1K Gallery

Overview

The Time Travelers is the third collection by 1K Gallery. It presents 1,000 pixel-art scenes in which John Zegrus and John Titor, two figures of time-travel folklore, stand together at twenty-five recognisable places on earth.

Every piece is a distinct combination of one location and one outfit for each traveller, composed on a 512-block grid at 2,048 × 2,048 pixels with a 256-colour palette. Eight grails carry the rarest location and the rarest outfit of both travellers at once.

Core specifications

Creation and curation process

1. The twenty-five locations and the twenty outfits — ten for each traveller, in five variants each — were produced and approved before any combination existed.
2. Every scene was composed on a fixed 512-block grid at 2,048 × 2,048 pixels, within a 256-colour palette, so that the pixel unit is identical across the whole collection.
3. The two travellers occupy fixed positions in every work: John Zegrus on the left, John Titor on the right. The rule is compositional, not incidental.
4. Exactly 1,000 combinations were selected, with the eight grails reserved by the allocation rather than left to chance.
5. All combinations underwent automated validation and visual review.
6. Final files were checked for quantity, dimensions, sequence, metadata correspondence, and cryptographic uniqueness.

Trait distribution

The percentages below represent the exact frequency of each trait within the 1,000-NFT supply.

Location — 25 values

The locations are deliberately close to even — twenty-four of them sit at 40 or 41 items. The Eiffel Tower is the single exception at 25, and it is the rarest location in the collection.

John Zegrus — outfits

John Titor — outfits

The same shape repeats for both travellers: nine outfits share the supply almost evenly, and one is scarce. Rock-Punk for Zegrus and Pajamas for Titor each appear in 25 items — the same count as the Eiffel Tower.

Variants

Each outfit exists in five variants, numbered 01 to 05. Within an outfit the variants are not evenly divided: in the ordinary outfits they range from about 13 to 34 items, and inside the two scarce outfits from 2 to 8. The variant is recorded in the metadata for every item, so the full variant-level distribution can be derived directly from the public records without relying on this document.

Grails

Eight items carry the rarest location and the rarest outfit of both travellers at the same time — Eiffel Tower, Rock-Punk and Pajamas together. They were reserved by the allocation rather than left to chance, and their existence is stated in the collection's public description on every marketplace.

How the metadata is modelled

This collection records its traits differently from the gallery's first two, and the difference is visible to anyone reading the metadata or browsing the trait panel on a marketplace. It is set out here so that nobody has to reverse-engineer it.

Instead of one Zegrus Outfit attribute whose value is the outfit name, there is one attribute per outfit — Zegrus-Cargo, Titor-Safari, and so on — and its value is the variant number. Each item therefore carries exactly three populated attributes: its Location, one of the ten Zegrus outfits, and one of the ten Titor outfits.

The consequence is that outfit and variant are read together rather than as separate fields: an item is not “Cargo, variant 03” but Zegrus-Cargo: 03. Rarity tools that work from the public metadata will compute frequencies at that combined level, which is finer-grained than the outfit tables above.

How rarity is calculated

The collection does not include a Rarity Tier trait and does not pre-classify NFTs as Common, Rare, or Legendary. Rarity is a mathematical consequence of trait frequencies and the specific combination present in each NFT.

The gallery uses the same score across its collections: the sum, across the attributes an item carries, of the inverse frequency of each value.

Where count is the number of items in the whole collection carrying that same value. A value present in 25 items contributes 40.00 to the score; one present in 109 contributes 9.17. The rarer the value, the more it adds. Ranks run from 1, the rarest item in the collection, to 1,000, the most common.

A less frequent trait may contribute to an artwork's rarity, but overall rarity depends on the complete set of attributes. Marketplaces and independent tools can therefore calculate rankings from the actual metadata, without a promotional category inserted by the collection and without trusting this document.

