Quick start

1. Decide whether to sign in

   You do not have to. Browsing the canvas and placing pixels are open to everybody, with no account of any kind. Signing in gives those pixels your name and unlocks the rest. There are two ways in, and they are not the same: see Signing in below.

2. Place a pixel

   Open the Canvas, pick one of the 16 colours, click a spot. It is yours until somebody takes it. After any pixel changes hands it is locked for a short while, so a fight over one square plays out over time rather than in milliseconds.

3. Join or start a Collab

   Browse Collabs and contribute to one you like, or start your own from New Collab. A Collab is how a group builds something far bigger than any one person can hold by hand. Starting one is free and open to any signed-in player. Putting money into one needs a Solana wallet, because Collabs settle in SOL; a Google account backs one with drawing ability instead.

Signing in

Two separate ways to be somebody here. They are independent: neither is built on the other, and you do not need both.

Google

Sign in with a Google account. No wallet, no crypto, nothing to install. You get a profile with a name, a handle and a short bio that you control, and you can paint, chat, advertise, start a Collab, and pledge your drawing ability to one. Your email address is not stored at all. Google confirms it is verified and we keep only the account identifier, so there is no address here to put on a profile or hand to anybody.

Solana wallet

Sign in with a wallet such as Phantom. You prove you hold it by signing a message. Signing is not a payment and never moves anything out of your wallet. Read the dialog before you sign: it should say artwars.io. A wallet does everything a Google account does, plus funding Collabs and the Marketplace.

Why only a wallet can spend

Funding a Collab and the Marketplace settle in SOL, so they need an identity that can hold SOL. If you signed in with Google, Marketplace is not in your menu. Everything short of spending is yours: browse every Collab, start one of your own, and back one with your drawing ability instead of money. Everything else on this page applies to you exactly as written.

What you can do without signing in at all

Look at everything, and place pixels. An unsigned pixel is simply not credited to anybody. Nothing on the canvas is hidden behind a login.

The rules

The canvas is 1024 × 1024

1,048,576 pixels. It does not grow and it does not reset.

16 colours, fixed

The same 16-colour palette r/place used in 2017. Restriction is the point. It is what makes co-ordinated art legible and forces groups to plan.

A cooldown on every pixel

After a pixel changes hands nobody can change it again for a short while. The cooldown is attached to the pixel, not to you, so you may act on as many different pixels as you like at once. It paces sieges instead of preventing them.

Taking a pixel is just taking it

There is no auction and no protected window. Whoever acts first gets it. A contested pixel can legitimately flip back and forth for weeks; that is intended.

Nothing you make is safe

This is the whole game. Any pixel you hold can be taken by anyone. The only real defence is a funded Collab, or enough people who care about the same picture.

Collabs

A Collab is a group project with a budget. Someone proposes a picture, people fund it, and once it is funded the Collab begins painting and defending itself.

Collab in the menu opens two doors, drawn as two pictures with no words on them: a list and a plus sign. The list is every Collab on the canvas; the plus is where you start your own. There is no separate New Collab item in the menu any more, because both doors live behind this one.

The Collab list

The list shows only Collabs that are actually on the canvas. One appears there the moment it passes 75% funding and gets painted, not when somebody first proposes it, so the list is a picture of the wall rather than a pile of ideas.

Sort it by Name, Funding, Pledges (how many people are drawing for it), or Time (how long it has been on the canvas). Click the same heading twice to reverse the order. Click any Collab to see its artwork full size, along with the controls to fund it or pledge to it.

How one runs, start to finish

1. A blueprint. The creator uploads an image or draws it by hand on the Collab Canvas. It gets reduced to the 16-colour palette, up to 256 × 256, and anchored to a position on the canvas. Proposing one costs nothing, and the creator name is filled in from whoever is signed in.
2. Funding. Anyone can contribute to the shared treasury. At 75% of target the Collab counts as funded and starts drawing. Contribute more than the target and the artwork scales up, if the creator has left scaling enabled.
3. Painting and defending. Roughly once a minute the Collab checks its own footprint. Any pixel that no longer matches the blueprint, because a player painted over it or a rival Collab did, gets reclaimed, paid for out of the treasury.
4. Running dry. Every reclaimed pixel costs the treasury. A Collab that spends its balance simply stops defending, and its art erodes. This is a real mechanic, not a bug: a Collab is only as permanent as its funding.

