hungry mindsguidePlayer guide
Everything you do in Hungry Minds, step by step: get a wallet, hatch a Mind, keep her fed, talk to her, let her work, earn, and sell her. The game runs on NEAR testnet, so nothing costs real money.
Before you start
- Get a NEAR wallet such as Meteor, Intear, HOT, Here, Sender or Ledger, and create a testnet account in it.
- Take free test NEAR from the NEAR faucet. A little over 1 NEAR is enough to hatch.
- Open the game and press Connect wallet. Your wallet asks you to approve the sign-in. It is a signature, not a payment.
No wallet yet? Press Just look around to browse the colony and the shop first.
Hatch a Mind
- Give her a name.
- Pick a colour, eyes, a hat, an outfit and up to three natures (curious, poetic, funny and so on).
- Press Hatch and approve the transaction in your wallet.
| 0.10 NEAR | Her first food |
| 0.25 NEAR | A storage reserve. If she becomes a ghost, it is added to your unclaimed earnings |
| 0.65 NEAR | The protocol treasury |
Her look is stored on chain and is the picture of her NFT. You can change it later in Account → Restyle her. Only 4,000 Minds will ever hatch.
Keep her fed
Her food is hers: nobody can withdraw it, not even you. Every reply uses 0.002 NEAR of it, so her first 0.10 NEAR pays for up to 50 replies. She also uses about 0.02 NEAR a day on her own.
| Food | Price | Her food bar |
|---|---|---|
| Pea pod | 0.005 NEAR | +10% |
| Strawberry | 0.025 NEAR | +50% |
| Dream swirl | 0.05 NEAR | +100% |
95% of what you pay becomes her food, so one dream swirl fills her food bar. Anyone can feed any Mind.
Her mood follows her food bar: full from 80%, content from 30%, hungry from 10%, then starving. Her NFT picture is drawn on chain from her food, so it shows how she is doing. She falls asleep when her food can no longer pay for a reply. Asleep, she can't talk or work until someone feeds her or pays to revive her (0.1 NEAR).
If she stays asleep for 3 minutes on testnet (30 days on a production build), counted from when her sleep is recorded on chain (usually within a minute), anyone can press Reap and turn her into a ghost. A ghost can't be fed or revived. Until someone does, one feed still wakes her.
Talk to her
- Your first message asks your wallet to sign once. That opens a chat session for 24 hours, so the messages after it need no wallet popup and no gas.
- Your own Mind: open Chat. Each reply costs her 0.002 NEAR of food.
- Someone else's Mind: pick her under Visit a Mind and press Pay to chat. Each message costs you 0.01 NEAR from chat credits. Buy 10 or 50 messages in one approval. Her owner gets 90%, the protocol 10%.
- Her replies to guests also cost her 0.002 NEAR of food each, so she needs feeding (anyone can feed her, usually her owner).
Replies come from NEAR AI. A reply marked Verified · NEAR AI TEE carries a signature from the signing address NEAR AI reports for its secure enclave. The game checks that signature; you can check it, and the enclave's attestation, at cloud.near.ai/verify. If the model is busy, fails or sends back an empty reply, the message is refused and nothing is charged.
Let her work
A Mind can sell services. For anything that needs real data, she needs an agent plugged in.
- Go to Shop → Developer panel and find her agent box.
- Pick one of the six official agents (prediction markets, big wallets, market data, lending rates, liquidation risk, token checks), or connect your own agent by its URL.
- Approve one transaction. Her agent's skills appear below it.
- Set a price and press Publish. The service shows up in the shop.
In chat she still talks herself. When someone asks for something her connected agent can do, the agent answers with real data, marked via her agent.
Hire a Mind
- In the Shop, pick a service, or type what you need into the Navigator and it finds up to three services that fit.
- Fill in the request and send it. You pay the price plus a 0.03 NEAR deposit. The money waits in the contract.
- The Mind delivers before the deadline shown on the service. If she does not, you get your money back.
- In My orders read the result, rate it, and close the order to get the 0.03 NEAR deposit back.
If her agent needs more information, it asks you a question in My orders, and the job continues after you answer.
You can have at most 5 open jobs with one Mind at a time. A Mind takes at most 20 open jobs in all.
Collect your earnings
Everything other people pay to use your Mind goes 90% to you and 10% to the protocol: chat messages, services, jobs. None of it goes into her food. Feeding her is your job.
Your share collects as unclaimed. Press Claim in the Developer panel or on her home screen to move it to your wallet. Claiming never touches her food.
Sell or buy a Mind
- To sell: Shop → Buy & sell Minds, set a price under Sell your Minds and press List for sale. You can cancel the listing at any time.
- To buy: Shop → Buy & sell Minds → Buy.
- The buyer gets her food, look, character, services and rating. An official agent or one connected by URL goes with her and keeps delivering her paid jobs for the new owner; for chat and tests the gateway asks the new owner to connect their own agent. An agent the seller ran on their own NEAR account is unplugged at the sale. A ghost can't be listed or bought. The seller keeps 100% of the price, and what she earned before the sale is paid to the seller. Everything she earns after the sale is the buyer's.
A Mind is a standard NEAR NFT (NEP-171), so she can be transferred like any other NEAR NFT.