DeFi Kingdoms AMA 6/27/24 Expeditions Discussion with DrZipper and Hubert Expeditions Overview and Transcript

Overview of Expeditions

Expeditions are a new feature introduced to enhance gameplay efficiency and experience within the DeFi Kingdoms ecosystem. They aim to streamline and automate certain questing processes, making it more convenient for players to manage their heroes’ activities.

Key Features and Mechanics

Phase-Based Release: The Expeditions feature will be rolled out in phases. Initially, it will include basic functionalities, with more advanced features planned for a later release phase.

Power-Ups: Several Power-Ups will be available to enhance the efficiency and capabilities of heroes during Expeditions:

• Basic Expedition Access: Allows heroes to participate in Expeditions for a fee of 10 cJEWEL or sJEWEL per 30 Heroes, ensuring accessibility for all players.
• Auto-Pet Feeding 100 c/sJEWEL: Automatically feeds Pets of Heroes during Expeditions, ensuring their readiness without manual intervention. Escrow all items and get any back that aren’t used when the expedition is ended.
• Auto-Stampotting 300 c/sJEWEL: Automates the consumption of stamina potions for efficient questing. This feature is optimized for speed and effectiveness in leveling up. Escrow stampots at the start and get any back that are not used when completed. Only works with Fishing, Foraging, and TQs.

Questing Efficiency: Expeditions aim to eliminate certain limitations present in traditional questing systems:

• No Queue Limits: Unlike traditional questing where there’s a limit on the number of quests that can be queued, Expeditions allow simultaneous questing by multiple heroes without such restrictions.
• Individual Hero Timers: Each Expedition operates on an independent timer, allowing for more efficient and independent quest completion.
• Quest-Specific Limitations: While Fishing, Foraging, and TQs benefit from Expeditions, other tasks like Gardening and Mining have specific limitations or exclusions.

Token Mining can only be done with either manual Quests or Expeditions at any given time.

Individual Gardening Pools can only be used by either manual Quests or Expeditions at any given time.

Only 3 Expedition groups (at a time) can be sent to Token Mining or (each) Garden Pool.

Small JEWEL fee per stamina tick: Unreleased info, will be released soon. The player will put the full amount of JEWEL into escrow but will get any JEWEL refunded that isn’t used.

Gold Mining: Simplifies and optimizes the process of resource collection, reducing the need for multi-wallet strategies. No limitations or queue, no need for multi-wallet mining Gold.

Stamina Management: Allows players to optimize Hero stamina usage, ensuring efficient resource gathering and quest completion. Expeditions ensure there is zero downtime between each iteration of the quest, once the Heroes have recovered their stamina. Additionally, attempt-based quests have the per-Hero multiplier for duration removed during Expeditions.

Unlimited Gardening Pool: Not tied to an LP but will give rewards equal to gardening when a player has not staked. LPs with rewards will have a limit of 3 groups and those groups will run, refill stamina, and run again.

Technical Implementation: The development of Expeditions involves significant smart contract work:

• Gas Efficiency: Efforts have been made to minimize gas usage compared to traditional manual questing methods, making the feature more cost-effective for players.
• Smart Contract Challenges: Addressing smart contract limitations such as stack limits and contract size to optimize performance and functionality.

Future Developments and Advanced Features

Auto-Level-Up Feature ~200 c/sJEWEL: Planned for a future phase, this feature will automate Hero leveling, streamlining progression and enhancing gameplay convenience.

Integration with Divine Essence: Continued integration with other game features to enhance synergy and provide comprehensive gameplay experiences.

Community Feedback: Development plans are influenced by community input, ensuring updates align with player preferences and enhance overall satisfaction.

Transcript

[DrZipper]
Thanks. Thanks for having me. I didn’t realize it was just going to be the three of us today.

It’s a small little group, but it’s a cozy one.

[Winston Jazzhands]
Intimate is the word you’re looking for.

[DrZipper]
I was refraining from that particular word, but sure. So yeah, we’re here. We’ve got some Expeditions on the horizon.

I’m going to try to make sure I actually say Expeditions correctly every time and not some other close by word, which is what I always end up saying or typing, because when you say it too much, it just kind of loses all meaning. But we’ve got Expeditions, getting close. I know there’ve been some questions about how the development of that was going.

