How to play Dark Forest, the zkSNARK powered MMO Game — Part 1

Published in

Coinmonks

5 min readFeb 15, 2021

Introduction

Dark Forest is a decentralized MMO space-conquest game built on zkSNARK, a powerful cryptographic tool. Players start with a home planet and expand his / her territory by capturing new planets. The universe is infinite and cryptographically specified. Throughout the conquest, the players can level up, capture another player’s planets and also collect ERC-721 collectibles.

Why is Dark Forest important?

Dark Forest is one of the first decentralized “incomplete-information” game.

An example of complete information games is CryptoKitties. Here, players know the full state of the game universe, who owns what kitty, the traits of the kitties.

Incomplete information games have hidden attributes. The full state of the universe is not disclosed and the players have to grind it out. Dark Forest can maintain a similar structure, keeping the planet locations secret and still stay decentralized. Players don’t submit the coordinates of planets conquered. Also, inspecting the Dark Forest hashes will expose nothing about where other players actually are.

Starting with Dark Forest

Dark Forest is one of the most hyped games currently. It is in v 0.5 and still invite-only. The initial test phases were on Ropsten Network. There were more reboots and fixes. Now the game has moved to xDai Layer 2. People can get an invite key by subscribing to the mailing list at https://zkga.me. There are occasional airdrops on Twitter.

Start

Once you have received the keys, Log in to the Dark Forest website.

Use the Import Private Key option and enter your key. The system will whitelist you and give you your xDai address. Note that you do not need to use keys multiple times. The burner wallet will store your address details in the browser and help you log in with the same. Dark Forest will also give you fractional xDai ($0.05), enough to get acquainted with the game.

Once you are in the system will show your home planet (Note: Finding a Home Planet may take a little time, up to few minutes). Before we go further, here are some basics.

Any planet you own will be outlined in white. In the very beginning, only your home planet will be outlined white. You have to conquer the others to bring them under your command. Along with your Home Planet, you will get an explorer. The explorer opens up the Map for you to find newer planets.

Home Planet:

If you click on the home planet, two new screens will pop up. The planet summary tab shows the energy of your planet / its capacity and also the amount of silver held. Energy is needed to capture other planets. Silver is needed to upgrade your planet, in terms of capacity.

Click on the top right planet icon to see more details.

Before you even start, understand all the attributes of the planet and strategize how to use them. It is important to save energy and save your xDai.

Explorer:

The explorer opens up the map at a certain hash speed. Click on the explorer to open up the details about the explorer.

Use the move button and click the cursor on the map where you want the explorer to explore. You can also change the hash power and speed up. Ask for a code in Discord. Please use codes from trusted people only.

Notifications

Any transaction notification should pop up in the top right

The Universe

Every player starts in Nebula. It is marked by blue and is the safest region of the universe. The outer regions are dark and contain rarer and more powerful planets, but are more vulnerable to attack by other players.

I will continue this article in the next part. We will talk about how to capture a planet, what is the range of a planet, what should be the best strategy to prepare for war. Hope you find this article interesting.

Read my previous article: How to own SubstraPunks, the first NFTs in Live Substrate Blockchain (Polkadot)

Note: This post was first published here for Cryptowriter in association with voice.com.

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