The complete handbook — gameplay, tokenomics, and every number the dungeon runs on.
A revival of the 2021 classic Crusaders of Crypto, rebuilt on Polygon.
← back to the game
1. What is Pi Crusaders?
Crusaders of MATIC is a dice-driven roguelike dungeon crawler on Polygon — a faithful revival of Crusaders of Crypto (2021), whose mechanics were recovered from its archived documentation. Everything the original did on BNB Chain, this game does with POL (the token formerly known as MATIC) and the CRUSADER ERC-20: holder tiers, drop rates, the redistribution pool, the P2P market, seasons — the works. This page is the equivalent of the original's docs site: every system and every number, in one place.
Numbers on this page marked ⚙ are read live from the game's own data files, so they can't drift out of date.
2. Getting started & controls
Sign in with your wallet (MetaMask or any Polygon wallet — one gas-free signature) to earn rupees on the server, hold CRUSADER, trade, and win POL prizes. Your wallet IS your account. Guest mode works offline for pure gameplay.
Pick a crusader, gear up, and Delve. Dying is normal — this is a roguelike. You keep rupees earned on victorious runs.
Controls
D-pad (bottom of the crawl screen): tap an arrow to step, hold to keep walking. The whole pad responds — a tap resolves to the nearest arrow, and the exact center does nothing (no wasted turns).
Swipe anywhere on the dungeon also steps.
Keyboard: arrows / WASD to move · Space or . to wait a turn · I inventory · M map · L combat log.
Walk into a monster to attack it. Walk into chests, potions and stairs to use them.
3. Game modes
4. Crusaders (heroes) ⚙
5. Combat & status effects
Combat is bump-attack: step into an enemy to strike. Damage = your ATK vs their DEF (minimum 1), then abilities and procs fire. Effects you'll meet:
True damage ignores DEF entirely.
Stun 💫 — lose your next turn(s). Poison 🧪 / Burn 🔥 — damage over time.
Weaken 🔻 — temporary ATK or DEF reduction. Buffs 🔺 — the opposite.
Siphon — steals HP. Regen — heals over time.
Item procs roll their chance on hit or when hit — stack gear whose procs feed each other.
6. Monsters ⚙
Monster stats scale with difficulty level (Normal uses Lv0 stats, Hard Lv1, Expert Lv2 — the World Boss uses higher still). Abilities always apply.
7. Items ⚙
Gear drops from dungeon-clear rolls (see Drop system), the Vendor, events and the market. Each piece enhances Lv0→Lv3 at the Forge; enchant levels and affixes travel with the item when traded or exported. Grouped by rarity:
8. Pets ⚙
Pets hatch from eggs found on boss corpses. One follows you at a time; it acts when you attack, and Forge levels (Lv0–Lv3) strengthen the effect. Some gear boosts pets — the pet echo effect gives them a chance to act twice (or three times) in a turn.
9. Forge & enchanting ⚙
10. Vendor & rupees ⚙
Rupees 💎 are the in-game currency: earned from kills, floor-clear bonuses, chests, passive CRUSADER generation and events; spent at the Vendor, Forge, and on boosters. The server is authoritative for rupee balances — they only change through validated runs and purchases.
11. CRUSADER tokenomics ⚙
CRUSADER is the game's holder token — a real ERC-20 on Polygon with a fixed 1,000,000 supply minted at deployment, no mint function and no owner (see On-chain reference). The game is wallet-native: what your wallet holds IS your balance.
Max supply: 1,000,000 CRUSADER (rebased — 1 CRUSADER here = 1B of the original's units, so all original thresholds carry over).
Buy: a fixed peg set by the operator (1 POL = 1 CRUSADER at launch; lower on the testnet while POL is faucet-only). Set any whole amount in the POL Shop — the shop always shows the live price and your running total. Sales stop when the distribution wallet runs dry. Or trade on QuickSwap once liquidity is listed.
