In-Game Items as NFTs on Solana: Core vs Compressed NFTs

Turning game items into NFTs gives players something games have never offered: real ownership. A sword earned in your game can be kept, traded or sold, even outside it. On Solana, minting items is cheap enough to do at game scale. The question is which approach fits each kind of item.

Two ways to mint items

Metaplex Core

Metaplex Core stores each item in a single account, which keeps minting cheap and makes items easy for programs to read. It's ideal for items that matter: rare weapons, characters, land, anything players trade for real value.

Core's plugins are what make it great for games:

• Attributes stored on-chain, which your game program can update: level, durability, kills, upgrades.
• Freeze rules, to lock an item while it's equipped, staked or in a match.
• Royalties enforced on trades, so your studio earns from the secondary market.
• Soulbound (non-transferable) items for achievements that shouldn't be sold.

Compressed NFTs

Compressed NFTs (made with Metaplex's Bubblegum) store items in a Merkle tree rather than individual accounts, making each mint cost a tiny fraction of a cent. They're ideal for items you'll give to thousands or millions of players: cosmetics, badges, consumables, season rewards, event tickets.

Games read compressed NFTs through indexers (the DAS API offered by RPC providers), which wallets and marketplaces support well.

Choosing per item

Item	Good fit
Rare, upgradable weapon or character	Core
Land or high-value collectibles	Core
Cosmetic skins given to every player	Compressed
Achievement badges	Compressed (or soulbound Core)
Season pass or event ticket	Compressed

Many games use both.

Upgradable items

With Core attributes, an item can grow with the player: a sword that levels up, armour that wears down and gets repaired. Your game's program updates the attributes after verified in-game events, so the item's history lives on-chain and travels with it when it's sold.

Minting without friction

Players shouldn't wait on a mint to keep playing. Common patterns:

• Mint in the background after the reward is earned, and show the item immediately.
• Batch mints of compressed items at the end of a session or season.
• Have the game (not the player) pay the tiny network fee, so players don't need SOL to receive items.

Marketplaces and royalties

Items minted as Core or compressed NFTs can be traded on Solana marketplaces such as Magic Eden and Tensor, and you can build an in-game marketplace too. Set royalties deliberately: they fund the game, but high royalties push trading elsewhere.

Build it with us

We design item systems for Web3 games: which items to mint, how, and the programs that upgrade and use them. See our Web3 gaming service, and read how to build a Web3 game on Solana for the bigger picture.