MPlankton Explores Decentraland

100+ Photos from my week-long vacation in Decentraland

Feb 10, 2023

I spent a whole week exploring Decentraland (DCL), visiting hundreds of different locations within it. I wanted to determine if it lived up to its hype 2 years after its initial Feb 2020 launch.

**Festive Road**: One of the many decorated roads in DCL

Decentraland (DCL) is a free-to-play virtual metaverse spanning a 5km x 5km area. It makes money from selling 16m x 16m land plots for 5000 MANA (~$4000) to private developers, who can build whatever they want on their land. As a visitor, you don’t have to pay anything to explore around. Most areas are completely free to explore, and I didn’t pay a single token during my trip.

I like to think of Decentraland as the world’s largest and loneliest virtual mall/amusement park. There are about 300 players in DCL at any given time, but since it’s so large, you can walk around for 30 minutes without seeing a single person.

**The 5D Gallery**: A trippy multi-level art gallery

Many of the places are quite beautiful, so it’s quite a shame that there are so few visitors. On the other hand, the game engine runs very poorly, and there are so many bugs in DCL. I can’t go 5 minutes without hitting bug. If they could fix the performance issues and bugs, I’m sure land developers would be able to build better locations, and there would be a lot more visitors.

Apparently, my ‘**MPTest**’ account was the 3rd most active explorer in DCL.

The Basics

Everyone starts off in the Genesis Plaza. You might find ~20 people here, which makes it one of the busier locations in DCL.

**Genesis Plaza**: Other players at the starting location.

**Genesis Plaza**: You can find a list of games, events, and popular locations. The “**Crowd**” billboard shows the most popular locations.

**Genesis Plaza**: A birds eye view of the starting location from a Hot air balloon.

Genesis Plaza is a tutorial area where you can learn about the basics of DCL. DCL is completely open-world, so you can immediately visit and teleport to any area using the map.

Map - Starred locations are ones recommended by other players

Wearables: There are lot of free wearables for your avatar, but you can also collect minted NFT wearables on the Polygon PoS network. The most exotic ones usually need to be purchased. Some quests and events will mint you free NFT wearables, but they usually requires a lot of work doing various tedious and menial tasks.

The minted NFTs I collected over 3 days by doing random quests.

What is there in DCL?

Sight-seeing: There are so many parks, plazas, and buildings. If you enjoy backpacking and visiting cities in foreign countries, this is the virtual version of that.
Tower of Babel in MVMF
A gallery in Genesis Plaza showing various DCL locations and history
Special Events: There are always special limited-time events going on in DCL. The events that give away free NFT wearables are highly-popular, and it’s not uncommon to see 20+ visitors new events.
The recent Doritos Triangle Studios 3-day event where they gave away half a dozen free NFT wearables for doing 10 minutes of quests.
LaLigaLand Lunar New Year NFT giveaway event
Empty plots and rental spaces: Most of the land in DCL is empty and unsold
Storefronts and advertisements/tributes for people and events in real life
Some random insurance storefront
Art galleries where you can view NFTs and click on links to purchase them
One of hundreds of explorable NFT art galleries
Inside the 5D Gallery
Casinos (mostly empty) where you can play by yourself. The one exception is Ice Poker (Stronghold), which sometimes gets up to 50-100 players during busy hours.
So many blackjack and roulette tables
ICE Poker Stronghold is always crowded. The DCL app often stutters whenever I visit here because it’s loading data. This area is single-handedly responsible for half the visitors in DCL.
Mini-games: A few really-boring NFT collectible "games". Most of these were extremely buggy and NOT remotely fun. The one exception I enjoyed playing was in the Spooky Forest, which is also the one also gave out most of my NFT wearables.
Antrom RPG: I have no idea why anyone plays this. It’s so mind-blowingly dull. All you do is left-click to kill chickens/pigs and collect items. I spent 2 hours clicking my left-mouse button for an NFT item that never even got delivered. That actually happens a lot in DCL. You’ll spend time trying to get an NFT, and some bug prevents you from getting it even though it uses up your in-game resources.
5 days of Spooky Forest quests. This was the only slightly-fun game I came across in DCL.
WonderMine Crafting: One of the few popular hangout spots. I don’t think anyone here cares about the game because it’s dead boring. They’re just using this space as hangout location.
Dance venues: There are so many dance venues
One of the coolest-looking dance venues and nightclubs in DCL

Theaters where you can watch videos. Many of them were either inactive or broken.

