After months of open beta testing, developer Zillion Whales has announced that the official release of their free-to-play card-based RTS, Wild Forest, is scheduled for July 1st at 12 PM UTC, the same day in which Play-to-Airdrop (P2A) Season 2 kicks off to give veterans and newcomers more opportunities to play and earn the upcoming $WF token.

What Does the Official Launch Bring?

The first official version of the strategic Ronin-based Web3 title will be available for free on Android, iOS (App Store) and PC for Windows and Mac via the Mavis Hub. This release brings user-friendly changes to the game’s interface while resetting all in-game beta progress, meaning Ratings, Golds and Shards will be reverted to their default values to give everyone a fair starting point. That being said, your Beta Units will also no longer be playable, but instead of letting the assets go to complete waste, the studio is offering players a timeframe of 4 weeks to convert their Beta Units into a valuable resource called Essence using the newly-launched Forge, which we’ll talk more about later down below. A dedicated Essence shop should go live in the first week of July to give the special off-chain currency some potentially decent use case. Skins however will continue to work normally as before.

Release Units collected from the Mavis Market and Packs will be playable with this launch, while your beta $WF tokens will convert to off-chain $WF automatically, so it seems there’s no need to worry about doing anything manually on that part. Ranking up Epic and Legendary Units now buffs them with random Perks, which are special abilities that were initially tested in the Arcade Mode that went live last month.

If you’re one of the players eligible to gain off-chain $WF from Play-to-Airdrop Season 1, then good news: you should be getting your rewards right on release date, allowing you to use the off-chain currency to buy the Premium Battle Pass and rank up your units. If you wait till after TGE though, you will actually have the option to withdraw the tokens to your wallet and convert them into proper tradable on-chain $WF tokens.

TGE & P2A Season 2 Details

So, when is TGE? Well, that info is still unknown it seems at the time of writing, with the team still working with their partners to properly determine “the most suitable dates for the Community Round and TGE,” stating that they will announce the dates as soon as possible, according to their Substack post.

What about the new airdrop season? While more specific details will be given once it actually starts, what we do already know though is that it will feature similar mechanics as the first season, meaning that you can look forward to doing skill-based Quests while earning Honor points to top the Scoreboard that is used to determine how the reward pool will be distributed. The previous season awarded the top 4000 players on this leaderboard with $WF tokens, and while we don’t know how many positions will be eligible for rewards in this new season, what the announcement does certainly reveal is that the reward pool will be twice as large as the one from the previous airdrop season.

In the meantime, you have a chance of earning $WF tokens by using the Signal Fire on the game’s official website, where you simply click to light the fire with a logged in account and connected Ronin wallet. Next to tokens, you can also earn Golds and Shards. In the future it will also be possible to earn assets such as Units, Skins and Packs. Once you light the fire, you will have to wait for 12 hours to pass in order to collect your rewards from a daily prize pool.

Now, let’s go back and discuss one of the game’s newest features: the Forge.

What Is the Forge?

The Forge is a new burning feature that lets you transform in-game assets you don’t need into a resource called Essence. Units are the only assets you can convert for the time being, but Skins and other items will also be supported at some point in the future.

Specifically, assets initially supported include broken NFTs, Beta Units (both in-game Units and Unit NFTs), and off-chain or on-chain Release Units, though it seems you’ll have to wait for the 4-week period for Beta Unit conversion to end before being able to burn Release Units.

By burning useless assets into Essence, you're able to buy various different items that may prove more useful to your tactics. Once the game releases, off-chain Units will be the first goodies you can buy from the Essence shop, with more items to be added over time.

The Rank and Level of Release Units affects how much Essence you get from burning those assets, with Common Release Units providing 100 Essence while the Epic ones can be worth 2220 Essence. On top of these Ranks, units of higher Levels bring even more Essence, as each Shard and Gold used in levelling up a unit is worth 0.089 and 0.009 Essence respectively. These numbers however don’t apply for Beta Units, which give reduced amounts of Essence.

Lord Staking Is Now Live

The new Lord staking feature has just officially been introduced to the website of Wild Forest, allowing holders of Lord NFTs to stake their assets for 90 days. Doing so provides bonus (x4!) Honor points for Play-to-Airdrop Season 2, as well as allocation in the Community Round of the $WF token, with the allocation varying based on the rarities of the NFTs staked. This means that the wallet used for staking is the one that gets allocation, with the official post suggesting users to “carefully pick the wallet you use to stake” because you will need to do KYC on Impossible Finance to participate in the Community Round. Within 2 weeks from June 28th, the developers will add the option to connect a second wallet to your account, with the NFTs in both wallets counting towards the 2nd airdrop season, while the Community Round allocation is only for the wallet used for staking.