In an unexpected turn, prominent Telegram crypto game X Empire—previously known as Musk Empire—has launched a new mini-season ahead of the airdrop, offering players another chance to rack up a share of tokens before the launch.

It’s unexpected because on Monday, X Empire shut down its game—described as ending its initial mining phase—ahead of the planned token launch and airdrop, which are now expected to come in the back half of October.

But with the new “Chill Phase,” X Empire players will be able to continue tapping their avatar—be it Elon Musk-inspired or otherwise—and unlock various upgrades. However, all character progression has been reset, which means it’s effectively like starting the game over again during this shortened play period.

The “Chill Phase” will let players compete to earn a slice of an additional 34.5 billion tokens, which were newly carved out for players from the total token supply. In a Telegram announcement, the developers said that rewards for the initial phase have been calculated, and that any progress made (or not made) during the Chill Phase will not affect those allocations.

As before, 70% of the planned total supply of 690 billion X tokens is still assigned to the initial mining phase. Now, an additional 5% of the supply will be allocated to “Chill Phase” players, coming from the 30% of tokens originally allocated to “new users and next phases.”

The late shift comes ahead of the token generation event on The Open Network (TON), where the entire 75% of the supply will be offered to eligible players. This is expected to take place in “the second half of October,” with an exact date being announced in the coming days.

“This phase will be very short and will only last a couple of weeks,” X Empire posted on social media. “Whether to participate or not is entirely up to you. We love you either way.”

The Elon Musk themed tap-to-earn game ended its mining phase on Tuesday, claiming to have attracted almost 48 million players. Those players also minted 570,000 NFT vouchers that enabled pre-market trading for the X token before its official launch.

These NFTs that represent 69,000 X tokens apiece are currently trading for approximately 3.5 TON ($19). This figure has largely remained stable since the tokenomics were announced. Pre-market trading can be particularly risky, however, as traders speculate on the price of a soon-to-launch token despite a number of unknown factors.

September was a big month for Telegram games coming to the end of their tap-to-earn cycles, with Catizen, Rocky Rabbit, and Hamster Kombat all releasing tokens. As these games look to reinvent themselves to keep players interested, it appears that X Empire will continue to stay in the pre-airdrop phase for at least a while longer.

Edited by Andrew Hayward