It’s been a very, very long process, as I’m sure you’re all aware. A number of months ago, we dropped a little teaser in Discord that the design document for Expeditions was, what was it, a 75 minute read, I think, or something like that. So it took a long time to just do the design, to write out all of that, to get things figured out.

And then we set Magnus loose on the contracts, and that’s been a really big ordeal. It’s like rewriting all of the Quest contracts from scratch again, in a lot of ways. So he’s been super hard at work on those for a good while now, while still managing the chain and doing all sorts of other little tasks and smacking down bugs and all those other things as we find them.

And then I think many of you probably know that I got started on the front end for Expeditions a little bit ago, and that’s been coming right along as well. At this point, I’m really just kind of buttoning up some last UI things and making stuff look real pretty, getting the information that you need out where it needs to be and really getting things finalized. So at this point, I think Winston’s planning on digging into some real serious testing pretty soon.

I’ve been testing it a little bit as it’s been going along, but he’s going to dig into all the big things and find everything that we missed, which is pretty exciting. And so, yeah, it’s totally bug-free, SPD. I mean, we hope, but we’ve written a lot of tests and in theory, it’s working pretty well, but Winston’s going to find stuff and I hope you find all of the stuff.

[Winston Jazzhands]
That’s not true. It’s going to be perfect. It’s going to be perfect.

I’m not going to find anything. It’s going to be good.

[DrZipper]
That’s what I expect. The very best, or maybe the second best. I don’t know.

So yeah, I’m not going to put any timelines on that directly, but we’re getting close enough that we can start talking about a few things. So I think maybe today we’re going to go into a couple little details about some of the stuff that you can and cannot do with Expeditions. And I don’t know, Hubert, do you want to jump in and talk about some of those things or do you want me to keep going?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Sure. I can hop in here. And I guess, yeah, just also noting, kind of adding on with the code of thousands and thousands of lines of code have been written by Magnus on there.

I tend to review most of the contracts as a part of the process of us getting it out. And this one has been a tough one to get through just because there’s so much and everything’s interconnected. So to really review everything, it’s like, okay, let’s go look at this contract, this piece of code.

All right, does that mix with this and that? The other, it’s very involved and a great piece of work by Magnus and really excited to get across the finish line. And I guess one thing to mention is that due to the scope of everything, we are planning on doing this release in two phases.

So there’ll be kind of the initial Expeditions that will come out and it will just be missing one particular feature. And I think there’ll probably be some optimizations that will mix in as well in the process of getting to the second stage. But the second stage will likely be somewhere after we’ve at least launched PvP because we’re going to be turning Magnus’ attention to that for the time being once we get that released.

But yeah, as far as things that you’ll be able to do with Expeditions, so we’re going to be starting with three different power-ups that will be for Expeditions. There’ll be a fourth one that will be on that phase two, which I’ll talk about. The first one is just the power-up to just let you do Expeditions at all.

That’s going to be at a rate of 10 C Jewel or S Jewel for 30 heroes to gain access. So a much smaller rate than what you do for any of the other quick study or the other ones that are on a per hero basis. So that power-up will be necessary and any hero that has signed up for that will be allowed to do Expeditions.

And then there will be a fee in Jewel associated with doing Expeditions as well, which I won’t get into the fee, what that is exactly, but it’s a charge out of per stamina used rate. And it’s like you pay up front and then any amount, like you can always cancel an Expedition in advance of it, like say you do it for a month and you want to finish it two weeks early. That extra two weeks that you didn’t do, you’d get refunded back whatever that amount would be.

So it’s kind of set up in that way. And so if you have the power-up, you have a hero signed, then you just escrow the fee and then your heroes are basically good to go. They’re doing the Expedition, whatever quest it is, we have it set up for all of the current quests that are available right now, all the profession quests, skill zero, skill 10, as well as the training quests are available to be done.

And then we have two additional add-on power-ups that are just kind of global power-ups for your wallet. The first is an auto pet feeding power-up, which we’ll just add that functionality in to ensure that the pets of your heroes will stay fed during that time. You’ll also need to escrow pet food for that.

