https://www.mysticgurus.club/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/TiveaRevealFinal.mp4

Stepping up the AI art game

Maintaining an art style with consistent design cues does not play well with the current image generations toolsets of today. The world of Montavera is quirky, mysterious, and charming (and soon with future properties, foreboding and dark). Finding a way to manage this consistency has been a long journey as AI generation rapidly develops before our eyes. With each new property release we want to make sure we are pushing the technology as far as we can so that what we have in our imagination can make it into the final image.

The most time consuming part of developing the images for the Montavera properties is a battle between rooting out stable diffusion results with negative prompts and a healthy diet of constant image model training repeated over…and over… and over again. A big part of this process is tapping our feet waiting for our computers to deliver the next result as we relentlessly punish our 3090 RTXs building the final 12k Tivea location. Having Theta introduce EdgeCloud and the hosted GPU resources sharing this summer will be an absolute GAME CHANGER. I can’t tell you how excited we are to access the computing horsepower available of an A100 right at our fingertips on the upcoming EdgeCloud update. Like, this is incredible.

Anyway, the Tivea release marks the completion of the Southern part of Montavera from the Long River and below including “The Streets”. I want to share some of the novel techniques we used in creating the Tivea tree-village location. Not only are they individual NFT images, but the properties are part of one single super high-resolution image. This way the properties are both individualized and now share a cohesive single location in the dramatic magical tree village. To show this off the video above will zoom in on each property in detailed full resolution from the final 12k image.

To accomplish this task we invested a lot of time in mastering Control Net, creating our own Lora models based on previous custom art training, and embedding them within a 2nd Architectural model we trained to our tastes. Most of the work was jumping between invokeAI and Automatic1111 to retopologize the low resolution concepts, then running a script to cut sections of the Tivea Tree for “image to image” processing. The up-res process took awhile to master so that the interpretive upscaling perfectly matched across all sections of the Tree. That is, up to the best it could get until we moved everything into Photoshop for final clean up and tone-matching. 

Congratulations to the Tivea property owners! Your NFTs will be minted soon and arrive in your wallets!

Next up in the blog:

1. The rental smart contract has been completed and tested, expect a demo of the functionality and how your dreams of being a Landlord in Montavera will finally come to fruition.
2. Clan Wars has seen an incredibly successful playtest series with seasoned gamers in the physical trials of the game. Look forward to a fat blog entry on that as well and the upcoming plans!

Discovering the blockchain approach for property NFTs

The beauty of blockchain is the end-user freedom to trade and the natural perpetuity of digital assets. When approaching smart contracts for Montavera, the concept is simple with a focus on ownership and utility. “Future-proofing,” however, quickly raises new challenges. We have these main goals for properties:

1. Ownership of a property offers exclusive access to your discord “neighborhood.”
2. Ownership allows you to house Gurus up to whatever the max occupancy is designated from the metadata for that property. 
3. Unused rooms will be available to be rented out to other Gurus at a price set by the owner.
4. Residential properties will act as a shelter to maintain Aura income for staked Gurus.

Leaning on our battle-hardened experiences in contract development, we created a lengthy list of FAQs for our stakeholders: How are Gurus attached to properties? What if a property gets sold and has Gurus? What if a Guru is traded while in a property? How do we do bulk move-in or vacating? How is rent collected? How does eviction work if rent is not paid? How do we make sure Gurus can’t be used twice in different properties? 

The list goes on and on, but the good news is that we think we have solved most of our questions with our approach.

We need property NFTs to be able to grow new neighborhoods and change over time. Therefore, there will be a “burn” function implemented on the contract as well as re-minting on the same token ID. There are also resort and business properties which require unique contracts to serve purposes beyond occupancy. For this reason, we can’t have occupancy recorded on a property contract. We will see multiple property NFT contracts in the future. We also don’t want there to be actual transfers of Guru NFTs to a properties contract because that could get way too complicated when unstaking a Guru. That’s why there will be a delegation method where a ledger is kept of where each Guru is housed. If a Guru is unstaked, we will use this ledger to vacate them from any property they were previously on.

