Every gift in the Patchwork Post is real. So is its footprint. Here is the honest arithmetic.
About six hundred to one. Not zero: a digital parcel still costs something, and we would rather say the small true number than a round untrue one.
Your photo travels. About one megabyte up from your phone, then a few copies down to the receiver's game and their wardrobe: roughly five megabytes in all, a few ten-thousandths of a kilowatt-hour.
A machine looks at it first. Before anyone else sees a shirt, an automated check reads the picture and the story so a person can review anything doubtful. That call runs in the United States for a fraction of a second.
It lives on a server. The parcel, the story and the tracker sit in a database in Germany for as long as you keep your account.
Add it up with ordinary grid electricity and you get a couple of grams. With the server on renewable power it is less; we keep saying two, to stay on the safe side.
The Patchwork Post runs on a single machine at Hetzner, whose German data centres are powered by renewable electricity. That is the main reason the number is small. One server carries every parcel, every Patcher and every story; the Post is a very small post office.
You can read Hetzner's own statement on renewable energy on their website.
The game is about mending a broken world with the things we already love. It would be odd to send a t-shirt across the sea in a game and never mention what a real one costs. So every parcel says it, once, on the tracker: the small number and the big one. The rest is up to you.