How PlayGen works
01 · Overview
PlayGen is an idle console miner on Robinhood Chain. You own one of 3,333 consoles, you plug it into The Arcade, and it mines $GEN every second from a shared pool called The Grid. The more hashrate your console has, the bigger its slice of each second.
You grow it by slotting cartridges, building racks and fusing consoles together. You keep it running by paying the power bill. You decide how hard to push it, because overclocking mines more and burns part of what you mine.
Nothing is promised. Rewards are a share of a pool split between every active console, paid in $GEN, whose price moves with the market.
02 · Quick start
1. Mint a console
Free. One per wallet. The whitelist window first, then the public one.
2. Plug it in — straight away
It arrives with 24 hours of power already paid, so it mines from the first second without you holding any $GEN yet.
You do not wait for the reveal. Until the seed is out every console runs on the same floor — generation 1's hashrate, the same for everybody, because nobody knows what they have yet. The moment the seed drops, a single call lifts your console to what it really is, and anyone can make that call for anyone.
This is why the whitelist window matters: the 500 Day-One seats are taken during it, by the people who minted and plugged in — not by whoever is watching the chain in the second the generations are revealed.
3. Mine
Your $GEN ticks up live, whether the tab is open or not. Claim it to your wallet whenever you like.
4. Grow
Spend $GEN on cartridges and racks. Bigger rigs take a bigger slice of every second.
5. Keep the lights on
Top the power up before it runs out. A console with no power leaves the pool and mines nothing until it is paid again. Nothing is lost, it just stops.
03 · Your console
Six generations, one for each console on the PlayGen banner. Which one you get is drawn after the mint closes — see the reveal.
| Generation | How many | Base hashrate | Slots | Racks | Draw |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8-BIT | 1,500 | 1.4 GH/s | 3 | 1 | 60 W/day |
| 16-BIT | 850 | 5 GH/s | 3 | 3 | 180 W/day |
| DISC | 500 | 12 GH/s | 4 | 4 | 400 W/day |
| 64 | 280 | 25 GH/s | 4 | 6 | 800 W/day |
| CUBE | 150 | 45 GH/s | 5 | 7 | 1,300 W/day |
| NEXT-GEN | 53 | 90 GH/s | 5 | 8 | 2,000 W/day |
33 of the 3,333 are held back for partners and giveaways. That cap is in the contract.
04 · Racks
Each rack adds 3 slots and unlocks a higher cartridge level. Your generation sets how many racks you may build. A rack takes time to come online, and it costs more the bigger your rig already is.
| Rack | Cost | Build time | Unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | included | — | L1 |
| 2 | 5,000 $GEN + 1,500 per 100 GH/s | 2 min | L2 |
| 3 | 10,000 + 1,500 per 100 GH/s | 5 min | L2 |
| 4 | 20,000 + 1,500 per 100 GH/s | 10 min | L3 |
| 5 | 40,000 + 1,500 per 100 GH/s | 20 min | L3 |
| 6 | 80,000 + 1,500 per 100 GH/s | 45 min | L4 |
| 7 | 150,000 + 1,500 per 100 GH/s | 1 h 30 | L4 |
| 8 | 300,000 + 1,500 per 100 GH/s | 3 h | L5 |
05 · Cartridges
Four families, five levels each. Higher levels cost more and mine more per $GEN spent. Every cartridge adds to the daily power draw.
ARCADE — pure output
| Cartridge | Price | Hashrate | Draw | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pong Cart · L1 | 2,000 | 1.5 GH/s | 60 W | — |
| Platformer · L2 | 8,000 | 7.5 | 220 W | — |
| Beat 'em Up · L3 | 25,000 | 31 | 620 W | — |
| RPG Cart · L4 | 80,000 | 128 | 1,760 W | — |
| Open World · L5 | 250,000 | 525 | 4,750 W | — |
COOLING — output, and it brings the heat down
| Cartridge | Price | Hashrate | Draw | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heatsink · L1 | 5,000 | 3 GH/s | 150 W | −5 |
| Fan Stack · L2 | 20,000 | 15 | 560 W | −8 |
| Liquid Loop · L3 | 60,000 | 60 | 1,500 W | −12 |
| Cryo Plate · L4 | 200,000 | 256 | 4,400 W | −18 |
| Zero-Point · L5 | 600,000 | 1,008 | 11,400 W | −25 |
NETWORK — the most output per slot
| Cartridge | Price | Hashrate | Draw | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Link Cable · L1 | 10,000 | 8 GH/s | 300 W | — |
| LAN Hub · L2 | 40,000 | 44 | 1,120 W | — |
| Modem Rack · L3 | 120,000 | 172 | 3,000 W | — |
| Fiber Node · L4 | 400,000 | 736 | 8,800 W | — |
| Mesh Grid · L5 | 1,200,000 | 2,898 | 22,800 W | — |
OVERCLOCK — the most output, and it runs hot
| Cartridge | Price | Hashrate | Draw | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Turbo Chip · L1 | 15,000 | 15 GH/s | 670 W | +4 |
| BIOS Mod · L2 | 50,000 | 69 | 2,150 W | +6 |
| LN2 Pot · L3 | 150,000 | 272 | 6,000 W | +9 |
| Die Delid · L4 | 500,000 | 1,160 | 18,500 W | +12 |
| Fusion Core · L5 | 1,500,000 | 4,568 | 51,000 W | +16 |
06 · Mining
Your share is your hashrate over everybody's hashrate. Every second The Grid releases $GEN and splits it between all the consoles that are plugged in and powered.
