A note from Aaron

CO-FOUNDER

We have entered the Year of the Fluf, er Rabbit, and are working diligently with our ever-growing team to build the world’s best open metaverse content and infrastructure.

Our first drops of the year have us literally shaking, from our ongoing wearables collaboration with MNTGE & Sean Wotherspoon, the continued Buzzies rollout via the recent Irradiated family, and the imminent Gods & Goblins sacrifice.

On the infrastructure front, the Futureverse tech team have been building deep roots in our growing network, developing the platform and protocols needed to safely and securely power the Futureverse and an open metaverse experience ready to onboard a generation of users.

We are looking forward to sharing the next trailer with you, which shows this technology coming to life in The Third Kingdom. The Root Network is the core of this platform, and the $ROOT token is now locked in with our launch partners.

We look forward to sharing more information on how you can help us build The Third Kingdom as we begin to bring it to life, and remember, we aren’t building the future; you are.

Aaron McDonald

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Gods & Goblins

A scary something is happening

The time to Follow the Path is nigh. Aspiring Goblins will soon be able to Pledge & Sacrifice their Void Seekers for the good of the Goblin Empire, the final steps in the reconstruction of the portal back to the Goblin homeland. We cannot wait for you to take your first steps along the Path in preparation for resurrecting the lost Goblin horde.

The Pledge & Sacrifice

You will have two weeks to Pledge your Seekers and Sacrifice them to the infernal fires of the Tinker forges. Our team has invested a lot of work into making this experience interactive, with tasty visuals and lore to ensure you enjoy burning as many Seekers as your heart desires.

The Bestowing

After the Pledge & Sacrifice stage is complete, the next step along the Path will be the Bestowing. This is when we will reward loyal Goblins with Amulets of indescribable power and utility. This will happen on the Root Network and take place shortly after the Sacrifice ends. If you were one of the lucky ones to win an Amulet in our Seven Ordeals of the Goblin Queen competition last year, don’t worry! We haven’t forgotten you and will be awarding you your Amulets at this time too.

Livestream

To celebrate the upcoming Pledge, we’ll be hosting a special livestream on the morning of the 17th (NZT). This livestream will be a look back at the journey so far, Goblin lore, what to expect from Amulets and some robust discussion from the Goblin lords.

Go in chaos Goblins and remember to #FollowThePath

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A note from Alex

CEO

GM Fluffle,

The Year of the Rabbit has officially begun, and we’re already on track to make this the biggest year in FLUF World to date.

The Irradiated Buzzies have exploded onto the scene, their psychedelic neon fur and sludge-splattered wings evidence of the many, many long hours our team has put into making each Buzzie family unique. We have our ears to the Underground and are consistently grateful for your feedback on the work of our growing team of international artists. Our desire to lead the industry in art and utility is one of our foremost goals, and the upcoming Undead family will be another example of boundary-pushing detail in game-ready assets we hope you’ll love.

Gods & Goblins is our most ambitious project to date, and the advancements in character generation, world-building, and the scope of utility this collection will bring to The Third Kingdom are unmatched. The Path continues with our upcoming sacrifice and more exciting, interactive experiences to come.

Scaling an ecosystem to over 300+ ambitious creators in just over a year has been a bold and rewarding challenge. We’re continually improving each day, from comms and content to world-class collections set to enrich the Futurverse experience. We look forward to sharing these evolutions with you over the coming days, weeks, and months.

Bunnies up!
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Alex Smeele

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Irradiated Buzzies

The Irradiated ravers have arrived!
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The Irradiated Buzzies have returned to their HNI pots, their psychedelic fur providing an explosion of neon brilliance into the Buzzies collection. Each Buzzie family in this free drop is unique, both in design and personality, and the luminescent toxicity of the Irradiated Buzzies has given them a love for late-night tribal raves!

On our end, we have used this time to address a main point of feedback, providing an option to closer view all the painstakingly designed details that make each Buzzie unique. We released the Irradiated Buzzies in a 1:1 dimension, as opposed to the 16:9 of the Desert Buzzies which has made viewing these toxic critters much easier.

