is a recorded claim on that exact venue; it becomes a token in your wallet when the collection goes up, and in the meantime it stands in the world and earns exactly the same.

Once the collection is deployed the same button becomes a mint: the contract takes the ETH, hands back the token and forwards the payment to the treasury in the same call. All or nothing.

Placing it, and the build

Buying gets you the building. Where it goes is your choice, and it is the next thing that happens: the world opens with every free plot lit up and waits for you to pick one. Hover one and it brightens; click it and it is yours.

Then the builders arrive. Construction takes twenty seconds and everybody standing nearby watches it, in phases:

• Marking out · stakes at the corners, rope between them, the site board up.
• Foundations · the ground opened, then the footing laid.
• Walls going up · the building revealed from the ground up under scaffolding, with a tower crane swinging over it and dust coming off the site.
• Roof and finish · the top of it lands and the scaffolding comes down.
• Opening · a burst over the door, and the place is open.

Three builders work the site the whole time: two walking the perimeter and stopping to hammer, a foreman at the front with a clipboard. A board over the site says which phase it is on and how far along. Because the whole thing is worked out from the moment you placed it, somebody who arrives halfway through sees the same wall at the same height as everybody else.

You can move a venue you own to another free plot later. It goes up again on the new one.

Whose is that building

Every venue in the world is clickable, whoever owns it. Hover one and a small panel follows the pointer with its name, its owner and whether it is open or still going up. Click it and the full card opens:

• Owner · their name if they are in the world with you, otherwise their address.
• Status · open, or the build phase and a progress bar.
• District, frontage and hours, and the tier.
• Pays · what it earns every six hours.
• Earned so far and claimed so far, in $CITY.
• Waiting · what has not been collected yet.
• Placed · the day it went up.

If it is yours, the Collect button is on that same card. You collect at your own door, in the world, and not from a menu on a website.

$CITY and the payouts

$CITY is the on-chain token the world pays out in. You buy in ETH and you earn in $CITY, and the split is deliberate: paying in ETH means anybody with gas on Robinhood Chain can buy on day one with nothing to approve, and earning in $CITY means what your venues produce is the currency the world itself spends.

A venue pays every six hours. Time is cut into six hour epochs counted from the token's launch; a venue accrues nothing part way through one, then an epoch closes and that epoch's pay becomes claimable. Nobody has to run a keeper and no transaction has to be sent on a schedule, so an owner who collects once a month is owed exactly what an owner who collects every six hours was.

A kiosk brings in 36 an epoch, the tower 2,400, and a higher tier or a venue that never closes brings in more still. You can claim a venue before the token launches; it simply does not earn until then, so buying early gets you the building and the id, not a head start on the money.

The contract

$CITY has not been deployed yet. There is no contract address to verify, so anything claiming to be $CITY today is not it. The address will be published here, in the shop and at the top of every page the moment the token is live, and nowhere else first.

The Casino

The Casino stands on its own forecourt in the north east of the square: an art deco block with a copper dome and a sign you can read across the water. Walk up to it and click it and the tables open over the world; close them and you are standing exactly where you were. You have to be at the building to play, which is what makes it a place rather than a menu.

The race

One game: a horse race. Five horses, up to five people a table. Somebody opens a table, everybody who sits picks a horse and a stake, and when the host starts it the race runs in front of everybody at the table, stride by stride, on the track in the panel. Whoever backed the winner takes the pot, split in proportion to their stakes if more than one of them did. If nobody backed the winning horse, every stake is refunded.

It is real ETH

Stakes are real ETH on Robinhood Chain, from 0.001 to 0.05 a seat. A bet is a plain transfer from your wallet to the Casino's wallet, and the table and the horse are the seat you asked for at the table rather than a note on the transaction (this chain refuses a transfer to a wallet that carries any data). Your seat is only counted once the server has read the receipt off the chain: wrong address, wrong amount, a wallet that is not the one you connected, unconfirmed, reverted or already spent, and it is refused. When the race ends the Casino's wallet sends the winnings straight back out and the panel shows each payout with a link to its transaction.

Provably fair

Before anybody bets, the table shows the SHA-256 hash of a secret the server drew for that race. At the start the secret itself is published, and every stride of every horse is derived from it. Your own browser reruns the race from that secret and lands on the same winner the server announced, and anybody can check afterwards that the secret matches the hash that was on the table before the money went in. The server cannot choose the winner after the bets are in, because the race was fixed before them.

How it stays fair

The server owns the world

A client says "I want to go there" and nothing else. The server pathfinds, walks your character a tile at a time on its own clock, and tells everybody where people are. A client that lies about its position is not believed, because it is never asked. The same goes for what you are wearing: only the colours and the kinds this site actually offers are accepted, because every one of them ends up drawn on somebody else's screen.

The chain owns what you own

Ownership of a venue is decided by Robinhood Chain, not by us, and not even we can change it. What the server keeps is where you put your building, which is a choice about the map and not about the money. Every payment, in either direction, is verified from the chain's own receipt before anything is recorded.

Your wallet, your keys

RobinCity is non-custodial: it never holds your funds and it will never ask for your seed phrase or your private key. Connecting is a request for an address, not a transaction. Read what your wallet asks you to approve, every time, and only transact from a wallet you control.

What is not built yet

Written down plainly, because a docs page that describes things which do not exist is worse than no docs page at all.

• The payouts. The rewards contract is written and tested but not deployed. No venue is accruing anything for anybody yet.
• The collection. Venues.sol is written but not deployed either, so purchases are recorded claims rather than ERC-721 tokens in your wallet for now.
• Merging. It is in the contract; it needs the contract.
• A marketplace. Venues will be tradable wallet to wallet on chain like any other token; a marketplace with a fee is a later piece.
• Voice, friends, crews, private homes, pets and the mini-games. None of these exist today. They are the plan, not the product.

Risks

$CITY is a crypto asset with a real, fluctuating value. Prices can move sharply, and a token can become illiquid or worthless. The same is true of a venue: what you paid for it is not what it will be worth.

The Casino is gambling with real money. The odds of any one horse are what they are, the race is fair, and a lost race is money gone.

Nothing here is financial advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything. Do your own research, verify the contract address yourself, and make your own decisions.

FAQ