FAQ

WHAT IS THIS?

A vertical mine with a record at the bottom. You dig, the music unmuffles. Every layer of depth unlocks another stem. Only in the final meters before the vault does the full mix play and the track is yours to claim.

IS IT FREE?

Yes. The digging, the music, the claim — all free. Blisters not included.

DO I NEED A CRYPTO WALLET?

No. An email address is enough — for saving progress and for claiming the track. A wallet is created for you behind the scenes, and the network fees are on us. If you know what a seed phrase is, great. If not, even better.

WHAT DO THE FIRST EXCAVATORS GET?

Each drop is a limited edition — the founding drop is just ten, most are twenty-five. Reach the core, register your spot, and the track is yours as an on-chain collectible. Everyone after the last number still gets the full experience — just not the deed to it.

I’M STUCK BETWEEN ROCKS. HELP?

Jump (↑ or W). Granite also breaks eventually — it just takes stubbornness. This question is dedicated to Aidan.

WHAT’S THE GREEN GLOWING RECORD?

A radioactive master pressing. Don’t dig into it. You’re going to dig into it, aren’t you? Fine — the contamination wears off after a few seconds. The shame is permanent.

IS MY PROGRESS SAVED?

Locally, always. Sign in and your archive follows you across devices — relics, stats, footage, everything.

WHY DOES THE MUSIC KEEP PLAYING?

Because it’s good. But fine: the ❚❚ button (or spacebar) pauses it, and the 🔊 button mutes the sound effects.

WILL THERE BE MORE DROPS?

Yes. Every drop is its own world, its own track, its own edition. The archive is deep and we have shovels.

HOW DOES THE MINTING ACTUALLY WORK?

You sign in with an email address and a wallet quietly comes into existence for you. When you claim, our gas station sends that wallet a droplet of ETH — about two cents, the archive runs on small change — and your wallet mints the token itself from the drop’s own contract. One per wallet, enforced by the contract, not by a promise. No seed phrases, no browser extensions, no “connect wallet” popup from 2021.

WHAT IS THIS WEBSITE BUILT ON?

The site is Next.js and React. The mine itself is PixiJS, drawing a few thousand tiles in your browser while the stems fade in around you. Progress lives in Supabase, payments run through Stripe, the collectibles live on Base. There is no game engine and nothing to install — the entire excavation is a web page. Your phone can do this. We checked.

WHICH BLOCKCHAIN? AND WHY?

Base, an Ethereum layer 2. A mint costs less than two cents and we pay it. We are not going to explain rollups in an FAQ. The point is that you never notice the chain — which is how chains should be.

WHERE DOES MY TOKEN’S ART LIVE?

On our own servers, at excavara.com/nft/<drop> — no third-party storage service in the middle. Open your token’s metadata and you’ll find the cover, the edition, the depth… and the full track, sitting right inside it. The song literally travels with the deed.

CAN I SELL MY CLAIMED TRACK?

It’s a standard on-chain edition in a wallet you own, so yes — it trades anywhere collectibles trade. But claims are free and the editions are tiny. The value isn’t the flip; it’s being one of the handful of names in a drop’s ledger, forever.

WHY DO DROPS COST WHAT THEY COST? (ASKING FOR AN ARTIST)

Because a drop is not an upload. Your track gets split into stems, your art becomes strata, collectibles and a buried world, a smart contract gets deployed just for you, and the whole thing stays live, hosted and diggable — for everyone, for free, indefinitely. It costs less than a day in a studio and a fraction of a music video. And unlike the music video, people can’t skip it: they’re holding the shovel.

IS THE MINE THE SAME FOR EVERYONE?

No. Every run is carved fresh — your tunnel is yours alone. The translucent diggers you sometimes see are real people, live, digging their own mine in the same drop. That’s why they drift through your rock: they’re not in your mine, they’re in theirs. Wave anyway.

WHY DOES THE ROCK GET HARDER THE DEEPER I GO?

Physics, obviously. Also: the descent is tuned per drop so the full mix arrives roughly when you do. Short track, harder rock. The geology is doing the mastering.

WHAT IF EXCAVARA DISAPPEARS TOMORROW?

Your token lives on Base, not on our servers — it would survive us. The music and metadata we host ourselves, which is also why no third-party storage company can lose them for us. That said: the archive intends to be the thing that gets dug up, not the thing that gets buried.