Undead Buzzies

The next family to reveal will be the eldritch Undead family. These ghastly creatures are terrifying to behold, scary enough to have even the toughest Goblin fleeing to its cave in fright. The Undead will add further complexity to the Buzzie collection and we can't wait for you to see the care and effort we've put into the design of this ghoulish family. Lock your doors and sharpen those stakes... They. Are. Coming.

Click on the button below to view the Irradiated Buzzies on OpenSea.

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A note from Jesse

CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER

Firstly, I want to say I’m really proud of the Irradiated reveal and how our team pulled together to get them over the line. The furs look incredible and we created each unique pattern using the Altered State Machine Thingie AI. The furs are a fun element to design as they require us to constantly play with the prompts, similar to creating with other AI art generation services that use text-to-image translation. It wasn’t an instantaneous process, and we needed to review each variation to ensure we could map them to the character model.

We’re designing every Buzzie family with individual character and flair. One way we’re expressing this is in the sounds and the animations for each Buzzie family, which will differ across the collection. A lot of our inspiration for the Irradiated came from Unit 177, including how this family would be impacted by their extreme environment. From the leg bags to the wings, we wanted to show that while the toxic radiation of Unit 177 has not completely consumed the Irradiated, they are definitely in the process of being corrupted.

Our creative team has also been playing with the turntable viewing function to create some pretty funny memes, and once it is released, we’d love for you to do the same, and take over social media with a swarm of Buzzie content.

For Gods & Goblins, we’re creating the most amount of input for Dynamic Object Transformer (DOT) that we’ve ever done in one batch, with a massive amount of variation in skin colour, facial shape, body structure, scars and even teeth. One of the main challenges has been creating a female version of the goblins that has feminine features while staying true to the goblin aesthetic.

I can’t wait for you to see this work for yourself as we take our first steps along the Path and draw closer to welcoming the Goblins into The Third Kingdom.

Jesse Metcalfe

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Year of the Rabbit

Celebrate with a limited-edition Scene & Sound

It’s extremely fortuitous that 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit, as this is the year FLUF World burrows even deeper into the metaverse! To celebrate the YOTR, we’re giving away a limited-edition Scene & Sound to everyone who bridges their Fluf or Party Bear to the Root Network, and swaps their assets background for this commemorative scene within a specific timeframe.

Everyone who participates in this giveaway will also receive a mysterious Red Packet, the contents of which are yet to be unearthed...

We can’t wait to share more details with you on what the future holds for FLUF World. We’ve already kicked off 2023 with a bang, and this is just the beginning!

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In-Play

As always, we’ve been heads down, tails up BUIDLing. Here are a few of the projects our team is currently working on.

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Community Spotlight

Our Community Spotlight is where we share our favourite content created by the Fluffle.

Tag us on Twitter @flufworld with your original content for a chance to be featured in next month’s update!

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Creativity is one of our core values, and nothing makes us as happy as an Irradiated in sludge than when you guys push the boundaries of creativity with your FLUF World assets. Our Community Spotlight for February is shining bright on BlockchainBunny, & bigheeno for their awesome AvatarScan project - a collection of free Snapchat filters for anyone to download and create content with.

They are currently running a community-led competition, Snap to the Futureverse, where you can win a Party Bear simply by sharing a remixed picture, video, film quote or original content using an AvatarScan Fluf or Party Bear filter. We love community-led initiatives like this, and want to encourage more of this content creation among the community.

The Snap to the Futureverse competition closes at 23:59 GMT on February 13th. Make sure you take the time to enter!

Find out more via the button below.
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Ecosystem News

Check out the latest developments among our ecosystem friends.‍

ASM

The Next Legends team is hard at work wrapping up pre-production. This involves validating components necessary for upcoming releases including the launch of The Locker Room.

Behind the scenes, the team is working on Machine Learning Progression and Training, and some major updates for all Pro Boxer holders to interact with their characters.

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ATEM

Even Goblins need a place to chill after a busy day hunting Seekers. Where better than their own signature ATEM Car Club garage?

ATEM has members from all over The Third Kingdom and the Goblins are no exception. This wicked garage will grant access to exclusive perks and features ranging from special claims to high-tech parts and accessories crafted from the finest GoblinTech.

At ATEM Car Club our battleground is on the track, in the dunes, the streets and anywhere there is a competitor up for a challenge!