Interesting Privately-owned locations

These are privately-purchased land that I found interesting

LaLigaLand: The Spanish football league built an entire stadium with supporting buildings, a shopping area, a helicopter, VIP sections, and a tram that goes around the entire stadium.

There’s currently an event quest going on where you can pick up several NFT wearables and a LNY rabbit ear hat.

Hinata Tower: A waifu NFT marketplace. It’s just a really-pretty building.

**Hinata tower** (inside) - There’s a beautiful translucent staircase you can use the climb the tower inside

**Hashkey** - Still proud of being sponsored by FTX and BlockFi

**Casadei - Project Nayom1**: Apparently this Blade Runner-inspired location was built for a shoe company.

Samsung 837x: A multi-building exhibit built for Samsung products

**Samsung 837x**: A tunnel leading to multiple locations

**Samsung 837x**: Advertising that they’re going green, literally

**Samsung - House of Sam**: I was so disappointed you couldn’t meet Sam in person. The NFT giveaways took several days to get minted after completing the challenges, so don’t worry if they don’t show up immediately.

**Rizk’s Amusement Park**: Someone built a small amusement park with functional rides

**Rizk’s Amusement Park**: A small roller coaster

**Serenity Island**: One of the many casinos in DCL. This one has an island resort theme

**The Aquarium**: Another casino. This one has 2 giant mermaid statues at the entrance.

**Decentraland Report**: An decentralized news agency. Anyone can submit news reports.

Art Displays

There are so many random art displays in DCL. You can visit, interact with, and climb most of these displays.

**Temple Trouble**: This was both an art exhibit and a puzzle quest. This was actually the same puzzle as Day 3 of the Spooky Forest quest. But this one doesn’t have a reset button if you screw up. And there’s no NFT prize.

Community Plazas

There are many public plazas in DCL where you can just hang out. Some of them are also art.

These would be really cool meetup locations if they existed in real life, but they’re completely empty in DCL. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another real person visiting any of these locations.

**Dragon City**: I believe this was used for MV Fashion Week

**Dragon City 03**: This plaza is absolutely huge. It’s a square km of decorations.

Dragon City 04: More random empty buildings

**Dragon City 05**: I have no idea why this whole city was built. It’s completely empty.

Soho Plaza 01: This whole plaza is a tribute to DeFi

A skate park. Much of DCL’s empty land is decorated

Dance Venues

MetaVerse Music Festival (MVMF): There’s a whole giant district for a music festival filled with multiple dance venues.

What was really annoying was that the music cuts out abruptly as soon as you exit the land tile. And sometime it’ll just randomly cut out for no reason.

**MVMF - Main Stage**: Probably where the main concert happened. It’s currently empty since there’s no event going on

**MVMF - MetaTokyo**: I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’s chaotic as hell

**MVMF - Party Degens**: This is actually a really cool stage. Under the stage is a whole nightclub with a transparent ceiling.

**MVMF - Party Degens (below)**: One of the many dance rooms below the main stage.

**Amnesia Ibiza**: Featuring Steve Aoki in a red dress

**Amnesia Ibiza**: Many of the dance venues are really pretty. This has color-changing lights.

Businesses

There are some real businesses and organizations that have set up storefronts in DCL. $5K for a 16m x 16m space is much cheaper than buying land in real life.

**VRS Business District**: You can rent or buy space here

**NFT World City**: The center of the city is a music venue where you can select your music

**NFT World City**: They built a miniature downtown here

**NFT World City**: Office space for rent. $500/mo. Not a single customer.

**New Beautyland**: A storefront for a makeup company

KB Homes built 3 model homes you can visit and customize. This is actually pretty cool and useful.

