Dark Forest: Round 4
A quick recap of the most interesting things that happened this round.
Silver & Artifacts scoring — Lightning Round⚡
For the scoring system of this round, we go back in time to Round 2 and keep all its main features, but add an important factor: Speed. This round everything was faster; Round time, Energy regen, Silver regen, voyage speed, etc…
With everything running faster, there were a number of interesting consequences, the first being the number of transactions being issued per second. The number of transactions per second dramatically increased as the game moved faster, and with them, the gas usage and the price of gas for these transactions skyrocketed, eating the whole chain.
At some points, the xDai chain even had the price of gas at over 40 gwei, reminding us once again why Dark Forest needs a whitelist for players who want to play. Right now, if the game were open to the public, I can only imagine how high the price of gas could go.
Obviously, this is a scalability problem that all protocols have and that any structure on top of the blockchain is going to face, not just Dark Forest. This reminds us how important the work of those who are researching new scalability solutions for blockchain is.
The player who won this round, as you can see in the image at the beginning of this article, is orden_gg once again. His repeated success does not mean that there is nobody good enough to face him; later in this article we will talk about dfdao’s project “The Astral Colossus,” one of the first innovations in guild-gaming and permissionless, decentralized team-play, which may be one of the possible contenders that orden_gg will face in the next rounds.
Artifact Data
To give an example to understand how rare is to find an artifact of high rarity, here is bit of data about the artifacts from the round 4.
There were 9 Mythic artifacts found in round 4, distributed across the following types:
Black Domain: 1
Colossus: 1
Photoid Cannon: 1
Planetary Shield: 1
Pyramid: 3
Spaceship: 2
There were 253 Legendary Artifacts found in round 4 (258 were discovered in total, but 5 were destroyed because people used them for the game). The 253 Legendary Artifacts were distributed across the following types:
Black Domain: 21 (+1 destroyed)
Bloom Filter: 16 (+1 destroyed)
Colossus: 48
Monolith: 39
Photoid Cannon: 29 (+1 destroyed)
Planetary Shield: 13 (+2 destroyed)
Pyramid: 47
Spaceship: 31
Wormhole: 9
There were 2644 Epic Artifacts found in round 4 (2858 were discovered in total, but 214 of them were destroyed because people used them for the game). The 2644 Epic Artifacts were distributed across the following types:
Black Domain: 148 (+9 destroyed)
Bloom Filter: 103 (+84 destroyed)
Colossus: 447
Monolith: 452
Photoid Cannon: 312 (+116 destroyed)
Planetary Shield: 153 (+5 destroyed)
Pyramid: 442
Spaceship: 436
Wormhole: 151
There were 10,960 Rare Artifacts found in round 4 (11,474 were discovered in total, but 514 of them were destroyed because people used them for the game). The 10,960 Rare Artifacts were distributed across the following types:
Black Domain: 721 (+13 destroyed)
Bloom Filter: 587(+127 destroyed)
Colossus: 1774
Monolith: 1762
Photoid Cannon: 1329 (+354 destroyed)
Planetary Shield: 637 (+20 destroyed)
Pyramid: 1771
Spaceship: 1710
Wormhole: 679
There were 7,141 Common Artifacts found in round 4 (7,252 were discovered in total, but 252 of them were destroyed because people used them for the game). The 7,141 Common Artifacts were distributed across the following types:
Black Domain: 418 (+12 destroyed)
Bloom Filter: 419 (+9 destroyed
Colossus: 1116
Monolith: 1100
Photoid Cannon: 1038 (+86 destroyed)
Planetary Shield: 411 (+4 destroyed)
Pyramid: 1095
Spaceship: 1128
Wormhole: 416
These are the odds of getting each type of artifact from a foundry:
Photoid Cannon ->15.61% (40/256)
Monolith -> 15.23% (39/256)
Colossus -> 15.23% (39/256)
Spaceship -> 15.23% (39/256)
Pyramid -> 15.23% (39/256)
Wormhole -> 5.85% (15/256)
Planetary Shield -> 5.85% (15/256)
Bloom Filter -> 5.85% (15/256)
Black Domain -> 5.85% (15/256)
^(256/256)To see the actual code from where I drew this information, check this link.
Artifact Markets
Last round I recapped the different markets created by the different guilds in the game. Both the DarkForest Market by dfdao and the DarkSea Market by MarrowDAO were updated for round 4, but dropswap.gg by orden_gg commented that they preferred to focus on the competitive arena during the round and that their market would probably be updated after the round was over with some new features.
