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…
