EOS Knights is an idle mobile or desktop cryptocurrency game that is played on the EOS blockchain. Where you unlock up to three knights that fight goblins to the death before needing to be rebirth and the whole cycle starts over again.
I have wanted to check this game out for a while now. Many consider it to be very top-heavy as far as rewards go even as far as to call it a pyramid. Which I do think is fair but that is also how most games are where the players with the best stuff are able to leverage it to the highest degree.
With that out of the way, I set a small budget and wanted to see how playing this game was for a little while. I take a look at things like idle gameplay, crafting, pets, dungeons, EOS resource staking, and how I’m faring spending wise.
Idle Game Play
The bulk of your gameplay is just letting the game do its own thing as your character fight goblins. You really only need to log into the game once your knights die off or you have a certain floor that you can reach that you want to reset it. Once there you need to click on rebirth and then you start from floor 1 again needing to kill 10 goblins to advance to each higher floor.
One of the more interesting things is if you only have the knight you are only fighting a single goblin. If you unlock the archer and the mage they each will have their own goblin to fight separately. They don’t help each other out and if one of them dies their goblin does not attack other characters. So playing this game without buying the others seems quite pointless.
One you do rebirth you get some magic water and three crafting materials. The higher the floor you clear to the more magic water they are gaining per kill and the higher chance of you getting better drops.
You advance further by getting better gear, pets, and upgrading levels. Each character only has four items slots a weapon, chest armor, jewelry slot, and pet. So at least from that standpoint, there are not a lot of things you need to fill out all of your characters slots.
Crafting
Since this game is very focused on crafting items and trading with players via the market this can be a big part of the game for many. The higher the floor you are able to clear to the better your chances are at bringing back better materials. The tradeoff is your knights only bring back 3 materials at a time total. You then can craft them into items if you have what is needed and further increase by combining and spending magic water to increase the item’s level.
The game itself is very kind in providing an in gamebook for you to look up what materials are needed to craft an item. So at least it’s not a total shot in the dark in what you need for crafting. This is quite helpful since you only start with 28 slots to hold materials and there are 70 in total in-game. Thankfully you only need a couple of materials to craft an item self.
Items themselves have a stat range that they can be crafted in with the final product given a percentage on how the overall craft went. Some stats on items are always guaranteed within a certain range. While others stats can craft without them even on it or so low of a roll it’s rather pointless. As such, there is a lot of rng when crafting.
The best way to understand this is by looking at the above example. The staff itself cost 2 Mithryl, Bison horn, and an emerald. Some of these items are rather cheap to buy or have dropped. The Mithryl, on the other hand, costs around 0.01 EOS and is a unique rarity so players need to make it to floor 100 for a chance of it dropping. Since these are not in as demand unless you farmed the Mithryl yourself it either is the same or cheaper to just buy one already crafted.
As we can see from the above example while there is a 100% chance of rolling attack when crafting this item. There is only a 40% chance of getting hp and 30% of getting defensive. It also comes with a set bonus if you get all three items.
You might also notice it says item level 5 but requires level 8 character. That is because this item has been synthesized by combining quite a few Mithryl staffs together to level it up and pay a cost of magic water per level. To get this to a max level of 6 it would take 16 of these staffs and there is only a 30% success rate on that final level. This is why I have a level 5 instead since it’s much cheaper just to buy and people are not taking such risks with this kind of item.
Synthesis mechanic in this game is quite interesting in reducing the supply of items while also giving players the ability to increase lower level items that they are able to farm. This also does create an interesting impact on the player markets where lower-level items are being crafted by players who choose to grind and therefore it’s just cheaper if you want to spend to just buy the item then to buy everything and then try to craft it.
At the higher end where everything is more in demand, there is a much better margin for crafting and risk-taking. The top player in the game has items you can’t even buy that is better than his. Even when there is something much worse than what that player is wearing people might ask for a crazy amount say 75 EOS on the open market for how far that item is leveled up. So at some point depending on your budget and the player market crafting and farming your own materials becomes rather important to advance.
