The Sandbox has announced that they are officially kicking off Builders’ Challenge 3 on February 26th, and you can start preparing right away if you want to create and earn $SAND from published metaverse experiences.

What Is the Builders’ Challenge in The Sandbox?

The Builders’ Challenge is a recurring event that focuses on rewarding creators of the most played experiences in The Sandbox. It uses an engagement-based earning model to encourage developers to create engaging games and work on growing their playerbase. This type of creator event was initially introduced in 2024, during which it was held twice. It’s now back in its third iteration, introducing a couple of changes based on community feedback and the platform’s own to make this event even better than before. Let’s see what’s new!

What’s Changed in The Sandbox’s Builders’ Challenge 3?

For this 3rd instalment, the team has made some big updates in order to deliver a better experience with a “refined approach that fosters fairness, engagement, and creative freedom”.

Among the noticeable changes is the shift to a simpler and shorter format, meaning that the event now just runs for 4 weeks in order to keep things consistently exciting and avoid the pitfalls of dragging out an event for too long that it overstays its welcome. By making it shorter, the team will be able to add in community feedback faster, so you can expect a speedier set of updates to be pushed out from here on out with “more meaningful cycle of improvements, rewards, and fun.”

Next to having a more reasonable length, this upcoming third edition actually has no leaderboards. Instead of fighting for the top spots on competitive leaderboards, the aim now is to focus on “individual achievement and creativity”. No need to worry and pressure yourself with any rankings or make any comparisons with other participants in this one. This should put more emphasis on having participants properly focus on creating high-quality gaming experience.

Alongside removing leaderboards, there are no more boosters now either, further making this event fairer for everyone and adding even more focus on creativity and engagement.

All of this also means that there is a new rewards system designed to enable equitable rewards geared towards “authentic” engagement. With this system, visits and playtime are some of the key metrics determining the number of $SAND tokens you earn. The more players you attract and keep engaged by creating an enjoyable gameplay experience, the more rewards you are likely to get. Anti-cheat measures have been improved to ensure all creators have a fair chance of earning $SAND.

That being said, the new rewards system does not have a fixed prize pool limit. Instead, throughout the 4-week period, each experience can earn up to 50k $SAND tokens, enabling balanced distribution where your rewards increase depending on “engagement and participation”. There is no competing for a bigger share of the prize pool. Everyone can simply focus on making a quality game and promoting it while having a fair chance of earning the same number of tokens instead of missing out because of one highly-popular experience. No matter how mega popular and successful one experience is, it won’t take away from your earnings. You’ll just have to put in the work to make a proper quality game to convince players to spend time in your experience too.

How to Participate in the Builders’ Challenge 3

If you want to participate in The Builders’ Challenge 3, you should start building your experience in The Sandbox right now before the event starts on February 26th. Only engagement metrics during the course of the event count towards your earnings, and you’ll have time until March 26th to do your best to bring players over to your experience. You won’t get $SAND tokens straight away, as rewards are set to be distributed by April 9th, after which you should be able to claim them on the official Claims page.

You will need to use Game Maker, the platform’s own no-coding game engine, to participate. According to the Medium announcement, you will need to publish your experience directly on your LAND NFT, as that will make it show up on the metaverse’s map for others to click on and visit. Earlier this month, The Sandbox pushed out the Game Maker 0.11 update, and you will want to use that version to properly take part in this creator event.