Drop Ship

Overview

Drop Ship allows holders of the NFT collection to send their soldiers to battle through various scenes using a combination of armor, weapons, and items.

Rewards

• SCRIP - in-game points, used to buy armor, weapons and items in the Armory
  • You earn SCRIP equal to your score for the week, unless you finish in the top 3
  • The top 3 are paid in real platform currency instead - see below
• Theme currency - Skulliance staking platform points awarded to the top 3 winners
  • 1,000 to 1st, 500 to 2nd, 250 to 3rd. The amounts are the same for every theme; only the currency changes.
  • Credited automatically the moment the week closes.

Winning pays currency instead of SCRIP, on purpose. The top 3 take the platform payout and earn no SCRIP that week, which is why a winning week shows as a 0 in your Drop Ship history: it is not a missed payment, it is the trade. Items are spent every run, so a player who wins every week gradually runs their stock down while the field restocks - the board stays winnable instead of the leader compounding better items into a bigger lead. If you want to shop, the SCRIP is in 4th place and below.

Each theme keeps its own board, its own squad and its own weekly cycle, so the currency a player wins is the one belonging to the theme they played.

Squads/Consumables

Send Drop Ship NFTs in squads of up to 4 into battle and browse consumables such as armor, weapons, and items that can be purchased to improve probabilities of getting higher scores. A squad with all armor, weapons, and item types is considered a Super Soldier Squad and has the best probability within the game.

Where a soldier's armor and gear come from. Each theme reads its own collection. Drop Ship's cards carry armor and gear as real traits, so what the card says is what the soldier is. Oculus Lounge reads its Outerwear and accessories. DHC2 Fighters reads the fighter's torso, headgear, arms and weapon, with rarer traits counting for more. Dread City and Filthy Mermaid share one collection whose cards carry no traits at all, so armor comes from how scarce the card is - a 1 of 1 is the best armored thing in the game - and gear from whether the card shows the character fighting.

The Armory

Filthy Mermaid and Oculus Lounge do not let everybody in, and the shop follows the same rule as the door. You will not see an Armory in those two until you can actually play them: Filthy Mermaid wants a Shorty Verse NFT, and Oculus Lounge wants a Disco Solaris NFT and VIP, either the Discord role or a temporary pass bought with DISCOIN.

Every other theme is open to everybody, so its Armory always is.

Sharing a run

When a run ends, Share on X sits under Instant Replay. It writes the post for you in three parts: your result, what the game is, and a line inviting somebody to come and beat it.

The result is the round you reached, where that puts you this week, and either the player you went past or the leader you are chasing. It always comes first, because that is the part you pressed the button for.

Then what the game is, for whoever is reading it who has never played, and a line asking them to join. Oculus Lounge tags its own account; the rest name the game in plain text.

The middle part is written per theme, because the five do not offer the same thing. It uses your theme's own word for what a squad is made of, it only says "free to play" where that is true, and it only mentions the four free soldiers in Drop Ship, which is the only theme that hands them out. Oculus Lounge says what it actually wants instead: the VIP role, or a temporary pass bought with DISCOIN.

Only two people can ever be named in it. Whoever this run overtook, and the player at the top. Nobody is named as having beaten you, and no label describes another player. If the run passed nobody and beat your own previous score, it says that instead.

A first run of the week passes nobody, however high it lands, because there was nothing of yours on the board to move past. The post says where you placed instead.

The link lands on the public Drop Ship page carrying that theme's cover art, so the post shows the game rather than a bare link. Nothing about your run is in the link itself.

DHC2 Fighters fields what you built, not only what you bought. Every Fighter you have assembled on the platform shows up as a soldier in that theme alongside your minted DHC2 Fighters NFTs, and the two sit in the same barracks. Armor and gear are read from the Fighter's own traits against the minted collection, so an assembled Fighter is scored on the same curve as a card and a rare trait counts for more. Assembling is free, so the theme is open to anyone who builds. Disassembling a Fighter to get its traits back takes its soldier off your roster, which is the trade: you can field the build or spend the parts, not both. See DHC Fighters.

Armor sets the odds. Gear does not. Only the armor your squad is wearing decides the roll each round: the best tier worn sets the floor and every lower tier adds a little on top, which is why a mixed squad of four beats four of the same thing. The Squad panel shows the figure before you deploy, and it is the same number the run rolls against.

One of each item fires per squad. A Medkit is one extra life no matter how many of them you send: a second Medkit in the same squad is a duplicate and does nothing. The same goes for Melee and Demolition. That is why the fourth soldier in a complete squad is better off carrying none than carrying a spare, and why a duplicate is a soldier you could have put in another squad. The first roll of a run happens on round 3, so that is the single likeliest round to spend your extra life on.