Pets
These things can get quite costly and can only be bought with magic water. You need to gamble for them by buying tickets as well. They can go along with your knights to fight goblins or go on expeditions.
While you can buy a ticket for as little as 100 water you also are getting the lowest rarities. If you want a chance at an ancient drop of only .0003% you would need to buy the 1k magic water tickets. I’m not going hold my breath on getting the best one in-game.
Even if you did get the best you also want to get duplicates so you could combine them to make something even stronger. With 26 pets in total, that is quite a pool to pull from. Thankfully the 1k ticket removes the lower rarities reduce it rare or higher so 18. Then you can level them up to level 6 which I’m not quite sure how many you will need in total for that. You will have a zoo on your hands by that point.
Thankfully each knight can have 1 pet with them while they are battling goblins which increase their stats depending on what they get. This Baby Yeti gives a nice little attack and defense bonus.
I could also send this guy on an expedition if I wanted to instead. Where he would bring back a range of magic water and a material. The lower the rarity the faster they do an expectation but less they bring back say 12 hours or longer. They then need to rest before they are sent back out. The higher your knight’s level up the more expectation slots you can have for sending more out.
This part of the game seems like a great magic water sink if you ever end up in a position where you have a massive stockpile. Otherwise, it seems quite pricy if you were buying water from the shop at .2 EOS per 2k. Thankfully there are better deals and other ways to acquire magic water. Still, that going takes you a lot to get the best and level it up.
Dungeons
The game does have a non-idle combat component where once you are high enough level and floor you are able to use skills that you have unlocked and enter into dungeons. They cost tickets to enter and can drop some highest valued crafting materials in-game.
The tickets themselves you can either claim every so often such as 24 hours for easy mode tickets up to quite a few days for the hardest difficulty called hell. You can also craft them which may or may not be worth the costs depending on the costs and what kind of luck you get.
I have yet to meet the requirements to run one of these let alone the hardest dungeon. It is at least great they have a non-idle combat part of this game where you have to select which skill you wish to use to try and defeat the monsters in the dungeon.
Most have their eyes set on the jade Skull that drops from the dungeon with the last trading price of over 3 EOS. There are only a couple of these even on the market and many are asking a lot more than just that. The items itself is used in items that require level 12 or 15 and is end game. They are quite costly to make. I doubt I’ll ever be able to enter that dungeon let alone have any items that require it due to how costly they are for now.
Resource Staking
With this game being played on EOS blockchain and every action being broadcasted on the networking it does require some EOS to be staked in CPU, Net and some Ram bought.
While I have been playing other cryptocurrency games alongside and some other actions I will say I have noticed this game likes to uses more CPU than other games I’ve played. If you have around 1 EOS staked you should be fine at the time of writing this.
The first couple of days were quite a heavy usage as I was learning the game before I got into more normal play. Along with some other games at .8 EOS CPU there where sometimes I went over due to peak hours and had to wait.
As far as Net and ram at .05 Net and 9549 bytes I never even came close to ever using up my resource for these two.
This game also requires an EOS wallet manager Scatter.
People use to have to stake a considerable amount to play this game. This seems to have changed between some changes they have made and who knows what else. This is subject to change in the future. For now, it seems rather reasonable.
Can I Turn A Profit?
This is often a common thought most players have when playing a cryptocurrency game. There have also been a considerable amount of people who have tried, spent quite a few EOS and never succeed in this game. Many others try and only spend the bare minimum to get started and then try and grind from there.
I myself did not go with bare minimum but I’m not looking to splurge. At the point, I am in this game I don’t see much of an ROI for quite a very long time. It would also cost a few times more than what I’ve already spent to progress to the next logical step gear wise if I was going the spending route
2.5616 EOS is what I am out of pocket at this time. While I could still spend another .4 EOS getting more gear for my weakest knight to put him on par with the rest this is about where I’ve cut my spending off for this game.
I am able to clear up to floor 1035 which ranks me at 3,611 in-games as far as highest floors are concerned. After floor 500 you are able to get up to ancient materials to drop. At floor 700 you unlock the ability to have 1 more slot sales slot making it 4 each for materials and items to sell. So far for me, this seems like a sweet spot.
