Pixels is a free-to-play farming and exploration game on the Ronin network. You plant crops, gather resources, craft goods and hand them in on a daily Task Board, which is the only place inside the game that pays out the PIXEL token. This guide covers how a new player gets going in October 2026, what owning or renting land changes, and the open-source tools the team shipped this year.
Risk note: PIXEL is a crypto asset and its price has fallen more than 99% from its peak. Play Pixels because you like farming games. Nothing here is financial advice, and the game should not be treated as a source of income.
What Pixels is
The official site describes Pixels as a world where you manage crops, raise animals, master skills and play with friends, and it is made by Banger Inc. It runs in a browser, so there is nothing to install. Under the hood the game moved to Ronin, the same chain that hosts Axie Infinity, which is why our Axie marketplace guide and this one share a wallet.
| Genre | Social farming and crafting game, played in the browser |
| Blockchain | Ronin |
| Cost to start | Free; land can be bought or rented later |
| Currencies | Coins (in-game) and PIXEL (token) |
| PIXEL supply | 5 billion maximum, about 771 million circulating (CoinGecko, 15 October 2026) |
How to start in 6 steps
The opening hours are slow on purpose. You learn the loop on a small plot before the game asks you to make any decisions about land or tokens.
- Open the game at pixels.xyz and create an account. A Ronin wallet can be attached now or later; you only need it once you want to move PIXEL in or out.
- Follow the opening quests. They teach the basic farming loop and lead you around Terra Villa, the central town where live events and the weekly livestream take place.
- Start on a Speck. According to the help center, Specks are small plots given to free-to-play players so they can learn farming, resource management and crafting without owning anything.
- Watch your energy bar in the top left corner. Every player has a cap of 1,000 energy, and your character slows down as it nears zero.
- Check the Task Board every day. It is run by an NPC called Hazel and pays Coins, experience and sometimes PIXEL for delivering items you produced.
- Pick one or two skills and stick with them. Farming plus one crafting industry is easier to supply than five half-built ones, because every task needs specific items in specific amounts.
Energy decides how much you can do
Almost every action spends energy, and running out is what ends a session for most free players. The official energy article lists the ways to refill it: food and drinks you craft or buy, the sauna, and energy parties.
Energy parties are worth knowing about. The team runs them as live events with a set time and place. The Pixels newsletter for the week of 6 October 2026, for example, announced a party at the Carnival north of Terra Villa on Friday 9 October at 15:00 UTC, plus a smaller boost during the weekly livestream. If your schedule allows it, plan your heavy farming around those boosts.
The Task Board and how PIXEL is earned
The Task Board help page is blunt: it is the only way to earn PIXEL inside the game. Each task shows the item Hazel wants, the quantity, the reward and the experience it gives. After you complete one, a new task appears five minutes later, and the whole board resets every day at 00:00 UTC. Unfinished tasks disappear at the reset.
PIXEL tasks are not guaranteed. Some days they show up right after the reset, some days only after you clear a few Coins tasks, and some days not at all. One change new players miss: when we visited the help center on 15 October 2026, PIXEL from stacked tasks was being claimed through the Shop on the separate Stacked website rather than inside the game itself.
So the honest expectation is this. Coins keep your farm running. PIXEL arrives occasionally and in amounts that depend on your level, your land and your luck with the board.
Land: Speck, rented or owned
There are 5,000 NFT farms, numbered 1 to 5,000 and lined up along the Rainbow Road, with odd numbers to the left and even numbers to the right. The NFT farms page points buyers to the Pixels Farm collection on OpenSea and warns about a step many people skip: after buying, you have to walk to the farm and click its gate to claim it.
Renting is the middle path. Pixels documents rentals through LootRush, where you connect a secondary wallet, pick a plot and wait a few hours for it to appear under My Lands. Read the small print on VIP benefits before you rely on them. The renting guide says VIP status follows the oldest land in your wallet, and a newly rented plot has to be held for 14 days before the status comes back.
Our view is that nobody should buy land in their first month. Play on a Speck, try a rental if the loop holds your interest, and only then compare what a farm costs against what it would add for you.
Staking PIXEL
PIXEL holders can stake their tokens into games in the Pixels family. The staking help article describes two routes:
- In-game staking needs at least 100 PIXEL and an account that stays active in the game. Inactive accounts do not receive rewards even if they hold enough.
- External staking through the dashboard at staking.pixels.xyz has no minimum and no activity requirement. Rewards go to the dashboard.
You can unstake whenever you want, but the tokens stay locked for three days before you can withdraw them. If you log in with an email or Google account, there is one more thing to check: that is a Ronin Waypoint wallet, and on 1 October 2026 Ronin gave those users an extra two weeks to finish a required migration so they would not lose access to their stake.
What changed in 2026: open source and community builds
The biggest shift this year is that Pixels opened its code. The team first published the game client, then the backend, and in August 2026 launched a Community Hub at community.pixels.xyz. Builders upload mods, tools, quests or full forks of the game, the team reviews them for safety, and players vote on which ones should be merged into the live version. Voting is weighted by what you hold in the game, including staked PIXEL.
Non-developers get Realms and Reforge, a no-code system for spinning up your own instance of Pixels and sharing a link to it. On 6 October 2026 the first community features went live in the main game: favourite Marketplace items, a search box on the sell tab, land access permissions by category and an in-game recipe book. The post says the builders behind them had earned over 450,000 PIXEL in bounties.
For ordinary players the practical effect is a stream of small quality-of-life fixes. When we visited the Pixels Post archive on 15 October 2026, the three latest release notes (2, 6 and 10 October) covered Tier 5 balance tweaks and gameplay fixes rather than big new systems. The team also states that its servers still check every action in the official game, so an open client does not let anyone mod themselves free tokens or items.
Is Pixels worth playing?
Pixels is a good fit if you enjoy Stardew-style routines, short daily sessions and a social town where events happen at fixed times. It is free to try properly, and the Speck gives you enough to judge whether the loop works for you.
It is a poor fit if you are looking for income. On 15 October 2026 CoinGecko listed PIXEL at about $0.0054, against an all-time high of $1.02 in March 2024. The token rewards are a bonus on top of a farming game, and the history of GameFi shows what happens to players who treat them as a salary.
If you want to compare it with other options first, see our list of the best play-to-earn crypto games. If Pixels is the one, start on a Speck tonight, clear the Task Board for a week and keep your wallet empty until you know you will stay.