Your squads build themselves. You do not assemble, save, name or disperse anything. Open the game and your whole collection is already arranged into the best squads it can make, sitting above the barracks, strongest first. Each one shows what its armour is worth a round, and a full set of four armour tiers with all three items is a Super Soldier Squad.

The arrangement is the best one that exists, not a good guess at it: the game works out the most complete squads your holdings can possibly produce. That is not the same as grouping them by eye, because the three items have to come from three different armour tiers - a collection with plenty of every tier still builds no second squad if every Medkit in it is Heavy.

Whatever is left after the complete squads is arranged into the best remaining squads rather than left loose, so everything you own is in something. Squads are rebuilt only when your holdings change - buying or selling an NFT. Playing, deploying, losing soldiers and getting them back never reshuffle anything.

Deploying is still yours. Pick a squad and send it. Strongest first is the obvious line; sending the weak ones out early to see if they get lucky is also a strategy, and the game takes no view on it.

Deploy squad fields all of them at once. Disperse breaks the grouping up and returns the soldiers to the barracks so you can rebuild. While a soldier belongs to a saved squad it is not deployed on its own, so a squad cannot be taken apart by accident.

Your deployed squad lists the soldiers you added yourself first, in the order you added them, and anything that arrived through Deploy squad after them in armour order. Withdraw all clears the whole squad in one press, which is what you want when you are setting several squads up back to back: build, save, clear, build the next. It never touches a saved squad.

A soldier belongs to one squad. If somebody on the field is already in a saved squad, saving says so and names them: disperse that squad first, or withdraw them. Members are listed heaviest armour first, which is the order the squad's odds are built in.

A squad only fields once per game, because soldiers who fight are out until the next game opens. A squad resting between games says so rather than looking broken. If you sell an NFT, the squad tells you which member is no longer yours and offers to remove it, and a squad you have sold out of entirely can still be seen and still be dispersed.

The four free soldiers

Every Drop Ship player is given four Grunts - Hagar, Delay, Blood Bag and Sektr - with no NFT required. Each carries a loaner kit, and the four of them together cover every armor tier and three of the gear types, which is exactly a Super Soldier Squad.

Deploy all four together. Sent on their own they bring only their own kit, so a single Grunt is much weaker than the squad. The loan is armor and gear only: Grunts stay level 0 and keep their rank.

Grunts are a Drop Ship feature. Oculus Lounge has no equivalent.

The other themes, and who can play them

The same game runs under several skins, each with its own collection, art, wording and leaderboard: Drop Ship, Dread City, Filthy Mermaid, DHC2 Fighters and Oculus Lounge. Press Select Game on the dashboard and pick one by its artwork. The one you are in is marked.

One qualifying NFT is the gate. Hold a single NFT from a theme's collection and that theme is playable: the NFT becomes a soldier, and a deployed squad is all the Play button asks for. Drop Ship is the one that needs nothing at all, because of the four free Grunts above.

Filthy Mermaid used to say it needed five. It no longer does. The Shorty Verse NFTs are expensive and getting hold of one is already the hard part.

Oculus Lounge is the exception, and not on holdings: it gates on a Discord role that holding the VIP token does not grant by itself. See Oculus Lounge.

If you have no soldiers for the theme you picked, the dashboard links straight to that collection on Wayup, so you can see what is for sale before you commit to anything.

Leaderboards

Track your ranks for the current game, all time high scores, and by levels and XP.

Registered Soldiers

Visit the Barracks of Registered Soldiers who have connected their wallets to Drop Ship and participated in games.

Trait drops

Taking the lead pays a DHC Fighter trait, and nothing else does.

If a run puts you top of the game currently running - or level with whoever is top - and it also beats your own previous score in that game, it drops a trait, rolled on the best odds table on the platform. Finishing second pays nothing, and neither does a run that fails to improve on your own.

The first player into a fresh game clears both conditions by default. A new game starts on a fixed cadence, so the lead comes back up for grabs every time and no single score keeps it forever.

Bear in mind that your latest run replaces your previous one, so playing again always risks the position you already hold. See DHC Fighters.

Drops are announced in the DHC Fighters Discord channel, the same as every other trait.

Results in Discord

Every run posts to Discord on its own - how the run ended, and the standings afterwards. This used to wait for you to sit through the whole replay and press a button, so runs went unreported whenever somebody closed the tab. The button at the end of the replay now just refreshes the page.

Both posts go out for every theme, each to its own channel and with its own artwork. Dread City and Filthy Mermaid used to announce the death and not the standings.

Play Drop Ship from the site nav's Play menu, or head straight to dropship/dashboard.php - signing in to Skulliance is required now.