The solution we came up with will be the introduction of an Occupancy/Rental contract which is separate from the Property contract. Ownership of both assets will be validated within the new Occupancy contract where owners will also be able to set and collect rent as well as move Gurus in and out.  We are also setting up batch functions using mapped arrays so multiple Gurus can be housed/vacated in one transaction.

We’ve made good progress on the Property contract with a batch minting function so that we can release entire neighborhoods as they come out. Waiting for them all to be done at once will take too long, so we plan to release the properties by district. And speaking of properties …

Property Art!

Behind the scenes, we have been absolutely obsessed with the look and architecture of Montavera. The properties of each district will share distinct features so, at just a glance, you’ll know if you’re looking at those snobby Gurus from Lakeview Estates or a grifter buying up all The Streets. 

We’d also like to announce that EVERY property NFT will have its own unique art asset! Many locations within Lakeway Estates, Long River, The Streets, and Tivea are currently under development. We’re also doing our best to include context in the image if your property is near a major bridge, water feature, neighboring district, etc. It’s been so much fun fleshing out Montavera imagery! Here is one of our favorite assets so far — the Tivea Tree.

Thank you, seekers! We will definitely have more updates as we get closer to releasing the first district!

The Core Set Staking Re-Factor is Complete!

Yes, I know this was a long time coming, and I’m eager to share with you some of that journey… 

…accumulating eagerness… 

Earlier in the summer, we experienced an unexpected transaction failure with the Core Set Level-Ups. Yes. It’s true. You may now gasp dramatically and choke on your scrambled eggs. With the Promo set, the 500 or so staked gurus was no problem; all sunshine and rainbows in Montavera. The New-Gen Gurus came in (The Core Set), and this set was a different beast. With over 4000 staked NFTs and version 1.0 of the staking contract, it just wasn’t up to the task. This unforeseen problem advanced our plans for building new contract upgrades from the Fall to… like… NOW. There was a lot of testing, a lot of building, and a lot of “I’m not sure what this error is but looks like I’ll have to read another 40 articles and debug some 10,000 lines of open source code.”

Finally, the time came to “finalize the commit” (fancy blockchain lingo for “going live”) on the final upgrade, when, to our dismay, we discovered a mismanaged proxy manifest from our previous developer (Dramatic Music Plays). I know that all sounds complex, but it’s actually just another day in Montavera.

This was no problem, of course, except the fact that this developer was in the Ukraine and he became extremely difficult to get a hold of. After playing the role of Dog the Bounty Hunter for a while, we decided to switch gears: rather than take the easy route, we had to rebuild the manifest, which required more time, but we were able to get back on track to commit the upgrade. Next, we had a very slippery bug that hid from us for a while in our Truffle Development Environment – a framework & asset pipeline for blockchains using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (The Montaveran Virtual Machine was being used at the time). After much back-and-forth with Truffle and OpenZeppelin developers, followed by long nights of debugging the upgrade source codes, we finally squashed the bug.

Given all of the research, time, and testing that we went through, I dare say Mystic Gurus is stronger for it. We’re no longer a smooth-skinned baby-face soldier dropped in the battlefield of blockchain technology. This was a bit of a proving ground that took us to the point from which we can look over our shoulder and say, “Oh, I’ve been there.” And I’m sure there will be more to come. 

This seems to be the nature of life.

Yay.