Settings a creator controls

• Defense speed. Slow, medium, or fast: 1, 2, or 4 reclaim attempts per tick. Faster defence holds ground better and burns treasury quicker.
• Canvas size. Four choices when drawing by hand: 16 × 16, 32 × 32, 64 × 64 or 128 × 128. An uploaded image keeps its own proportions instead, so it can never come out stretched. Bigger costs more to fund, because the target is worked out per pixel.
• Acquisition. Whether the Collab claims its footprint all at once or creeps outward gradually.
• Roaming. A Collab may be pinned in place, or allowed to migrate. A roaming Collab reconsiders its position about once a day and will only move for a materially better spot, shifting a few pixels at a time rather than teleporting.

Persistence Score

Every Collab accrues a Persistence Score from how long it has held its pixels, weighted by how many distinct people backed it, so a genuine community out-scores one person with a large budget. It pays nothing. It is a prestige ranking and nothing else, with no payout attached to it in any form. Lose every pixel and the Collab goes extinct: the score zeroes, though the historical record is kept. Holding even a single pixel is worth something.

Pledging your drawing ability

A Collab is funded in SOL, so putting money into one needs a Solana wallet. If you signed in with a Google account you have no SOL to give, but you have the other thing a Collab runs on: a person with a cooldown. You can hand that to a Collab instead, including to a Collab you started yourself.

Open Collabs, find one you want to help, and choose Pledge my drawing ability. From then on the Collab draws one pixel of its blueprint for you every hour, and those pixels are recorded under your name. It keeps drawing while you are away, which is exactly why it is an hour and not the 60-second cooldown you paint at by hand: the hour is the price of not having to be there.

What it costs you

Your own Canvas Editor closes while the pledge stands. That is the whole trade: your pixels go to the Collab rather than to wherever you would have clicked. Open the canvas editor while pledged and you get a message naming the Collab you are drawing for, with two choices: leave the Collab, or carry on. Leaving takes effect at once and your editor is back on your next click.

The details worth knowing

• One Collab at a time. Leave the one you are drawing for before pledging to another.
• Your pixels cost the Collab nothing. Painting by hand has never cost you anything but a cooldown, and a pledge is worth exactly that, no more and no less. It does not touch the Collab treasury.
• A Collab that is not on the canvas yet cannot draw. If you pledge to one still short of its funding threshold, nothing is drawn until it gets there. Your pledge simply waits.
• Solana players are not affected. A wallet already takes part by funding a Collab and buying pixels, and keeps the Canvas Editor. Pledging is there for people who have no SOL to give.

Chat

There are two kinds of chat, and they behave differently on purpose.

The global room

Chat is one room with everybody in it. It is for reactions and shouting about what just happened on the canvas, not for planning. Anyone can read it, including people who are not signed in, and anyone signed in can post.

Messages disappear after 24 hours. This is the one part of ArtWars that does not last. Everything else here is built to be permanent, and the shoutbox deliberately is not, so say the thing that matters somewhere else. Your screen keeps the most recent 50 lines.

Collab rooms

Every Collab has its own chatroom, on the Collab's page under the Chat tab. It is where the people funding and defending a picture argue about what to build, agree where to put it, and call for help when a rival starts eating an edge. Unlike the global room, Collab chat is kept, because it is part of that Collab's record.

• Who can post. In the global room, anyone signed in, with Google or with a wallet. In a Collab room, anyone who can reach that Collab. You do not have to have contributed to talk in a room.
• Messages are public and attributed to whoever posted them. Treat either room as a public place, because it is one.
• Limits. 1,000 characters per message, and a couple of seconds between posts, which is only there to stop flooding.

Collab rooms are the only chat currently reachable in the interface. A whole-game room and direct messages between players are planned.

Marketplace

Not open yet. The Marketplace is built but is not finished, so it is not in the menu. Everything below describes how it will work when it opens.

Two things get minted as NFTs, and the Marketplace is where they are bought and sold.

• Canvas snapshots. The state of the whole canvas, captured on a schedule: a dated record of what the world looked like at one hour.
• Collab artworks. A finished Collab picture, minted as a piece in its own right.

You can list at a fixed price or run an auction. Auctions enforce a 10% minimum increment, so bidding moves in real steps rather than one cent at a time, and they settle automatically when time runs out. Buying an artwork NFT is buying the picture; it does not transfer the Collab's pixels on the canvas or any control over it.