My Spending
- .6998 was spent unlocking the 2 other knights in this game a ranger (0.2999 EOS)and a mage (0.3999).
- 0.4 EOS on 4k Magic Water to buy some pets.
- 0.3 EOS Upgrading item inventory. Each purchase of 4 slots increases by .1 EOS. I felt I had enough resource inventory so I have not bought any of that.
- 0.004 EOS spent on crafting materials. Quite pointless at lower levels but I wanted to see how that went.
- 1.2427 on gear
All in all 2.6425 EOS to make it to floor 1k+ which is quite good compared to what older accounts have spent to get that far. Since I’m coming in late to this game item were selling for less than the actual costs to have made them if you were buying all the mats and the magic water.
My Sales
This is part of the game that leaves me a bit concerned. Even more so since stateofthedapps shows this game having 4,813 monthly users. I would have expected a higher turnover rate and a bigger sale volume than I got. Quite a number of my items and materials I ended up trashing for magic water.
The game does charges a small 5% on trades which seems fair.
- 0.0475 EOS Item sale (1)
- 0.0334 Material Sales (5)
.0809 EOS in total sales after the in-game tax
That’s not a very hopeful number to one day break even. I’ve not been looting anything people seem to want at the quantity the market is farming at. I’ve also wanted magic water so I’ve not attempted to sell under the going rate to try and move items faster.
Totals
So that all puts me out around -2.5616 EOS out of pocket so far. Two of my three knights are wearing level 5 Mithryl gear while the other is still in Titanium. So to get the last one caught up I would .4 EOS if I wanted to go further in.
Assuming my current gear is worth around 1 EOS after taxes and I was able to recover that by selling being down by 1.5616 EOS does not sound too bad. In addition, I have 6 unique materials I’m waiting to sell for .01 EOS each. However the slow turnover rates of things and at the rate, I’m getting drops of which most of them I don’t sell I don’t expect this gear to be near anything like that by the time I get enough drops.
If I assumed I sold my gear to just cover the 5% tax on all of my sales of materials months down the road. I would need to get the following to break even on this non-dungeon material held their value over the long run.
257 Unique rarity .01 per item
52 Legendary rarity .05 per item
26 Ancient .1 per item
While this is not the only way to earn some money back in the game this would be the bulk of it. I’ve also never gotten so far a legendary or ancient rarity material drop. So the bulk of the sales would need to be in unique.
I think this is entirely possible but peopled past failures and these current prices tell me playing efficiently and having restraint is the way to go. Right now I’m at a point where I could spend 5 minutes daily to rebirth a couple of times, check on trades and what have you and that be it. It would just take a while if my current luck is holding up and I’m unable to increase sales at the current prices. Even 2 Unique rarities per day in sales which would not be hard to get but trying to sell that many are a whole other story at a decent price.
Final Thoughts
As far as idle games go this one can be quite slow in trying to progress. The good news is one you are set up and have a coupled levels and some gear under you. The actual time played per day for me is around five minutes or less of just checking in. This is kind of the point of playing an idle game in the first place the low amount of time spent each day playing.
Many spend around 1 EOS to get started and then try and grind from there. Both way, there is a lot of grinding in this game and once you stop spending progression slows down by quite a lot. Whether or not you can even turn a profit is questionable. My own chances are not looking so great in the short term where I feel I’ve found a decent sweet spot without going too crazy on the spending. My next logical gear upgrade step could be three times what I’ve already put into the game. This is more risk than I’m looking to take and I’ll be saving materials or selling to acquire it.
NOT RECOMMENDED
This game is NOT RECOMMENDED due to the high amount of CPU Staking required to play games on EOS. This is an unreasonable burden to be placed on the end-user and has been persistent for quite a few months now. If this game is on other blockchains it is recommended to look into them first. If they seem to have reasonable staking or transaction costs have fun playing.
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Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about the game EOS Knights.
Are you considering playing this game? Feel free to use enjargames44 as a referral name and we both get 1k magic water. This can be found under settings referral bonus. You do need to buy one knight to be able to input a referral name.