DarkForest Market Data (dfdao)
Since dfdao has a subgraph for their own market, I decided to dig into it and grabbed some cool data.
DarkForest Market Round 3 Artifacts:
Sales in Active Round: 8
All-time Sales: 152Volume in Active Round: 2.51
xDai All-time Volume: 1998.7633333000006xDai Sales per rarity ( Active Round / All time)
COMMON: 5 / 45
LEGENDARY: 2 / 15
RARE: 1 / 54
EPIC: 0 / 38Sales per Artifact type ( Active Round / All time)
BLACKDOMAIN: 0 / 11
WORMHOLE: 0 / 12
BLOOMFILTER: 0 / 12
COLOSSUS: 0 / 26
MONOLITH: 0 / 17
PHOTOIDCANNON: 0 / 16
PLANETARYSHIELD: 0 / 5
PYRAMID: 0 / 21
SPACESHIP: 8 / 32
Note: DarkForest Market R3 was launched after the round was over, so the sales in Active Round were just for testing the plugin
DarkForest Market Round 4 Artifacts:
Sales in Active Round: 28
All-time Sales: 32Volume in Active Round: 77.34 xDai
All-time Volume: 93.34 xDaiSales per rarity (Active Round / All time)
COMMON: 8 / 8
EPIC: 0 / 3
RARE: 20 / 21Sales per Artifact Type (Active Round / All time)
COLOSSUS: 0 / 1
MONOLITH: 3 / 3
PHOTOIDCANNON: 8 / 8
PYRAMID: 6 / 6
SPACESHIP: 2 / 2
WORMHOLE: 9 / 12
Note: DarkForest Market R4 was launched the first day of the round 4
The Astral Colossus
The Astral Colossus is the project that made me most excited this round, and is the project that, in my opinion, is the most likely to be competitive against orden_gg in the battle for first place in subsequent rounds.
What is The Astral Colossus?
The Astral Colossus is a smart contract made by dfdao that acts as an in-game player that is able to climb the leaderboard like any other player and win a prize if it reaches one of the Top 63 positions. It has an integrated contribution system that enables other players to interact with the smart contract to contribute to the Astral Colossus, and the Colossus will record the contributions done by each player in the smart contract.
How do players contribute to The Astral Colossus?
By using a plugin to give spacetime rips full of silver to withdraw or foundries with artifacts to discover. Once these items have been gifted through the plugin, the Astral Colossus will automatically withdraw/discover them, and the planets give back to the player, while also recording the amount of points they delivered to the Colossus.
Why it is so amazing?
This enables people to team-up to play Dark Forest in a permissionless way, without having to share keys. It also makes possible potential use-cases of the contributions record, for example, allowing a community token to be distributed amongst the contributors proportional to their contributions. The same community token could enable the power for sharing the ownership of the planet prize, and allowing token holders use a voting system to decide what to do with the planet.
If we get to this point, then we are building a real decentralized, permissionless guild system in the blockchain, and making people work together as a community for the common objective to “Feed the Colossus,” and each member will be rewarded for their contributions.
Obviously all of this is just castles in the air, but the potential is there, meaning this could be one of the best innovations in the entire crypto-games sector, and I’m very proud to be part of the team that led the release of this amazing project.
I want to give credit to cha0sg0d (cha0sg0d)for having the idea for the project and working on the smart contract with the help of Ansgar Dietrichs (adietrichs). Credit is also due to Scott Dodge (scotato) for working on the plugin that the contributors interacted with in-game, and to all of the dfdao team for helping with the launch of this project.
Finally, thanks are due to the 51 contributors who participated in the project by giving part of their score to feed the Astral Colossus.
If you want to read more about The Astral Colossus, you can check out this article about it — The Astral Colossus
Also, get up to date on one of the key objectives of dfdao — The Crypto Gaming Governance Thesis
Join our dfdao discord if you’re interested in follow what we’re doing or want to help with our project — Discord
Other
Despite being much shorter in duration, 1573 players have joined this round of Dark Forest, and 743 have qualified for the next round. It is amazing to see that round after round the community keepings growing. We can only imagine how it would have been if it had lasted a few days more.
As always, I want to thank all the members of the Dark Forest discord community who are always bringing good vibes and helping to learn/build in community among the players, you are all one of the valuable pillars that the game has and without you everything would be less fun.
Thank you so much ❤
