The Takeaway: You totally, and kind of easily, can get permanent citizenship in Upland (and I will show you how), but I can't decide if you would want to yet...it's a pretty boring place to float around right now. Maybe someday?
I am pretty new to most things about the cryptoverse, and while I got hooked trying to figure out Bitcoin, CEX vs DEX, wallets, shitcoin spotting, and gas fees, I absorbed a steady stream of llamas (and alpacas and monKeys and other weird totems) without ever intending to. I thought I was investing in crypto not spending, so the idea of putting my meager crypto stash into virtual properties seemed pretty weird. And the llamas. Why llamas? What exactly about Fresno screams llamas?
I digress.
I was going to ignore the whole #UplandPublishOx thing but a commenter in another one of my posts steered me toward MOBOX as a good way to accumulate coins before the rest of the world wakes up to their value. Or something. I am sure experienced people are rocking it, but honestly I can't say I have any idea what MOBOX will eventually turn into. However, it awakened a cheap, greedy gremlin in my mind. The one that already has clicked the ridiculous FreeBlanketyBlank.com faucet 200+ times. The one that thought, maybe, just maybe these things could be worth something someday.
If you are reading this, you also think that maybe, just maybe some of these things could be worth something someday, so I wanted to share the path I found to owning some beautiful blue rectangles and a giant floating camera in Upland! You, too, could have some rectangles and a floating thing of your choice (disclaimer: choice availability is limited), for $0 down as you graduate from Visitor to Uplander!
But should you? More on that at the end.
The Basics
Uplander is a real estate trading game that has ambitions to somehow great a fully functioning virtual economy. The developers have created flat white/pink/blue/green maps of three cities: New York, San Francisco, and the 3rd greatest American city: Fresno. Which is a real place in California, known mainly for lettuce. Excited yet?
If you start playing from scratch, you really start from scratch, with nothing to your name. Which means you can't buy anything. So why would you do that?
You begin with the status of Visitor, who needs to log in every week or lose everything and who can only buy special "FSA" labeled properties, AND can't sell properties (so no real estate trading game for you, Visitor, keep moving along)! It is a sad status.
Your goal, at minimum, is to accumulate a net worth of 10,000UPX. That changes your status from Visitor to Uplander, with durable status that does not depend on logging in and renewing your Upland Passport every week at least. You can buy any property within your price range and you can sell, so maybe you can trade your way up to owning landmarks such as Guy I Never Heard of Park in Fresno or even the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.
You can buy your way to 10,000UPX by parting with your hard-earned crypto currency, but with 1 week's devotion, you can become Uplander for free.
Uplanding Yourself
Step 1 - GET 6,000 UPX. You get this by signing up through PublishOx here: https://discover.upland.me/publish0x_official This is a big deal. It is hard, hard, hard to get 6,000 UPX any other way.
Step 2 - When I started off in Fresno, I first chose my floaty icon (called an Explorer). Upland is pretty short on helpful descriptions or helpful anything (which is something I have noticed about crypto things - everyone is supposed to get all their information from discord, etc.) so I ended up picking stuff without knowing what I was doing. I am a giant floating camera now and forever. I was brought to 3 adjacent properties. I bought all three and moved to your BFF in Upland, the Collection interface. Follow these steps: Click the ... at the bottom of the screen. Click Collections. Click Newbie. Click Edit Collections. Add any single property and collect the UPX bonus. I got a bonus for completing the Newbie Collection and for completing my first Collection.
Step 3 - If you got lucky or if this is just a standard thing, you can pull out your first property from Newbie and Click on the King of the Street Collection. All my properties were right next to each other, on the same street, so when I assigned them to King of the Street, I got two more bonuses. We're on our way!
Step 4 - Next, pull your 3 properties from King of the Street, Click on the The Fresno Collection, assign the properties, and collect another 2 bonuses.
Step 5 - Pay attention to the logging on, Treasure practice, and property purchase and collection activity bonuses. Those added 1,200 UPX or so on top of the fixed bonuses you get for specific collections.