**KB Homes**: The gallery where you visit 3 model homes

**KB Homes**: You can customize each home

**KB Homes**: The backyard of one of the homes.

Collecting NFT Wearables

My NFT collectibles, all acquired in 1 week for free doing quests

There are many ways to obtain NFT collectibles:

Special limited-time events: This is the best and easiest way to get free NFT collectibles. Both the recent LaLigaLand Lunar New Year event and Doritos Triangle Studios event gave me 5-10 collectible NFTs each, and it only took 10-20 minutes to complete each of them (if it weren’t for bugs).
Doritos: Special limited-time events that give away NFTs are often among the most-crowded areas.
Doritos: Giveaway prizes for doing simple quests
Cost of publishing NFTs: Keep in mind that Decentraland charges developers $150 to publish each unique item. So this 10-item NFT giveaway cost Doritos at least $1500 plus additional Polygon PoS network gas fees. Each NFT mint is ~150k gas (uses metatransactions), so minting 10k items could easily cost $500-1000 in transaction fees.
Spooky Forest 2022 quest: This was a 5-day event back in 2022 (YouTube walkthrough) where you can collect NFT items. Some of the NFTs have run out, but most of them are still available as of Feb 2023. This was also the only partially-fun community “game” that I came across.
Spooky Forest: Day 1 quest
Spooky Forest: Glass Pavilion with the Girl
Spooky Forest: Gargoyle Castle
Spooky Forest: Day 2 Cemetery quest
Spooky Forest: Day 4 Illusionist quest
Permanent community RPG games: Do NOT play these unless your idea of fun is doing a single action over-and-over again for 10 hours. There are many community RPG games like WonderMine Crafting, Antrom RPG, Soul Magic, Butterfly Prawn Farm. All of these are so mind-numbingly boring. You will lose brain cells playing any of these longer than 10 minutes, and it usually takes 2-20 hours of left-clicking before you can acquire any NFTs through them.
Buy them on the DCL marketplace. Most items, even legendary ones can be acquired for $1-10 on the Polygon network.
The only super-expensive ones are the Unique items. There is only one of each, and they can go for hundreds/thousands of dollars.
I spotted this Unique item on a random player. You can’t even buy this.

Other random locations

**Aquanova**: There are a lot of random areas that require platforming-game skills. I suspect they were used as challenges for special limited-time events in the past.

**Club Nyan Cat**: An NFT gallery for Nyan Cat

**DCL Scene**: Giant girls and giant cars

**The Creativity Engine**: One of the many random challenges in DCL that no longer give away any collectible items. Of course, you have no way of knowing this until **after you waste** 10 minutes doing the challenge.

Archverse: Some Chinese community built an ENTIRE 1 square km village in DCL. I have no idea what it is, but it’s entirely empty. I wandered around for 20 minutes and didn’t see another player. I believe it was an art project? Would’ve been a super expensive project considering how many tiles it uses.

**DigiFun**: Sells expensive NFT wearables

**Lunar New Year 2023**: Sponsored by Avalanche (AVAX). It says the event is still ongoing, but there’s nothing to do here.

**Twitch HQ**: An overhead view of the giant Twitch building on DG Arena for streamers. Completely empty.

**ZED HQ**: A random futuristic-brutalist building

It was playing an anime movie about the Cold War I don’t recognize

**Society of Lost Elves**: An NFT art gallery

**Society of Lost Elves**: Inside the NFT art gallery

**MetaSkins**: A creepy factory where you can view dead bodies … I mean skins for avatars

**MetaSkins**: Inside the body skin factory

**VoxBoards**: A weird skate park arena. The game is buggy as hell, and I think the devs abandoned it.

A giant building for hosting NFT galleries. I think it was empty since I couldn’t use the elevators or get above the ground floow.

**Lobsteropolis**: This place was weird as hell. It’s a small downtown area built for ugly Lobster NFTs.

**Lobsteropolis**: It even has its own band.

Ads and Rented Spaces

A lot of space in DCL was bought by advertisers and squatters who had no intention to develop their land. There is way too much unused land in DCL, and I doubt these guys are going to get many rental customers.

This particular squatter bought land all over DCL.

Rental spaces in NFT World City for $100-500/mo. I only found 1 space out of 100 that was rented. All others were EMPTY.

Glitches and Bugs

There are so many bugs in DCL, and I literally could not go 5 minutes without encountering one.

**Getting stuck**. This happens all the time, and I often have to teleport away to escape.

**Despawning objects**: There’s a whole tower in front of me that despawned. I have to quit the app and restart to make it show up again.