DEX trading tax: buys and sells against the QuickSwap pool pay 9% (contract-enforced, hard-capped at 10%) into the rewards treasury — redistributed daily to all holders pro-rata, as CRUSADER, through the owed queue. Wallet-to-wallet transfers and game flows are untaxed.
Passive rupees: rupees/day per 100 CRUSADER held, claimable in the Home Dungeon (blocked while you hold + rupees — the original's anti-hoard rule).
Wallet-native: there is no in-game token ledger. Purchases are delivered on-chain straight to your Pi wallet (enable CRUSADER in the wallet's Tokens page first — the shop walks you through it), and holder tiers, drop gates, pity, guarantees and event entry all read the balance your verified wallet holds on-chain.
Verified by construction: sign-in is a wallet signature, so the wallet counted for tiers, drops and Loot Room shares is cryptographically yours — nobody can borrow a whale's address.
Owed queue: earned tokens (Expedition claims, market proceeds) wait in the Home Dungeon until you claim them — one on-chain payment to your wallet.
Deflation: the NFT Market's 10% tax on CRUSADER-priced sales is burned — sent to the issuer account, out of circulation forever.
Holding CRUSADER is what turns runs into income: it gates drops, the pity system, daily guarantees, enchanting, event entry, and your share of the Loot Room.
12. Holder tiers ⚙
13. Drop system & pity ⚙
14. Loot Room — the POL redistribution pool
The original redistributed 9% of every purchase to holders in BNB. Here it's real POL, split by what your wallet holds:
9% of every POL purchase in the game flows into the day's pot, plus half the 10% tax on every POL-priced market sale.
The 9% QuickSwap trading tax is a second reward stream: settled daily pro-rata by holdings, paid in CRUSADER via your owed tokens.
Once per UTC day the pot is split pro-rata by the CRUSADER each verified wallet holds on-chain at snapshot time. No verified holders that day? The pot rolls into the next.
Claim from the Home Dungeon: paid as a native POL transfer straight to your wallet, with its transaction hash. Minimum payout 0.1 POL (gas + dust).
Until the contracts are configured on a server, prize claims fall back to rupees at 10,000 per POL.
15. POL Shop & Expedition Pass
🪙 CRUSADER — fixed peg: 1 POL per 1 CRUSADER, always. Enter any whole amount and buy — one wallet transaction pays the checkout contract, the server verifies the on-chain event and sends the tokens straight to your wallet. No packs, no discounts, 1,000,000 total supply.
🎫 Expedition Pass (1 POL) — the original's daily-claim engine:
Claim once per day in the Home Dungeon after a dungeon run within the last 3 days. Days don't stack — the original's rule.
First 20 days: +5 CRUSADER/day recoup (100 CRUSADER over the window).
Every claim: +0.1 CRUSADER per NFT point (1 point per item owned + 0.5 per enhance level, max 90 points).
5% chance per claim of an exclusive item drop.
16. Events
🏆 Weekend Leaderboard — every week, Friday 14:00 UTC → Sunday 14:00 UTC (the original's Fri–Sun window). Best victorious Hard/Expert delve score counts; CRUSADER holders only. The top 25 split a 5 POL pool, weighted by rank. Prizes are claimable POL (paid on-chain) with the rupee fallback.
👑 World Boss — the last 3 days of every month. Requires 5+ CRUSADER. There is no victory — deal as much damage as you can before you fall; your best attempt counts and no rupees are earned in the arena. Winners (0.1 POL each) scale with the community's total damage, Miremint-style: 7 ranked + 3 lucky under 30k damage · 10 + 5 at 30k+ · 25 + 5 at 100k+.
⚡ First-Clear races — limited windows where the first 3 crusaders to a feat (e.g. an Expert delve victory) split a POL prize and take a limited item that never drops again.
17. NFT Market
The original's P2P marketplace: sell your gear drops to other crusaders for POL or CRUSADER — enchant levels and affixes travel with the item. CRUSADER sales settle on-chain: the buyer sends one ERC-20 transfer from their own wallet, the server matches the Transfer log, the seller's 90% lands in their owed queue, and the 10% tax is burned to 0x…dEaD.
