Realize your imagination by building your creation from the ground up
Discover new types of blocks by splicing “seeds” of various items
Invite your friends over to your world to hang out and have some fun
Growtopia is a unique type of sandbox game due to its incredibly social nature, as well as its one-of-a-kind seed-splicing system that allows its players to discover new types of blocks and items.
Once you’ve loaded the app up, you’ll get to choose to sign up and play, or simply log in as a guest and immediately start the game. You’ll then be dropped into the starter/tutorial world that’s designed exclusively for new players. Unlike most tutorials, Growtopia provides a tutorial that’s both text-intensive since you’ll need to do a lot of reading, and interactive as you’ll get to try out a newly-taught action in a controlled location.
After you’ve “graduated” from “starter school”, you’ll be able to either enter a random world of your choice from the world selection menu or create one of your own. To create a world, you simply need to type in the name you want for the world while ensuring that the name doesn’t overlap with any existing worlds in Growtopia. This might be a bit tricky to get right but if you opt for a random string of letters and numbers, you’ll usually get the world you want. If not, just try again! You’ll get there soon enough!
Being a newbie can really be bothersome to some extent in Growtopia. This is mainly because other players, like trolls and high-level bullies, can hop into the new default world you’ve just created and mess up anything you do there. The only way to stop that without relinquishing control of your world is by purchasing a world lock, which naturally will cost quite a bit of game currency. There are also other types of locks, each of them securing a limited amount of space in a world for your use. These, unfortunately, can be pretty costly as well.
That said, not everyone you meet in Growtopia will turn out to be a troll. If you’re lucky, you may bump into someone who’s actually quite generous and are willing to “donate” a variety of stuff to you even without you asking.
Aside from worlds and locks, Growtopia also features the familiar mining and “crafting” (or as the game calls it, “splicing”) aspects that are inherent in sandbox games like Minecraft. However, unlike the latter, you may get a chance to earn a “seed” from every block you destroy. Seeds can then be planted on dirt and then harvested so you can get more blocks and seeds of the same type, as well as some gems, if you’re lucky.
The splicing process, on the other hand, feels a lot more like an Alchemy-type game where 2 types of seeds can be combined to get a new type of block. For example, you can get Grass by splicing Rock and Dirt seeds together. Similar to the most Alchemy games, you’ll need to do some trial and error to figure out which seed can be combined with which just so you could get a particular type of item. The seed of the resulting item can in turn be further spliced with other seeds to give you another new type of block. Considering that Growtopia offers thousands of blocks and items for you to discover, you’ll definitely be spending a lot of time splicing up all the seeds you have.
Keeping that (the tons of seeds and items you can get from splicing) in mind, I find that the starting backpack space is rather limited. Don’t get me wrong – the backpack may last you for a few cycles of splicing, but by then, you’ll probably be having an overflowing backpack with nowhere permanent for you to store your goods.
Unless you are willing to shell out real cash to buy 10 more slots for 100 gems, you’ll probably need to trade your stuff away and thankfully, this is something you can do in Growtopia. Some players even came up with designated areas in their worlds where you can set up your own stalls and sell your wares. You could also make use of the game’s chat broadcasting function to inform other players of the sale you’re doing. However, do take note that items of common/low rarity might not sell as well as rarer items, and definitely for not as many gems.
Gems also come in different colors because of their difference in value – Yellow is 1; blue is 5; red is 10 and so on and so forth. Besides earning them randomly from mining and splicing, or from trade, you can also earn some by watching ad videos or downloading some apps. With sufficient gems, you can purchase a variety of goods from the Growtopia Store, including item packs and even weather machines.
So, if you’d like to play a 2D sandbox game that’s a whole lot more social, Growtopia is a great choice. Download the game on your Android or iOS devices now and check it out!