More despawned buildings. You’re supposed to be able to climb up to those pyramids.

“Data not available” - This is in the Genesis Plaza. Not a good sign when you can’t even keep the first location updated.

Despawning objects is probably the worst issue. Often when I’m doing a 10+ minute quest, something will despawn and prevent me from completing the mission. So then I have to start over. There was one quest that should’ve taken only 15 minutes to complete, but I ended up restarting it 5 times because of the despawning bug.

Concluding Thoughts and Review

Good for Exploration:

If you like visiting foreign countries and backpacking by yourself, it’s actually somewhat fun to visit Decentraland. There are a lot of locations without a purpose, and it feels kind of like discovering random locations when traveling.

One way to look at DCL is as a giant virtual art museum or playground. A lot of user-designed locations are very creative and pretty.

For me, the highlight of Decentraland was traveling around and discovering things.

**EDP**: Some random city built this museum to showcase their sustainability.

Lack of users:

Ice Poker Stronghold often has 50+ users. Other than Ice Poker, there are not many players in Decentraland. It’s like a dead mall. I’ve visited entire districts for 30 minutes and not seen a single other player.

Given that it costs Decentraland $1.5M a month to maintain, they really need more players. Virtual storefronts for business are only good if people visit. I suspect these storefronts might get a few visitors per month.

Also, the game engine has trouble handling 30+ users in one location without stuttering, so that also limits the platform’s growth.

Expensive for developers:

While it’s not anywhere close to being as expensive as setting up a physical store in real life, it is pricey for companies to set up a storefront or location in Decentraland.

Cost of land: Developers have to pay 5000 MANA to buy each 16m x 16m land tile (secondary market prices may vary). Some of the larger places are 4x4, so that’s 80K MANA or about $60,000 USD. At the peak of the bull market, that would’ve been $300k USD.

Cost of NFTs: In addition, Decentraland charges $150 USD per unique NFT wearable. So if a private company decides to give away a set of 10 NFT items to its customers, that’s a minimum of $1500 spent on those NFTs alone. Plus there are Polygon network fees of ~$0.02 to $0.10 per mint, which is expensive because Decentraland uses gas-heavy meta-transactions.

So launching a medium-sized (4x4) store in DCL with giveaway could cost $100k even in this bear market.

Graphics:

The graphics are much worse than Second Life’s, but better than Roblox and VR Chat. I’m less concerned about the graphics than about the performance, which was very slow even on my gaming PC.

Audio:

There is no consistent background noise in DCL. Every location has its own audio track, and it’s so weird that audio cuts out abruptly when moving between scenes. Most places are eerily devoid of background noise or music. I think a lot of developers should focus more on the sound design.

Mini-Games:

If you’re looking for a gaming experience, DCL is not for you.

The mini-games and RPG games in DCL are horrible. The game engine performs very slowly, and you can’t go 5 minutes without a game-breaking bug. The games are poorly-designed and so boring.

**Koko Jones**: Even IGN would give this 1 out 10

Performance and Bugs:

It takes up to 10 seconds to load new locations, and I often find the game stuttering when I move around. When there are 20+ other players in a location, the constant halting is unbearable.

There were so many times I got stuck waiting for a location to load, but it never loaded. I could teleport to another location and back, but the location still wouldn’t load. DCL is often frustratingly buggy.

The pathway up to the upper floors that seem to be floating in air disappear. This happens all the time.

I realize the game engine is still in beta at version 0.1.46. But it has been 2 whole years since launch. They’ve had that long to improve the engine, and it still doesn’t run smoothly. Unless they can make it run smoothly, this is probably going to be a dying platform.

Audio glitches were also very jarring. I would often walk around in a room, and the background music would suddenly disappear.

MANA token usage:

I would have a hard time recommending MANA as an investment. The utility exists, but there are so many empty spaces. Unless the platform gets a lot better (in performance and bug-fixes), I don’t expect it to grow. For now, its MANA’s price is entirely speculative.

Overall feelings

Overall, my 1-week virtual vacation in Decentraland was enjoyable. The mini-games, bugs, and performance issues were bad, but the exploration was fun. I could easily come back once a month. There are always special events going on, so there are always new places to explore and activities to check out.

MPlankton