Sell rupee bundles for POL (1,000–100,000 per bundle) — the original's "sell RUPEE directly" feature.
Every sale pays the original 10% market tax. POL-sale tax: half feeds the Loot Room pool, half is app revenue (the original 50/50). CRUSADER-sale tax: burned.
Listings escrow the goods server-side (no duping), max 8 at once. A purchase locks the listing for 10 minutes so cancels and rival buyers can't race the payment.
POL proceeds reach the seller through the prize-claim flow; CRUSADER proceeds wait in the owed queue for a one-transaction claim.
18. NFT Vault — real on-chain NFTs
Epic+ gear and rare+ pets can leave the game as real ERC-721 tokens in the Crusader Relics collection on Polygon:
Each export mints a unique token (game name CRSDITM#### / CRSDPET####, token id = the serial) straight to your signed-in wallet. Metadata — kind, relic, level, affixes, artwork — is served by the game at the token's tokenURI, so marketplaces render it out of the box.
Flow: pick the relic → it moves into vault escrow → one server-signed mint puts it in your wallet. No token-enabling dance: ERC-721s need no trustlines. Cancel any time before minting.
The NFT is a normal Polygon asset: hold it, send it, list it on OpenSea or any marketplace.
Play from the chain 🔗: minted relics held by your wallet stay playable in-game — equip the gear, let the pet follow you. They're frozen while on-chain (no forge, enchant, vendor sale or market listing), and if the wallet sends the NFT away, the relic leaves your game with it.
Import back: one wallet transaction sends the token to the vault address; the server spots the Transfer event and the relic (enchants intact) returns to your account as a normal mutable item, the NFT out of circulation.
Trust model, honestly: the game server owns the collection's mint key and enforces one-token-per-relic; the contract enforces unique token ids. Full details in the repo's docs/NFT.md.
19. PVPD — Player vs Player Dungeons & seasons
The original's asynchronous PvP. Everyone plays both roles: as Dungeon Master you configure a dungeon (normal monsters, auxiliaries, a boss) that other players raid; as Crusader you raid theirs. Matches have the original 10-minute limit.
Dual TrueSkill leaderboards — separate Crusader and Dungeon Master ratings (Microsoft defaults, like the original). 5 games minimum to appear in rankings.
Seasons run ~3 weeks. Top 10 on each board win 0.1 POL plus the season-exclusive item (the Champion's Signet); 3 lucky crusaders ranked in both top-50s win the item too.
Test-raid your own dungeon any time without rating changes.
20. On-chain reference (Polygon)
Contracts — three small, dependency-free Solidity contracts (source in the repo's contracts/): CrusaderToken (fixed-supply ERC-20, no owner, no mint function), CrusaderRelics (the ERC-721 vault collection) and CrusaderPayments (the POL checkout: pay(ref) emits an indexed event the server verifies before goods move).
Deployed addresses are announced by the server at /api/chain-info — the game reads them from there, so this page never goes stale.
Network: Polygon Amoy testnet during development (chainId 80002), Polygon mainnet (chainId 137) at launch. The game offers to add/switch the network in your wallet automatically.
Explore any address, token or transaction at polygonscan.com (Amoy: amoy.polygonscan.com).
1,000,000 CRUSADER — the whole supply — minted to the distribution wallet at deployment. The token contract has no owner and no mint function: the supply is locked from block one.
21. Fair play & server authority
Rupees, CRUSADER, drops, market escrow, prizes and NFTs are all server-authoritative — client saves can't mint value.
Dungeon-clear submissions are validated (mode, difficulty, floor and damage sanity) and rate-limited by the 5-minute win cooldown.
POL payments are verified on-chain end-to-end (every order is matched to its Paid event before goods move), and payouts are real signed transactions with public hashes.