Rarity across Token IDs

In the gallery's inaugural collection the artwork-to-token assignment was not shuffled: numbering followed the order of generation, which produced a measurable rarity gradient across token IDs. That gradient was disclosed in full on the first collection's technical sheet, together with a commitment:

The commitment applies here: the allocation is seeded, and the shuffle is the last step of the generator, so no ordering can reassert itself afterwards. The seed and the hash of the script that consumed it go in the integrity section above, and are published before the first mint — without them the guarantee is a claim rather than something anyone can check.

Measured distribution by ID range

For each block of 100 token IDs: the average rarity rank, and how many of the collection's 100 rarest items fall inside it. Rank 1 is the rarest item in the collection and rank 1,000 the most common, so a block with no bias averages near 500.

The averages run from 452 to 532 — a spread of 80 positions around a collection mean of 501. From the first block to the last the difference is −39: the end of the numbering is marginally rarer than the beginning, which is the opposite of a gradient and the signature of noise rather than order. The hundred rarest items are spread across every block, between eight and thirteen in each.

The figures above were computed from the public metadata, using the formula in the previous section — not from any internal value of the generator. Anyone can reproduce them from the files on IPFS.

Items reserved for the gallery

100 items. They are minted from the gallery's own wallet in the Gallery stage on 6 October 2026, a full day before the public opening. Because the contract issues IDs in the order transactions land, and the gallery mints first, that block corresponds to tokens #1 through #100.

File integrity and provenance

Each of the 1,000 images has a unique trait combination and a distinct SHA-256 hash. The values below document the version prepared before publication without revealing the individual manifest or the association between images and Token IDs.

The provenance hash is computed over the bytes of the image manifest exactly as delivered. Reopening and saving that file in a text editor would change its hash and invalidate the published provenance, which is why the delivered file is never edited.

The complete individual image-hash manifest will be disclosed only after the reveal.

Images and metadata

Image specification

• All images are 2,048 × 2,048 pixels with a square composition.
• Each scene is composed on a 512-block grid: every pixel of the artwork is a block of 4 × 4 screen pixels, so the pixel unit stays identical across the collection and at any display size.
• The palette is limited to 256 colours.
• Delivery is PNG, at 468 to 511 KB per file.

Why PNG and not JPEG

The gallery's first two collections deliver JPEG. This one does not, and the reason was measured on the actual 2,048-pixel artwork rather than assumed:

For pixel art, JPEG is both larger and worse. The format exists to compress smooth photographic gradients; an image made of hard-edged blocks in a 256-colour palette is the worst possible input for it, and the artefacts land exactly on the block boundaries that define the medium. PNG stores the palette exactly, at no loss, in two-thirds of the space.

A rule that only applies to pixel art

Because the artwork is built on a 4-pixel block, only three operations preserve the grid: a native crop, a division by two, and a division by four. Any other scaling blurs the block edges and the result stops being pixel art. Every graphic piece produced for this collection — logo, banners, previews — was made by native cropping rather than free resizing.

Metadata

• The metadata contains 1,000 records encoded in UTF-8, one for each NFT.
• The attribute model is described in its own section above.

Filename correspondence

• The sequence 1.png through 1000.png corresponds directly to The Time Travelers #1 through The Time Travelers #1000.
• The tokenID field in the metadata matches the numeric part of the filename, with no offset and no zero padding.
• The base URI is written with a trailing slash, because the contract concatenates the token number onto it; the collection URI, which points at a single file, is written without one.

Contract, storage and license

Every value below was read back from the blockchain — by eth_call against a public RPC node — rather than copied from the interface that wrote it. A confirmation screen reports what a tool intended to do; only reading the contract reports what it did.

The four IPFS uploads were verified the same way, by fetching them through a gateway and comparing SHA-256. The chain contract → metadata → image was closed end to end at both ends of the numbering, tokens 1 and 1000.

Still to publish

Everything in this sheet is final except the values below. All of them are filled in before the first mint:

• Allocation seed and the hash of the script that consumed it
• Deployment block and date