Advertise

Above the canvas there is one advertising slot: a fixed 128 × 32 block, 4,096 pixels, shown at its own scale so it stays readable however far you zoom out. It sits entirely outside the game. Ads take no canvas territory, cannot be painted over, and have nothing to do with Collabs.

There is one slot and one advertiser at a time, and you do not book dates. You buy airtime, and you can be displaced.

• The rate. $0.0025 per pixel per hour, or $10.24 an hour for the full block, billed hourly from a balance you top up.
• Displacement. Pay a rate at least 10% above the current occupant and you take the slot. It is a standing auction, not a calendar.
• Minimum tenure. Whoever holds the slot keeps it for at least 24 hours before they can be displaced, so the slot cannot strobe.
• Being outbid does not cost you money. Your ad pauses, your remaining balance is preserved, and you automatically resume if you regain the slot. You can withdraw the unspent balance while paused.

Ads are not reviewed before they go live. Every ad carries a Report this ad link, and reports are read by a human rather than auto-pausing the ad. In a bidding system, automatic takedowns would just be a cheaper way to clear the slot than paying for it.

How the economy works

ArtWars runs on SOL. There is no ArtWars coin or token, and there will not be one. It was designed, reviewed, and dropped deliberately.

The one rule worth reading twice

Owning pixels pays you nothing. There is no yield, no drip, no staking, no dividend, and no schedule on which holding anything pays out. Not in SOL, not in points that convert to SOL, not in any form. This is not an oversight or a feature that is coming later. It was removed on purpose and it is not coming back. What you get from owning a pixel is the pixel: territory, a part in a piece of art, and standing on the Persistence Score board.

Nothing in ArtWars is offered as an investment, and nothing here should be read as a suggestion that pixels, Collabs, or NFTs will be worth more later. No mechanic in the game is designed to make them appreciate.

What things cost, by design

• A pixel. $0.01, plus the 10% creator fee, so $0.011. The same price whether it is empty or you are taking it from someone.
• Collab funding. Whatever contributors put in. It is a shared treasury and it is spent, per pixel at the same rate, on painting and defending.
• Advertising. Hourly, from a balance, at the rate above.

Where the money goes

When a Collab reclaims a pixel it pays 11 units from its own treasury: 10 for the pixel, 1 as the creator fee. Treasuries only ever go down. Spending is the point of them, and a Collab that has spent everything stops defending. You can watch this happen for any Collab on its own page, and across the whole canvas on Data.

The creator fee

10% on every pixel purchase, and it goes to the developer. Buying a pixel costs $0.01 plus $0.001 on top. That extra 10% is how the person who builds and runs ArtWars gets paid.

To be exact about what it is not:

• Not paid into any Collab's treasury.
• Not burned or otherwise destroyed.
• Not shared out to other pixel owners as a reward.
• Not a return on anything you hold.

It is an ordinary service fee for running the platform, charged at the moment of a purchase, exactly like a marketplace commission. It is a flat 10%. It does not rise with how much you spend, and there is no tier that avoids it. It is stated here because you should not have to find a fee by reading source code.

Glossary

Collab

A community-funded picture on the main canvas that defends itself from its treasury. Always what "Collab" means here. Previously called an Artwork Campaign.

Ad Campaign

Something else entirely: a paid advertisement in the slot above the canvas. Separate system, separate money, no interaction with the game.

Blueprint

The target image a Collab is trying to hold on the canvas.

Treasury

A Collab's pooled funds. Spent on painting and defending; never paid back out.

Reclaim

A Collab repainting one of its own pixels after somebody changed it.

Extinct

A Collab that has lost every pixel. Its Persistence Score zeroes; its record is kept.

Persistence Score

Prestige ranking from pixels held over time, weighted by number of backers. Pays nothing.

Pledge

Giving your drawing ability to one Collab. It draws a pixel for you once an hour, awake or not, and your own editor stays closed until you leave. Slower than painting by hand, because it costs you no attention. Google accounts only.

Cooldown

The time a pixel is locked after changing hands, currently a short while.

Handle

The short name on a Google account profile, such as @scott_thomas. Yours to change, and unique across the game.

Wallet address

The long string that identifies a Solana wallet. It is public, and it is how the canvas credits pixels to you.