Provenance Hash Questions

[spike-hue]

I have a questions about provenance hash.

Projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club have a webpage like this. Picture:

I'm not sure how one would recreate this Bored Ape Yacht Club webpage when using this library. Some questions I have are:

1. How does one choose a starting index? Is this randomly chosen by us and set here in library as shown here with const startIndex = 0;? Some projects like Invisible Friends seem to do complicated things to get a starting index as shown in link.
2. Is this formula (tokenId + startingIndex) % 10000 → Initial Sequence Index used at all in this library? Not sure if this is something done somewhere else.
3. I generated the provenance hash with node utils/provenance.js using sample artwork. However, I don't see the hashes of individual images. Are these provided?
4. Is the Bored Ape Yacht Club webpage overkill?

[nftchef]

Hi, this is a more complex subject.

4. for most projects, yes. Attention to provenance and offset "true randomness" has fallen a bit out of popularity in the last couple of months. It's still a good practice to handle this in the contract from the beginning, but perhaps a page like this is best saved for after minting is closed and if the community asks for it (my opinion)

5. The start index is usually chosen in a single Chainlink VRF call to get a random number (in the smart contract)

6. This formula can be used in the smart contract for convenience, but it generally will happen off-chain on your metadata server (so you won't be using IPFS initially)

7. The generator will output individual hash for each image as long as the option is set to true in config.js. Then, after generation, when running the provenance hash script, it will output provenance.json containing the concatenated string (like BAYC) and the single provenance hash

Hope that helps! I am moving this to a discussion to preserve the conversation for others.