The New Changes in Staking 2.0

Most of what changed behind the scenes won’t be initially apparent for our lovely Guru holders. However, the exciting stuff happened under the hood. Here are some of the important new changes:

1. Claim All is now available. This is a simple function that will be available on the Shrine page by checking the “All” box next to claim. This will take all realized AURA rewards held by all the Gurus you’ve got staked in a wallet to be claimed to your personal wallet. Some of our biggest supporters are going to love this. You might even miss the old days of clicking through MetaMask prompts for hours. Oh, Nostalgia…
2. Sync All tfuel gas costs have been trimmed down by an average of 30-40%.Take that Biden!
3. A Guru leveling-up is no longer dependent on being written to the chain by a daily update. This means the moment a Guru levels up, it will be shown in your dashboard. All those times you spent biting your nails waiting to see your Guru transcend into a higher level of consciousness will happen right before your eyes (as soon as you click on your Guru again to refresh the stats, of course).
4. Staking 1.0 had an expensive daily transaction cost to maintain the ledger, individual Guru statistics, and payouts. That cost has been reduced by 95% in Staking 2.0! (This is your cue to Ooh and Ahh…) This was hugely important for us to continue to our next phase of development and by far has me the most excited. This also means we have a lot more control of the reward payouts when certain *ahem* events happen in Montavera. It’s a good thing some of these Gurus will be safe inside their homes.

Promo vs Core Set Guru’s (Oogway vs Club24… wink wink) 

            I want to reiterate some of the differences between the two sets. As you all know, the congregation is known as the total gathering of Gurus meditating. The more in the congregation (or staked) the more Aura that gets distributed. The Promo and Core sets are 2 different congregations. This is for a couple of very important reasons: 

First, if they shared the same congregation, the Promo Gurus would easily sap the rewards of the Core set Gurus as they would always be a few levels ahead. This would lead to a devaluation of anything Core Set, and the Promos already enjoyed a very lucrative 10x rewards during their initial launch. 

Secondly, the Promo gurus are going to have access to governance roles in future mechanics and activities in Montavera (aka City Council). Keeping them in their own congregation allows them to compete for rewards in their own circle without the unfair ability to tower over the Core Set. What this means is that you shouldn’t be concerned about competition between rewards for Promo vs Core unless you plan to purchase some Guru’s from either to maximize your Aura returns.

That’s it for my update, and now a word from our Headmaster:

Kidney.

Shrine of Montavera 
Official Transcript from the Headmaster

~@~

Hello Seekers,

It is I, your Headmaster, and I want to tell you all about the Core Set drop on OpenTheta!

For starters, I have to tell you that the Great Guru of Yonder is beyond himself with excitement. Typically, he manifests himself for Montaverans, year after year, and while that is wonderful – and we all truly appreciate it – it is a MOST SPECIAL EVENT when he ventures out through our Hyperdimensional Portals into other worlds, to offer his Gurutastic services there. 

It just so happens that he is kind of an Earth Fanboy. He loves everything about your world. The shoes you wear. The food you eat. The way you all seem to think soap makes you smell better. The shoes you wear. Your love for animals. Your fear of demons. Your shoes. He’s just a big fan, so whenever he gets a chance to get his hands on the Legendary Vessel (pictured below) and take it with him to your world… Well… let’s just say it’s party time in The Shrine. 

The Mystic Vessel – The Guru’s chosen channel for appearing to Seekers. 

Here’s how the Minting Process Works:

1. Go to OpenTheta.io and Mint your Mystic Vessels. Everything is minted directly to your wallet so there’s no need to transfer the vessel anywhere. 
2. Once you have done this, you will then go to our website MysticGurus.club and login via Metamask. 
3. In the Shrine, you will see a tab labeled Mystic Vessel. Click on that. You should now be able to see your Mystic Vessel containers listed. 
4. Click on “Open Container.” 
5. After a short moment of reading your ego, The Great Guru of Yonder will decide how to manifest before you, and then you will see him appear in his chosen form.
6. You now have your Mystic Gurus Core Set NFT. Again, this Guru has been minted to your wallet, so there’s no need to transfer it anywhere. If you open your wallet on another website, you’ll be able to see your Guru. 
7. Now have some fun and check out your Guru’s Deets!

You Should Know:

At Mystic Gurus, we wish for everyone to be able to partake in our great mission. The conquering of Planet Yondorin. It was ours first and he took it from us and that’s not fair and YOU said I didn’t HAVE to share if I ate all my greens. 

