How to Play Plant vs Undead (PVU)

Plant vs Undead (or “PVU”) is a multiplayer tower defense game inspired by many widely-known tower defense games. The name sounds like a spinoff of the popular Plant vs Zombie from Electronic Arts, but both are very different. In PVU, players would lead magical Plants to defend their Mother Trees from bloodthirsty Undead and earn cryptocurrency rewards.

The game developer’s ultimate goal in developing PVU is to contribute to a new chapter of gaming history by creating the best blockchain-based tower defense game while providing players with the best free-to-play-to-earn (F2P2E) mechanism. Their primary focus is on mobile devices as they hope that everybody can play their game anytime and anywhere.

In this article, we will look into how to start playing the current version of Plant vs Undead.

How to play Plant vs Undead?

1. Obtain BNB Token

Plant vs Undead is running on the Binance Smart Chain Network. A small amount of BNB is required to transact on the network.

On the top of your MetaMask wallet, change your network to Binance Smart Chain. Select the custom RPC button and input the following information:

Network Name: Binance Smart Chain
New RPC URL: https://bsc-dataseed.binance.org/
ChainID: 56
Symbol: BNB
Block Explorer URL: https://bscscan.com/

Next, fund your BSC wallet with BNB by bridging assets from the mainnet using the Binance bridge or purchase BNB through the Binance app.

2. Swap for PVU Token

Go to PancakeSwap to swap some of your BNB tokens to PVU tokens. Enter the contract address manually on PancakeSwap. It is recommended to exchange at least 5 PVU to start the game. Of course, don’t forget to keep some BNB for transaction fees.

PVU Contract Address: 0x31471e0791fcdbe82fbf4c44943255e923f1b794

Next, add a custom token in your MetaMask wallet to view the PVU token you just purchased. In MetaMask, click “Add Token” then choose “Custom Token”. Next, paste the same contract address in the box and confirm.

3. Login to Plant vs Undead using MetaMask Wallet

Once you have obtained sufficient PVU and BNB tokens, go to Plant vs Undead official website and login to the game by connecting your MetaMask wallet. Don’t panic if the website loads slow or crashes as the game is still at its beta phase.

4. Engage in Farming

Plant vs Undead Farm Mode involves planting seeds and watering your farm to harvest a resource known as Light Energy or LE. LE may be exchanged into PVU tokens, which can then be traded on cryptocurrency platforms.

You can obtain LE by harvesting it from your seeds after they have grown for a few days or by completing the daily quest of watering other players' plants. Follow the steps outlined below to discover how to engage in PVU farming.

Step 1. Convert PVU to Light Energy (LE)

Go to the Farm tab and from there, click the converter on the top right corner. Select “PVU TO LE” to convert. At the time of writing, the one-way conversion rate is at 1 PVU = 105 LE.

Step 2. Claim your free land plots

New players will receive 6 empty land plots: 1 plot for a mother tree and 5 plots for plants. You may claim the land plots via the “Land” tab in the Farm interface.

Step 3. Visit the shop to buy farming necessities

Navigate to the shop by clicking on the button on the left to purchase farming tools. Then, select the “Tools” tab on the top.

To begin growing sunflowers, you will need at least one little pot and one set of water, which you can use 100 times.

It is important to click the buy button only once when purchasing products with LE from the Shop. This is because the game is still in its beta testing phase, and the game may lag frequently. Make sure you only click once, then wait for the interface to update.

Step 4. Buy Sunflower seeds

Head over to the “Sunflower” tab to purchase Sunflower seeds.

You may plant any Sunflower, which will give you the LE rewards in the description. You may also try your luck with the Sun Box, which will give you a chance to obtain the following items (subject to change):

30% to drop 100x water and 20x scarecrows
30% to drop 2x small pots
30% to drop 1x Sunflower Sapling
9.9% to drop 1x Sunflower Mama
0.1% to drop 1x seed

Step 5. Plant Sunflowers and water them

Once you have purchased the necessary farming tools and seeds, you are ready to plant your Sunflower. Click on the “+” icon on top of the farming tab, select an available land, and choose a Sunflower seed you want to grow.

Return to your farm home, and you’ll notice a new plant with the caption “Add pot to start farming.” Click on the plant slot and then the “Use” button next to the pot. Water your plant twice by clicking the “Use” button next to the watering can icon.

When your Sunflowers have reached full maturity, it is time to harvest their Light Energies. Simply go to your farm and click "Harvest All" in the upper right corner. Once harvested, remove the land plot to plant another new Sunflower.

Step 6. Check out the new update for each Farming session

As the game is still in its testing phase, it updates quite frequently. Before Farm 2.5, players could participate in daily quests that involved helping neighbors water their plants and scare away crows.

However, the daily quests were replaced by the World Tree in Farm 2.5 update on September 6. All players must work together to water and take care of the World Tree to earn corresponding rewards:

Reward 1: 10LE + 1 Sunflower Sapling – Requirement: 4,000,000 water
Reward 2: 15LE + 1 Sunflower Saplings – Requirement: 6,000,000 water
Reward 3: 25LE + 2 Sunflower Saplings – Requirement: 9,000,000 water
Reward 4: 1 Sun box + 2 Sunflower Saplings – Requirement: 12,000,000 water
Reward 5: Every plant is automatically fully watered for the next day + 50LE + 4 Sunflower Saplings – Requirement: 15,000,000 water

It is unclear whether the World Tree will get replaced in the next update or if the game will just refresh the watering status.

According to the official Farm 3.0 sneak peek, we might expect to raise undead pets, defend crops from crows, fish, gather, mining, crafting, and more in the upcoming update.

5. Wait for the release of PvP and PvE

According to the game's whitepaper and official announcements, the core play-to-earn portion of Plant vs Undead will be the tower-defense game mode, which includes PVE and PVP gameplay.

PVU announced on September 21 that the beta for PvP mode for Plant vs Undead would be released mid-October on a new chain, Factory chain, which means that the PvP mode will be a different game using an independent ecosystem along with a new token. Meanwhile, PvE mode will be integrated into Farm mode in Update 3.0, which will be released in Q4, 2021

Should I Start Playing Now?

One thing to note is that since the game is still in its very early stage, the developers are seemingly still trying to figure out how the GameFi ecosystem should work out. It appears that the developers are using a trial-and-error approach to adjust the cost and reward of players.

For instance, on September 23, PVU discord admin under alias JangMin announced that the one-way conversion rate of LE -> PVU would be adjusted from 150:1 to 500:1 effective almost immediately. Meanwhile, the PVU -> LE rate would remain 1:105. Consequently, players who haven’t converted their LE Token before the implementation would lose their PVU earnings by 3.33X.

In the meantime, the LE -> PVU exchange rate will increase by 10% every week. Such that, the LE -> PVU rate would be 500:1 on the first week, 550:1 on the second week, 605:1 on the third week, and so on. (10% weekly increase is subject to change. You may find the most recent conversion rate update on the Discord server's announcement tab.)

Initially, the developers introduced this scheme to prevent the game from getting overheated in a short period of time. Unsurprisingly, it will also incentivize players to cash out asap instead of retaining their earnings in the ecosystem. The overwhelming majority of community members do not support the arrangement and hope that the team will revise it soon as it is detrimental to the game in the long run.

Overall, the game updates frequently, and any piece of advice would become obsolete very quickly. So, you might want to do your own research on the latest development to decide if you are going to play the game.