Ethercraft Development Update

4 min readMar 9, 2018

March 9

We’ve got a couple of development updates for you all today as well as some potentially big news. Starting with development:

Contract Development

As outlined in our previous post, we’ve been working hard on contract development. Our top priorities have included both the trading system and an RNG system and its implementation in opening the Lucky Bag and subsequently other loot items.

Trading

Since our last post, we’ve made quite a lot of progress, and we’re pleased to announce that our trading floor system is essentially complete and is nearly ready to be deployed to the mainnet. While we can’t guarantee an exact time frame yet, the release is imminent, and in the interest of keeping everything as smooth and bug-free as possible, we will likely model its deployment after our initial crafting recipe deployments, starting with small-scale testing with community members and moving to pepnet and eventually main site integration later on. We will make efforts to keep everyone in the loop, especially on Discord and Telegram, so join us there for the latest updates and information.

In the mean time, Ethercraft support has been added by Project Wyvern!

RNG

Concerning the RNG system, we’ve done a lot of rethinking and redesigning. To recap, RNG on the EVM essentially requires one of two things: future block hash as part of a commit-reveal scheme, or Oraclize (or alternative). We chose to employ future block hash for a number of reasons; Oraclize goes against the spirit of decentralization and is prone to a number of issues and trade-offs otherwise.

However, as some of the technically-minded in our community may be aware, contracts on the EVM only have access to the block hashes for the last 256 blocks, as that’s what the EVM stores in memory. This gives way to one potential issue: there will be no way to finalize the reveal if more than 256 blocks have passed since the commit. What this means in practice is that anything requiring a random number will, at that point, stop functioning properly. In fact, the ‘industry standard’ in that regard (virtually all major crypto ‘games’ with collectible assets or NFTs) is essentially to simply warn users of the fact that if they don’t act within about an hour, they’ll simply lose their committed resources.

Ultimately, while this does work fine most of the time, it’s obviously not ideal, and so we’ve done quite a bit of refinement in an effort to come up with a solution which can, in at least some cases, mitigate this problem while still avoiding the introduction of potentially exploitable functionality. As a result, our new RNG system, consisting of an RNG core to be accessed by multiple users across multiple contracts, is more elegant, robust, and should accomplish this goal with minimal trade-offs.

With trading development coming to a head, these contracts will take center stage as our top priority.

Community Sites & Resources

We’re excited to talk about a few excellent resources which have been published by our community.

Websites

Discord community member StiffEyed has brought us https://www.ethercraftstats.site/, an excellent resource for a variety of Ethercraft-related metrics.
For those of you who haven’t yet seen it, there is an excellent Ethercraft wiki located at ethercraft.info. Special thanks to RadicaLee for his continued curation and contributions.
Last, but not least, another excellent site combining a wealth of stats and info is https://ethercraft.guru. Check out the item marketcap page!

Misc.

We’d like to recognize some of the great resources published by our community. Thank you!

Check out these cool projects, too:

Regional Releases

Japanese

Our Japanese marketing push continues to prove fruitful! Here’s a short list of some of what’s been popping up:

Our Japanese items, along with a number of free items, are available on the shop until the end of this month. Get the free stuff before it’s gone!

Chinese regional release

Our target for a Chinese item release is Saturday, March 17, 3 PM Beijing time (that’s Saturday, 7 AM GMT, and Saturday, 3 AM EST). Similar to our previous releases, this release will begin with a Chinese-language article some time around 10 PM EST on Friday followed by marketing efforts and the release Enchanted items, regular items, and free items.

This is not set in stone and the exact date and time are subject to change, but this article will be updated should there be any change, and of course we’ll keep everyone in the loop via Discord, Telegram, Twitter, etc. (Join our groups and follow us!)

Lastly, a couple of goodies

A new crafted item

We’ll be releasing a new crafting recipe soon. (In fact, the contract is already live, and those of you who are technically inclined can begin interacting with it right away.) We won’t spoil what it is yet, but we’re confident that the info will get out shortly after this post goes live, and we’ll post follow-up updates on social media and in our various channels.

Developers

Finally, and perhaps most importantly to many, we’re pleased to announce that we’re in the preliminary stages of bringing more developers into the fold. While it’s premature to give any specific details, the process has begun and we will be ramping up our efforts as time goes on. Moreover, if you’re a part of our community and you think you may be interested in contributing to the project in some way, we’d love to hear from you—just contact us via the usual channels and we’ll be happy to have a one-on-one discussion.

As always, join our channels and follow us on social media for the latest updates!

Social Media

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethercraft_io
Telegram: https://t.me/ethercraft_io
Discord: https://discord.gg/WAJdrvw
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ethercraft_io/