Step 6 - Your goal now is to click around Fresno trying to find 2 more properties to but to fill out the City Pro Collection, which requires 5 Fresno properties. I hated this step A LOT. You see, there is no help, no guidance, and no way to search for the kinds of properties you can buy. As a Visitor, you can only buy lots with the letters FSA on them (so make sure that choice is activated in Settings). The good news is that you can buy any of the Green FSA lots no matter where they are. The bad news is that there also are White FSA lots. These need to be "minted" by having your floaty Explorer float over them. Your floaty will draw a path on the map and FSA lots along that path will turn green for as long as the path is active (there is a decay rate). When I started, there were 0 green FSA properties. None. I looked everywhere. There is no way to search for them either, and click on the randomly shaped icons might show properties nearby, but you can't buy them. So tough nuts for you. I got pissed off and scanned every single lot in Fresno by zooming scrolling. I finally found three White FSA lots. Two were 6,500 UPX and the third was 3,000 UPX. After buying my first three properties and getting the bonuses, I was back up to about 4,500 UPX so I tried to buy it. That's when I learned that I had to get my randomly floating camera over there by "Sending" it. basically, you click on all the properties near the unminted one you want to buy and "Send" your floaty to the cheapest one 5UPX seems to be the cheapest. Someone made 5 UPX that day and I bought the property. The next day, two giant neighborhoods in the NW of Fresno opened up and there were dozens of cheap properties to buy. I bought one, Clicked ... Clicked Collections, unlinked my first 3 properties from The Fresno Collection, Clicked City Pro, assigned all my properties, got two more bonuses and bought a beautiful, spacious quadrangle right on an artificial lake.
Step 7 - After all of this wheeling and dealing, and floating around. I stood at 9,763 UPX. I wasted some trying to get Treasure (which burns UPX because you have to "Send" your floaty in a (hopeless in my case) chase around the city. Now, as long as I log in every 6 days and 23 hours and renew my passport, eventually I would get Uplander status based on the rental income my 6 properties earn. They earn an pitiful $0.30 every 3 hours. But...BUT, Uplander has one final bonus up its sleeve. By logging in for 7 consecutive days, I will earn a 300 UPX bonus and that will lock me in as an Uplander forever!!
Now, I honestly don't know if the extra bonuses I got beyond completing collections will work for everyone. But I think they should, right? I'm nothing special. If they are standard, you will have Uplander status and 5 or 6 properties in the Lettuce Capital of Central Californian in 7 short days. Then you, too, will be an Uplander forever!
Is that a Reward or a Punishment?
My experience with Upland started with the exciting realization that I was really, truly going to get something for nothing. Yay! But I really don't understand what I am supposed to do in Upland or how that is enjoyable. There are so few instructions. Beyond clicking "Renew Your Upland Visa" and gathering your UPX pennies of rent, Game Play is essentially watching your thing and a handful of other things float around slowly and randomly. Visiting your property is...nothing. Maybe I will get super jacked selling my rectangles for other rectangles? Maybe I will find traveling (for the minimum price of "Sending" my floaty to a property near the train terminal) to San Francisco, but what would I do there? I will leave it to more seasoned cryptogamers to explain the value in Upland. It seems like it's worth a shot to me.
I can't really complain. I am on the path to being a fully staked property owning Uplander. That might be a thing someday. But the user experience is pretty unhelpful, there is no mining, nothing to profitably click on, nothing to build, and I am not sure I want to visit other people's properties because I can't tell if there is anything like a bulletin board to find reasons to go anywhere. Upland says part of their vision is to have people store NFTs on their properties. Even so, how would I ever find out who is storing what, where, and when? For a game, Upland lacks play. And despite floating around for days, at least right now, it feels like Upland is standing still.
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#UplandPublish0x
If you are interested in sites where it is pretty clear there is lots to do and fairly obvious ways to gather resources and "walletable" assets, you might like these two sites:
Cointiply -- http://cointiply.com/r/p9Gyy
BetFury -- https://betfury.io/?r=601502337521da79ce95370b
I wrote a guide to how I made $50 from nothing in 3 weeks on Cointiply if you are interested in learning my tips.