And we are excited to see what the Goblins bring to the table!

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SYLO

Our 3D Animation Comp is well underway. We have received so many fantastic entries that we have decided to extend the competition until February 28, 2023, 12:00 AM NZT

We will also be hosting another animation live stream tutorial with Moritz, the Seekers’ lead 3D artist, to help you get your entry polished on February 10, 2023, 11:00 AM NZT.

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MNTGE

To celebrate our friends at MNTGE dropping their first collection, a selection of digital wearables created by vintage collector & acclaimed fashion designer Sean Wotherspoon, we’re giving away 1x Fluf & 1x MNTGE Pass.

Simply like, RT, and tag your friends in this Tweet and you’re in the draw! The winner will be drawn on 9th February at 8pm PT.

The Public Sale for MNTGE Pass holders is live now. If you do not have a MNTGE Pass you can register for the public raffle (dependent on supply). All MNTGE Pass holders also have a free claim window from February 9th - February 28th (PT).

Click here to learn more.

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Security

New threat alert! Address Poisoning

There’s a new security threat in the Web3 space we want to talk about this month, address poisoning. Address poisoning is designed to exploit how addresses are displayed on many sites.

To improve the user experience, some crypto wallets only show a few characters from the beginning and end of a wallet address, e.g. only showing the first and last five characters of an address and skipping the middle 15-30.

Attackers can create an address with the same shortened version as a user’s legitimate address.  This is significant because, when making a transaction to a wallet you interact with regularly, some users will copy-paste their address from their blockchain transaction history without verifying it.

Address poisoning attacks take advantage of this practice by sending a low-value transaction to the victim from the lookalike address. If you’re not careful, you can copy-paste the dummy address when making a later transaction and accidentally send the transaction to the attacker rather than to the intended address.

While you can’t prevent scammers from sending transactions to your wallet on a public blockchain, the simplest way to avoid this attack is not to copy-paste addresses from your transaction history.  Instead, copy-paste addresses from a reputable source, such as the wallet provider. Always double-check addresses in full before submitting a transaction, and don’t interact with any assets that are transferred to you out of the blue! We also recommended checking your transaction history and flagging any low or zero-sum transactions that look suspicious.

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Meet the Team - Jorge Valle

Every month we will be interviewing one of the incredibly talented people we are proud to have on our team.

This month we sat down with Jorge Valle, Senior 3D Engineer and brilliant Buzzie builder, to discuss his role and his journey before joining the Non Fungible Labs team.
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What is your role at FLUF World?
Officially, 3D engineer and technical lead. Unofficially, I make the computers work for us by automating stuff that used to take technical artists hours or days to do manually, so they can focus on the more creative side of things. I love problem solving!

What were you doing beforehand?
I was working in the film industry at Weta Workshop, as a 3D modeller and prop maker for projects like Avatar: The Way of Water, The Lord of the Rings - The Rings of Power, and as an industrial designer for the Dubai 2020 World Expo. Since I was a kid I have dedicated my spare time to designing and programming stuff, so when I'm not working on FLUF World I am learning new tech and working on personal projects to keep up with the latest trends in the industry.

What is your favourite collection?
It has to be Buzzies - the variety of characters and uniqueness that we are getting on those not-so-little bees is something out of this world! And the ones that are yet to come are looking insane! The Irradiated family is mesmerising to look at, with all those different AI generated furs that create the most amazing patterns on them.

What project do you enjoy working on the most?
The Next Legends was amazing from a technical point of view, helping to develop a tool to make thousands of unique human characters was a great experience. I am personally very proud of the DNA system I developed for it. Buzzies is very enjoyable too, we are pushing the boundaries of Unreal Engine to make a real-time character build with thousands of different variations that are game-ready for the metaverse.

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Final Thoughts

What a start to the year it’s been!

The Buzzies rollout is well underway and we’re excited to continue with the remaining families, rolling right into the upcoming Sacrifice & Gods & Goblins activity.

Strap in Fluffle. We’re about to go Goblin Mode.

As always, we appreciate and value your feedback. If you’d like to share yours with us, please send any questions or suggestions to fluf@nonfungiblelabs.xyz.

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