Items Overview

Weapons, armor, collectibles, consumables, equipment, and other types of game items make up a huge part of today's games. Launching your game's items on the blockchain yields a number of benefits and can streamline various features and management systems for your game.

Some of these benefits include, but are not limited to;

  • Player item inventories are automatically tracked, managed and guaranteed.
  • Secondary marketplaces for players to easily trade amongst one another can quickly be implemented while allowing you to capture a percentage fee on all trades by players in the form of royalties.
  • Extremely simple patterns for creation, management and minting of items without having to build systems.
  • Greater immunity to exploitable item duplication bugs.
  • Atomic transactions involving items. This means if players spend, trade or use items, all operations associated with that interaction must succeed, otherwise the entire interaction is reverted.
  • And much more.

With MetaFab, you can launch an items collection and begin creating, minting and implementing items in minutes. MetaFab item collections and items conform to the base ERC1155 standard and implement additional functionality required for managing, querying and operating items systems for games. This non-exhaustive list includes:

  • Item Caching, Querying & Retrieval: Traditionally, retrieving and querying item data on the blockchain is painful and otherwise not possible at speeds you need for a game. MetaFab automatically manages item data caching, listens for item updates on chain and provides simple API methods for item queries and data retrieval, no matter how many items your game has.

  • Batching (Mints, Transfers, Etc): Operations like transferring or minting multiple items to multiple recipients in a single transaction are not possible with the base ERC1155 implementation. These types of interactions are necessary for many types of game interactions and systems that work at scale. MetaFab's item collection contracts implement a variety of helper functions to enable multi-item and complex operations needed in games that can additionally be performed through our simple API calls.

  • Creating, Minting, Burning, Etc: MetaFab item collections provide the ability to quickly create, mint, burn and transfer items through simple API methods. Everything you'd need to manage your item collection and build functionality specific to your game is readily available through our APIs.

  • Dynamic Metadata Updates: As a game developer, being able to update item attributes, data and more is an important mechanic for many game implementations. This may involve things like item art updates or players being able to upgrade their owned items and have those upgrades reflected on the blockchain. With MetaFab, items can be updated on a collection-wide or per-item basis.

  • Player Inventory Management & Querying: Retrieve a complete list of your player's currently held inventory with a single API call at sub-second speed. Item collections implement inventory querying and pagination helpers. This is a must-have for any game that needs to at any time be able to show a player their current inventory.

  • Transfer Timelocks: In some cases, you may want to make certain items non-transferrable and non-tradeable indefinitely or for a period of time. MetaFab item collections support the ability to set transfer timelocks on any number of individual items.