Time to Mint a Splinterlands RUNI

The mint for the new Splinterlands, cross-chain NFT, known as RUNIs is upon us! The whitelist mint begins on October 25th. Public mint starts a week later. Officially known as Runicore, RUNIs are generative, PFP style NFTs that also function as playable cards in the Splinterlands game.

RUNIs are another one of these cross use-case NFTs that we're seeing more of lately. Both a unique, generative NFT and a level four Legendary Creature, playable in Splinterlands, the RUNI mint should be a hot event. And it begins at 1pm CST on October 25th for those on the whitelist.

The whitelist mint actually covers three different categories. There are those who won a free mint, those who purchased a RUNI Component Kit during the Splinterlands pre-sale, and those who won a whitelist spot, but have to pay full price. The base price for a RUNI is 0.38 ETH (~$500). Though anyone who purchased a Component Kit gets to mint for half price.

Folks in any of the above categories have one week, until the end of the day on November 1st, to make their purchase. After that, any reserved NFTs are freed up and added to the public mint, which begins on November 3rd, also at 1pm CST.

Public minting will be limited to three RUNIs per wallet. The team expects to have about 4,000 RUNI available for sale during the public mint.

The mint will be hosted by OpenSea and requires creating an OpenSea account, which is free and can be done with a number of web3 wallets.

What are RUNIs?

Runis are generative art pieces, much like a standard PFP. As is standard with most PFP projects, each RUNI NFT will be unique, with varied graphics. But here comes the next interesting part. Splinterlands runs on the Hive blockchain, but the RUNI mint, and the generated NFTs, will be on Ethereum.

Players who own RUNIs can stake them to a special Ethereum contract. The owner still maintains possession of the NFT. But they are unable to sell or transfer it while staked. When a player stakes an Ethereum RUNI, the Splinterlands system delegates an in-game RUNI card to them which has their unique artwork on it! Every RUNI in-game will be max level (4). And every one a truly unique card due to the different artwork.

Splinterlands RUNI NFTs cannot be bought, sold, traded, or rented. However, while the Ethereum RUNI NFT is staked, players can choose to delegate the Splinterlands card to a different Hive wallet. And though Splinterlands won’t offer an official in-game rental market for this feature, some third-party site will likely jump on the chance to help manage RUNIrentals.

And to top it off, RUNI holders also receive a full, commercial use license for their unique RUNI artwork! This is for the individual PFP art only. Nothing Splinterlands related such as the icons and borders. This is a pretty cool bonus. And it will still be very interesting to see what RUNI owners decide to do with their licenses.