Game Mechanics Details — Hero Training

4 min readFeb 8, 2018

Feb 9, 2018, 15:00 GMT. — New Dungeon: The Cathedral of Constantinople

Game Website: https://etherdungeon.io

Ether Dungeon is a strategic RPG blockchain game in which players can train epic heroes, upgrade powerful equipments, and explore the depth of dungeons in an artificial blockchain world called Pangaea Ultima.

The code of Ether Dungeon is open sourced at https://etherscan.io/address/0x141766882733cafa9033e8707548fdcac908db22#code

Hero Training is a major part of the game, it is designed to be interesting and deep, to be discovered by players over time. Below is a primer for your exploration journey.

TL;DR

Each hero has 8 equipments, and when you train your hero, their equipments will be randomly “shuffled” based on the current dungeon “theme” and “difficulty” in a unique way, and if the resulting power is higher than the original power, training is successful, vice versa.

Each dungeon will have a specific set of equipments that you’ll be able to loot from training, you can only get certain equipments in any specific dungeon, and the more the dungeon difficulty is larger than your hero power, the greater the chance of success.

But you’ll only get so far in one dungeon, in order to go beyond normal and rare items, you’ll need to reforge your equipments in another dungeon.

Technical Details

Each hero is persisted in the blockchain as an “attributes string”, the string encodes all 8 equipments, each identified by a single digit (think of a trait in CryptoKitties). The attributes string can be obtained by interacting with the smart contract (see bottom Appendix).

Equipments are divided into different rarity categories, e.g “normal”, “rare”, “epic”, etc. Usually the rarer the equipment the higher the power, and the sum of all 8 equipment powers will be the major part of your hero power.

Whenever you train your hero in a dungeon, the attributes of your hero will be shuffled with the current state of the dungeon, a new set of attributes will be formed, and then the contract will calculate the new hero power and compare with the original hero power, if total power increased, congratulations, training success and the resulting attributes string will be persisted to the blockchain.

P.S. Currently the contract code do nothing to prevent a Super Hero from being “downgraded” if the base power “upgraded” and lose his “super-ness”, we will update it in the coming release.

We haven’t go into details on how attribute shuffling actually works, but the general ideas is as follows:

You can only get a specific set of equipments in a specific dungeon.
It is easier to success if your hero power is lower (have fewer and more common equipments).
It is easier to success if the dungeon difficulty is higher.
Some rarer equipments need to be reforged in another dungeon.
The higher the rarity, the more difficult it is to upgrade.

Training Appraisal Helper

The in game Training Appraisal feature is to help players to estimate the success rate of their heroes training in the current dungeon.

The appraisal is a 6-graded system, namely [AA > A > B > C > D > E], when you mouse over the Training / Blessing button, the grade will be shown with a simple message, indicating the relative training success rate.

[AA] The success rate is impressive!
[A] The success rate is pretty decent.
[B] The success rate is above average.
[C] The success rate is all right.
[D] The success rate is kinda low.
[E] The success rate is… Don’t do it!

For most players, training under E grade is highly discouraged, as shown in the tips above. For D grade the chance is still very low, unless you know what you’re doing (chasing the last few points of power, chasing a specific equipment, etc), please avoid training under D grade too.