FAQ
Last update: Sep 12, 2026

Etheria is a 3D world of ownable, tradable, hexagonal land tiles on the Ethereum blockchain. Four fully decentralized, fully viable versions of the same 33x33 map were deployed in October 2015 and are now combined into a single map available for viewing here.

Fastest, easiest way to get up to speed with Etheria? This video.

For the nostalgia: the original "What is Etheria?" and "How to Play" pages from 2015.

Each version of the map has 457 ownable land tiles and 632 unownable ocean tiles for total of 457*4 = 1,828 tiles, though we estimate 5-10% are permanently lost.

In the vintage NFT space, "first" is a claim asserted by many different groups about many different assets, usually by twisting the term "NFT" to suit a particular asset. It's a deep and fascinating topic that's way too complicated for this FAQ, but the TL;DR is this: Etheria is the first project to unambiguously check all the boxes of what people consider an NFT today.

YES! Etheria's original build mechanisms were... inefficient. While this didn't matter much for a passing experiment when Ethereum was $0.43 and the network was empty, using those old build mechanisms in the modern era is astronomically expensive. To solve this problem in 2021, I (Cyrus, the dev) created a system where the unlimited character "name" field of each tile is now used to store both the name of the tile as well as compressed, highly-efficient build data. Now builds are 95% less expensive and new ones are going up all the time! Whew! To build on your tile, use the Etheria Builder.

See Buy / Sell / Trade — v0.9 and v1.0 on OpenSea, v1.1 and v1.2 on the Etheria Exchange.

2015 was early days and there was a lot to figure out about this new thing called Ethereum. In the process of trying to fix a (now irrelevant) "stuck ETH" bug in v1.0, I incorrectly used tx.origin instead of msg.sender in v1.1 and v1.2 for verifying tile ownership. Unfortunately, this means that base v1.1+ tiles can only be owned by EOAs, not by smart contracts, and, thus, cannot be wrapped.

Update 2026: EIP-8141 has been set as the headliner for the upcoming Hegota hardfork and should solve this old tech debt, making Etherias v1.1+ finally wrappable. Stay tuned!

You can view and manually verify Etheria's smart contract code via this repository: https://github.com/cyrusadkisson/etheria_source or on Etherscan.

Value is subjective, but generally has to do with version significance, rarity and/or appearance. Without getting in the way of the market making up its own mind, it's safe to say that Islands, Mountains, Ice and Tundra are more prized than others.

Wrapped? → yes
Unwrapped? → NO! You will lose your tile.

That story is best told through this video or this X thread. More info:

In March 2021, shortly after Etheria's rediscovery, I (Cyrus) bought up all the remaining tiles in v0.9 and v1.0 due to concerns about their trading safety. These earlier base contracts feature internal trade logic which, in both versions, is awkward and impractical and, especially in v0.9, unsafe to use unless care is taken to prevent front-running.

After a year of heads-down development on v1.2 (exchanges, world rendering, etc), I finally realized a few things about these 2 earlier contracts:

1. They're wrappable into the modern ERC-721 NFT standard
2. Once wrapped, the old trade logic is entirely bypassed and irrelevant (i.e. trading is completely safe)

Thus, in March 2022, I made the decision to wrap and airdrop these versions to the holders of v1.2 (what was considered "official Etheria" then) and create a 4-map Etheria multiverse consisting of:

• v0.9, the first viable, fully-decentralized NFT smart contract ever (2015-10-19)
• v1.0, the first official release of Etheria, discussed on /r/ethereum within the week (2015-10-22)
• v1.1, the second official release of Etheria, announced on blog (2015-10-29)
• v1.2, the "final" official release of Etheria, presented at Devcon 1 (2015-11-01)

Use the Tile Manager for wrapped v1.0- and unwrapped v1.1+ tiles.
Use the wrapping page to wrap unwrapped v1.0- tiles.

v0.9 is the first viable version of Etheria, according to extensive research into my own blockchain history. In 2015, I believed what came to be known as v1.0 was the "first version", hence the "v1.0" naming. But with some arduous pre-AI digging in 2021-2022, it became clear that there was an earlier version whose trading mechanisms were viable, map shape was identical, and couldn't be destroyed. Hence v0.9 now stands as the first viable NFT smart contract ever deployed. All prior versions were either killable (and killed) or have fatal, unfixable trading flaws. (I was experimenting!)

v1.0 is the first official release interacted with by people other than myself. Within days it was being discussed on /r/ethereum — in a thread someone else started — and I answered questions there.

v1.1 is the second official release which I noted in my blog at the time and on the official website, but did not otherwise announce. This is the first version to use a simple setOwner (which was smart) but also used tx.origin (which was dumb). The latter means this version is waiting for EIP-8141 to land in the Hegota hardfork (2027) to become wrappable.

v1.2 is the final official release which I presented at Devcon 1 in 2015 and which saw significant interaction from the small community at the time, though even this version didn't sell out back then. It contains the first real on-chain artworks in the cabin, the horse, the colosseum, etc. Same wrappability notes as v1.1. All v1.1 tile ownership was mirrored onto v1.2 immediately after deployment and then the contract was locked.

"Minting" is a relatively new concept in NFTs. When a person "mints" an NFT, the blockchain space and information about that NFT are reserved and written at that time.

For example, as BAYC began to mint in 2021, there were no Bored Apes at all - no blockchain space dedicated to them whatsoever. Then, one-by-one, as they were minted, the blockchain space and links to the external art were created as people clicked the "mint" button.

Etheria's 1089 tiles (457 purchasable land) (per version), on the other hand, all came into existence at the same time in 2015. Each tile was initialized with a column, row, elevation, empty "name", empty "status" and the owner was set to "0x0000....0000".

As people bought the tiles in 2015, 2016, 2017 and finally 2021, no new blockchain space was created. The owner of the tile was simply set to the address of the new owner like this: 0x0000...0000 → 0xabc1...2345

The status field is just a text field which was originally meant to allow people to update their status and have that status auto-post through the official Etheria X account. To prevent spam, a fee of 1 ETH was hardcoded to change a tile's status ($0.43 at the time; Etheria predates stablecoins, too.) Whoops! So that field is basically dead for now. It's not connected to the X account anyway.