We also want everyone to partake in our OTHER mission – the bringing of Light into the World. In order to make this accessible for everyone, we have chosen to make our NFTs reasonably priced. Sure. We COULD have tried to charge an arm and a leg, but human limbs are not in high demand in our markets these days – or so says the Shrouded Merchant of Yonder. For that reason, we brought down the price of our Mystic Gurus NFTs to 750 Tfuel. Seekers. That’s barely $60 USD at the time of writing this letter. It’s a steal. 

Our Mystic Gurus NFTs have a unique function. They can Meditate in The Shrine, and when they do, they accrue $AURA, a TNT-20 token. In other words, our NFTs can be staked! At $60, these won’t last long.

But we’ve decided to go a step further. We REALLY wanted everyone to get a crack at our project, so we decided to have a PRE-SALE which allows all of you to buy our NFTs for the reduced price of 555 Tfuel!

Do the Math. That’s $45. It’s a lower entry cost than many other NFTs in which you’ve invested, and ours have NFT-Staking Utility! 

We thought this would make a lot of people happy. Especially since the PRE-SALE has no limit of quantity of how many NFTs you can buy. There is just a 24hr window to participate. After that window closes, the PRE-SALE ends. 

We could have dusted off our hands and gone out for a drink for a job well done, but that’s not our style. When we have a mission (to make sure EVERYONE participates in the project), we go all out. As such, we decided to add a VERY special incentive… 

Personalized…

Custom…

Gurus…

#PCG

96 hours after the final sale ends, we will take a single snapshot of all the wallets who participated in the sale. We will then reward those who chose to buy multiple NFTs. Here’s how it works:

For every 10 Core Set Gurus in your wallet (not containers, must be opened) at the time of the snapshot, you will receive a #PCG NFT. This NFT can be…

1. Sold on OpenTheta
2. Redeemed for a #PCG

Redeeming the NFT means you will work directly with me – The Headmaster – to design your very own Custom Guru. You will be able to tell me (within reason) what theme, semblance, details, or styles you would like the guru to have. I will put it all together as best I can and show you your one-of-a-kind Mystic Guru. And yes, the guru will be minted, considered part of the Core Set, and be able to be staked just like any other Guru!

If you’d like a few samples of #PCGs, simply hop on our Discord and ask around. Those who already have theirs (The Mountain Guides) are always happy to show them off and tell you about the experience of having a personalized custom guru designed for them. 

Seekers. I know of NO OTHER DEAL better than this in the Theta Ecosystem. Your dreams will come to life and become an immortal NFT in the Mystic Gurus Project. 

PreSale

• May 20, 2022
• 24hr window begins at 12:00pm EST (USA)
• And ends 24hr later.
• NFT Price 555 Tfuel

Big Drop

• May 31, 2022
• 12:00pm EST (USA)
• NFT Price 750 Tfuel

SnapShot

• June 4, 2022
• 12:00pm EST (USA)

DID YOU THINK THAT WAS ALL?

If you happen to be a holder of a GuruPass NFT (pictured below), you will receive a 20% Discount on all Mystic Gurus NFT Mints!!!

That means that on May 20th, you will be able to mint Mystic Gurus NFTs for 444 Tfuel!! Whaaaaaaa?!?!? And on May 31st, you’ll be able to mint for a mere 600 Tfuel!!!

Seekers. Don’t sleep on this. The Promo Set Gurus we made available in December SOLD OUT in 9 hours, and now-a-days, they are often 10X or greater the value they were when they first sold! The GuruPass we made available SOLD OUT in 2 hours and Twitter went wild with people who wished they’d been able to get one. I won’t make predictions, but I will say I’m beginning to see a pattern here.

We have much more planned in the not-too-distant future, but for now, I will end this already too-long letter. 

Farewell Seekers, and always remember to spend time with your Guru.

Always at Your Service,

The Headmaster of The Shrine of Montavera