So there’ll be kind of functionality around that. That one will be 100 C jewel or S jewel. So it’s activated per chain, but that applies to the entire wallet.

It’s not like a per hero basis for that. So once that’s activated, you can use it. And then the other one is a auto stamp potting power-up.

And I believe I should probably double check this because I am going to get my numbers mixed. So I believe that one’s going to be 300. If any, if either of you…

Yeah, that’s correct. Okay, good. Yeah.

So that one’s 300 C jewel or S jewel. It will allow you to escrow in your stamina potions for that team, and it’ll just consume all of the stamina potions at the most efficient rate to do that. So help you do like sort of power leveling things.

It would be more efficient than manual questing because it just handles all of that logic immediately. There’s no like needing to spend a transaction to consume the potions or anything like that. It just kind of happens as a part of the whole loop.

So it’s by far the most efficient way to do that. And let’s see, there’s another nuance about that. Oh, it only works for the like kind of instantaneous quests.

So for fishing, foraging, and training quests. So there won’t be stamp potting available with the gardening or mining quests. So yeah, those ones will be available when we release it.

Then the third one that won’t be available will be an auto level up feature. That one is a little bit more complicated, and we just decided we could kind of detach it from this to ensure that we get this out sooner rather than later. So in that one, I can at least say, you know, the planned power up level on that is going to be 200 C jewel or S jewel.

And it will, when it’s available, it’ll allow players to kind of escrow in all of the resources they need for a level up, save the settings for that level up. And they can do it not just for like the next one, but you could do it for the next 10 if you wanted to. And it would, you know, as you’re doing Expeditions, it would just automatically level them up during that moment when they reach max XP.

So unfortunately, that won’t be available up front. So kind of what will be the case is like if your heroes reach maximum XP and you want to level them up, you would just need to like pull them out of the expedition and then level them up and then put them back in. The other nice thing about how we’ve set up the Expeditions is like a full iteration is considered from, like it starts at full stamina, and then it ends at full stamina.

So when you pull your heroes out of an expedition, like it’ll give them, like you would be able to process as many quests as they would be able to have done up to that time, up to the point where they reached full stamina. And so like when you pull them out, they’ll be at full stamina. So that also allows you to, like if you’re using some teams for Void Hunts, you’d be able to like pull them out, do Void Hunts, and then put them right back into Expeditions again.

The system doesn’t care if they’re at full stamina or not when you put them in. So you can, like even though you use them to do Void Hunts, you can put them back in and it’ll just know when they actually start doing the next iteration. And you know, when you pull them back out again, you know, they’ll have done as much as they could have done and be at full stamina when you pull them out.

So it should be make it very convenient to even with your heroes that use Void Hunts, you can be using them also in the expedition system. And yeah, so that’s kind of how that all works. Hopefully that makes sense.

It’s a lot of information. But hopefully that kind of covers, you know, kind of the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of all of that. I don’t know if I missed anything.

Zip, if you have anything else you want to add?

[DrZipper]
Sure, just a couple of little things, I guess. I mean, first off, we will definitely be doing some write-ups, you know, as we get closer to launch to make sure that, you know, all of this information is clear and accessible. So I guess one other little technical nuance that I did want to mention is that Expeditions will, for those attempt-based quests, so the fishing, foraging, trading quests, they will ignore the additional stamina time per hero, or not stamina time, the additional duration time per hero.

So that means these Expeditions will be more efficient than what you can do with regular questing, regular manual questing, which is pretty exciting. So that’s one little thing. Then one other thing I just wanted to mention about the auto-leveling and the phase two part is that, you know, one reason that that also gets delayed, maybe split into a second phase, is because it does have some important overlap with some of the plans for Divine Essence that we’ve released.

So it makes sense to develop those things in parallel once we get to that point, I think. So that’s just one of the reasons to not have to write it and then have to rewrite it again once we get to that point. I did see a couple questions in chat.

One is, you know, are there new rewards or is this just sort of a long quest system? And Bolon answered that. And, you know, at some point we may have, you know, different rewards or different kinds of quests, especially once we get into, you know, have a travel system and different things are available in different places.

