Chapter 2: Chainlife World

Like metaverse NFTs, Chainlife NFTs coexist in a larger 'World.' A public facing API provides the data to render this world, and a viewer can be opened from chainlife.xyz (if it loads slow, please be patient, we're fine-tuning the Azure app's automatic resource scaling and CDNs).

Your token is one of those little squares! If all tokens were displayed on the same level (like level 0, where they all minted), they'd appear in a grid. As the tokens 'mature' they move up levels in their metadata, unlock new features and functions, and they literally move up a level in the World view. Currently, World display is capped to 64 levels, but this will change!

This World is more than just a representation of on-chain data; it's also collaborative and playable! (We'll cover that in chapter 7.)

Click and drag in the 3D viewer area to change the view. You can zoom in or out with scrolling/pinching, or move the camera with click and drag.

Where in the grid is your token? The token traits list the coordinates, but you can quickly find your token with a token-ID map. After mint, tokens can be elevated as they 'mature' but they'll always stay in their grid coordinates.

The token grid is massive and doesn't play well with gitbook. View the full resolution version here.

When looking down at the World, token 0 will always and forever be in the upper left corner, and the last token in the collection will be in the bottom right corner. Building patterns is a topic we'll cover later, but the best way to do so is to position your token on the same level as a neighbor. You can use this graph to identify your token's neighbors, eg. token #1000 has neighbors: 935, 936, 937 on the row above; 999 and 1001 to its left and right; and 1063, 1064, and 1065 on the row below.

Unless the token is on an edge, tokenID +1 and -1 are the tokens to the left and right; tokenID - 64 is the token directly above it; tokenID + 64 is the token directly below it, and you just subtract or add 1 to get the other neighbors on those other levels. If the token is on the edge, then depending on which side it falls, it will have 3 less neighbors on that edge.

"...Does that mean edge tokens are less desirable? What about the corner tokens with even less neighbors?"

The answer? We'll find out, but note that after a planned update/upgrade (cough, roadmap, cough), some token traits could change the math on this... That's all I can say, and I've said too much. ;)