The Grid
The Grid starts with 600,000,000 $GEN and releases a slice of whatever it still holds, every day:
| When | Released that day |
|---|---|
| Launch day | 20% of The Grid |
| Rest of week one | 2% of what is left |
| After week one | 5% of what is left |
60% of every $GEN spent in the game goes back into The Grid and the other 40% is burned. The pot refills as the game grows, and the supply only ever shrinks.
While nobody is plugged in, nothing is released at all — an empty Arcade does not drain the pool.
First Boot, and the Day-One seats
| What | Who | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| First Boot | every console | 24 h of power paid, and the very first claim is untaxed |
| Day-One seat | first 500 plugged in | exit tax halved, permanently |
| Fused | any fused console | +10% hashrate per fusion, up to +30% |
07 · Power & heat
The power bill
Your console and every cartridge in it draw watts. The bill is paid in $GEN, in blocks of 12 or 24 hours, up to 72 hours ahead. One watt-day costs 1 $GEN.
When the power runs out the console shuts down: it leaves the pool and mines nothing until you pay again. It does not lose its racks, its cartridges, or anything already mined.
Heat
Every console sits at 50 heat. Cooling cartridges bring it down, overclock cartridges push it up.
| Heat | Effect on your share |
|---|---|
| 0 | +10% |
| 25 | +5% |
| 50 | neutral |
| 75 | −12.5% |
| 100 | −25% |
Heat is a continuous skim, not a dice roll. A random raid that resolves on a block you choose to settle in is a raid you can dodge, and anything built on a block hash belongs to whoever produces the block. So overclocking does not risk a hit every six hours — it shaves your share continuously, which costs the same on average, shows up on screen as it happens, and cannot be gamed by anyone.
08 · $GEN
1,000,000,000 $GEN, all of it created once. There is no mint function, no pause, no blacklist and no transfer fee — nothing anybody can switch on later.
| Where | Share | What for |
|---|---|---|
| The Grid | 60% | everything the game pays out |
| Liquidity | 30% | the pool on Robinhood Chain |
| Treasury | 10% | operations, partnerships, listings |
Claiming, and the exit tax
Mined $GEN sits as unclaimed until you send it to your wallet. Claiming costs a share that goes straight back into The Grid, and that share shrinks the longer your console has been running:
| Running for | Tax | With a Day-One seat |
|---|---|---|
| your first claim, ever | 0% | 0% |
| under 24 h | 40% | 20% |
| under 72 h | 20% | 10% |
| under 7 days | 10% | 5% |
| 7 days or more | 0% | 0% |
This is the whole anti-dump design, and it is deliberately the only one. "Reward the players who stay" and "tax the players who leave early" are the same sentence, and the second one is a single number read at the moment you claim — nothing to poke, nothing to time.
09 · Fusion
Two consoles of the same generation burn to make one of the next, and the new console keeps +10% hashrate for good, stacking to +30%. Two NEXT-GENs make an ARCADE CABINET.
Fusion is the only way to move up a generation, and it always destroys one console. 3,333 is a ceiling that is never revisited.
10 · The draw, and the reveal
The whitelist draw
2,000 of the 3,333 come from the whitelist: 100 guaranteed to the top referrers, and 1,900 drawn. When applications close we announce a Robinhood Chain block number in the future. The hash of that block is the seed:
rank = keccak256( blockhash(N), your X id ) — lowest 1,900 win
The entry list is published before the block lands and the draw script is thirty lines, so anybody can run it and get the same winners. Nobody can compute the hash in advance, and we cannot hold it back once it exists.
Running before you know what you have
A console that has never been lifted runs on generation 1's base stats and is capped at one
rack, so the whitelist window cannot be used to out-build an unknown. After the reveal,
refresh(id) swaps the base for the real one. It is permissionless: a console
left on the floor only ever under-earns, so there is nothing to grief and everything
to gain by sweeping the whole set. Racks and cartridges you already bought are untouched.
The generation reveal
Nobody knows which console is which until the mint closes, including us. If the generation were decided during the mint, the 53 NEXT-GENs would be sniped: simulate the call, look at the answer, send the transaction only when it is good.
So the mint is sequential and carries no property at all. A commitment to a seed is published before the mint opens; the seed itself is revealed once it shuts. Generations fall out of it through a permutation over the 3,333 ids, which means the rarity table above is matched exactly — 1,500 8-BITs and 53 NEXT-GENs, not "about that many".
11 · FAQ
Do I need $GEN to start?
No. The mint is free and the console boots with a day of power paid. You mine before you spend.
What happens if I stop paying?
The console shuts down and mines nothing. It keeps its racks, its cartridges and everything already mined. Pay again and it restarts.
Can I lose my console?
No. Nothing in the game can take your console or your cartridges. The only thing heat touches is the rate you mine at.
Can I sell it?
Yes. It is a normal ERC-721 and it carries its whole rig with it.
Is the generation random at mint?
It is not decided at mint at all. See the reveal.
Which wallets work?
Any EVM wallet on Robinhood Chain.