But for now, this is, you know, just a way to make questing more efficient and easier. And Hubert, you’re going to jump in on what I just said.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, I’m finished what you’re going to say. If you have anything else, I just unmute because I do have more to say.

[DrZipper]
Okay, sure. Yeah, well, I was just going to answer the other thing that Bolon jumped into was, will it be available on holiday wallets? Yes, it will be available on holiday wallets.

And the plan also is to launch on both chains as well.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Okay, so yeah, Bolon reminded me that there were a few other points that I didn’t mention and you kind of alluded to, I guess you went, started to go down that direction with one of your comments, Zip, is like in terms of like efficiencies that are gained of the system as well compared to normal questing, there will be no, for fishing, foraging, training quests, there will not be a queue limit like there is right now, or you can have only 10 on normal questing.

So for players that have a lot of heroes on a lot of, you know, and like are kind of reaching their max of how much they can queue right now, that won’t be an issue to do on a single wallet with this system. And everything runs on its own timer. So there is no, like, I think it’s kind of what you said, you know, there’s, as far as like the timing goes, like right now, if you were to queue up six heroes, it would look at how much time it would take for each hero to do all of their iterations.

And that’s like the whole time it would take for like fishing and foraging. Instead, it’s going to just be like, how much time does it take? Like, that’s what like a minute 40 seconds.

So I think it’d be like a minute 40 times six is how it is in normal questing, this is just gonna be a minute 40 seconds per set. So each hero is considered fishing individually on their own rather than as a group in terms of like how much time it goes. And then there is no, like each group themselves are not like running behind each other.

So all of them can start at the same time finish at the same time, that like all the nuances of a queue go away when it comes to that. So it’s going to be far more efficient that way. And then with gold mining, there will be no limitations on how many groups can be gold mining at a time.

And also there’s no queue either. So each group is just running on their own timers, regardless of what other timers are being done. So there won’t be a need for any sort of mining approach either with this.

And for token mining, that’s still going to have limitations. And it’s also going to have limitations tied to normal questing as well. So if you have any heroes doing normal token mining, you wouldn’t be able to send any to do expedition token mining or vice versa.

You can only do one or the other. And that one does have a limit of three groups at a time can be doing that. With gardening as well, it has the same type of system.

For each pool that you’re in, you can only send three groups at a time. They do still run on their own timers without caring about a queue. So you don’t need to worry as much about that.

They’ll just run for as much stamina as you want them to run and per iteration and then recover to the full stamina and then run it again and so on. And we will also be adding an unlimited gardening pool that is not tied to any LPs, but you’ll still be able to get the minimum amounts that you can get from gardening classes if you had no LPs in the pool. And that one won’t have any limits on how many groups you can send as well.

So that unlimited pool can be like, if you have a ton of gardeners and not in every LP, you will be able to still consolidate all your gardeners into one wallet and just send them in that pool. A lot of this, I see people making comments about infinite gold supply and things like that. It’s really just taking what can be done right now, where right now people can multi-wallet, they can send groups of miners to a bunch of different wallets and just gold mine and get the same effect.

It’s just a lot more tedious to do, but it is possible. So this is just reducing that TDM down to a minimum and you can get that same effect, but on the same wallet. But it would be within the expedition system, you’d have to have them all signed up to do Expeditions.

There is a fee associated with it. So it has some trade-offs, but it’s not really adding that. As far as what is currently possible, it’s not really changing much in that regard.

It’s just far less tedious as would be the result with a fee. So hopefully that makes sense. And let’s see, I guess on the note of gold as well, we do have a lot of plans for additional uses for gold coming up with PPP when it comes to equipment and durability systems and things like that.

So I guess if that is a cause for concern for people, it seems like that may mean that there’s more gold coming in potentially. I think we’re also planning to have more gold sinks coming as well, just as a part of this whole thing. Yeah.

Anything else you want to add, Zip?

[DrZipper]
Sure. Yeah. Just the last thing that I have is that we’ve been doing some tests and calculations of gas usage with Expeditions, and they are much, much, much lower than the amount of gas that you would use for regular manual quests.

And so I think we’re all pretty excited about the potential savings there.