Death of the Universe Wrapup

On January 1, 2022, over 250 players raced to scavenge points from a dying Dark Forest universe. This round was an incredible way for us to test our organizational and technical chops, push the boundaries of the Dark Forest codebase, and above all, have a lot of fun playing a cool game with this amazing community.

This wrap-up will try to capture the awesome things that happened in this round, with the hope that others can learn from our experience and create their own community rounds of Dark Forest.

Scoring

This round had three scoring mechanisms, a first for a round of Dark Forest. Players could reach the top of the silver & artifacts leaderboard by harvesting the most points from silver & artifacts; the from center leaderboard by broadcasting and holding the closest planets from 0,0 by the end of the round; and the destroyed planets leaderboard by blowing up planets.

This round’s victors were:

• Orden_gg, who topped the silver & artifacts leaderboard;
• dudendy, who claimed the spacetime rip at 0,0 to secure the closest planet from center;
• 0xSpenser, who earned the most points from destroyed planets.

An additional twist in this round enabled the player who claimed & held the center planet (the appropriately and randomly named Waylay Twist) to make the final decision on which scoring function ultimately won the round.

Dudendy held Waylay Twist at the end of the round, and so was able to use a unique plugin to vote for the winning scoring function.

Dudendy selected silver & artifacts, making Orden_gg the winner of the dfdao & friends New Year’s round.

Highlights

There are a lot of incredible details to share about this round that really made it special. Here are some of our favorite things that happened during the New Year’s Community Round:

1. The community spirit that emerged among players hanging out in our Discord. It was so fun to just play a game we love with our cool Internet friends. This sentiment is perhaps best expressed in a celebratory artwork created by our friend Magdalena aka @komosotweets, which they minted as an NFT & distributed to everyone who played in the round.
2. The players who took the time to provide thoughtful feedback either publicly or privately. It’s fantastic to know what was successful and where we can improve. Special shout out here to @Spencecoin & @0xhank’s thread.
3. Everyone in our Discord who rolled up their sleeves & helped build things and improve the round we put together even as it was ongoing.

• @Modukon1 built the in-game plugin for the triple leaderboard and @scotato helped to display it on our game client homepage;
• @Bulmenisaurus was active throughout, helping players, doing subgraph queries, building plugins, to name just a couple things;
• @Nahkd123 made a plugin that destroys your own planets;
• @zeo updated the df-snarker and shared it with the community so everybody could use it;
• @Spencecoin was a huge help in moderating our Discord and answering player queries (and still found time to play competitively in the round and stream a little bit!)

We also want to thank the amazing team of contributors that helped build this round. We experimented with Coordinape as a method of tracking contributions & distributing rewards in the form of “GIVE.” For this round, the GIVE is not attached to any monetary compensation — it was more of a fun way to share appreciation among round contributors.

Below is a chart of the contributors’ GIVE allocation . Note that some contributors like @cha0sg0d_ decided to opt-out from allocations, so appreciation for their efforts are not reflected here.

Dark Forest Innovations

A highlight that deserves its own section are the many innovations that we, along with the friends who helped us plan the round and the players who participated, were able to achieve.

Note: To the best of our knowledge, these are “firsts” for the Dark Forest community. We will update this list as needed to correct any errors.

Community

1. First off-chain committee of devs, guild leaders, and community members.
2. First brainstorming and proposal process for new round ideas. Check out 20 awesome ideas for mechanics to implement in DF!
3. First time using Coordinape to measure and reward contributor value.
4. First official sponsorship to pay for player’s whitelist drips and offer a new play-to-earn mechanic via running a node with Pocket Network.

Technical

1. First on-chain vote for a meaningful game decision **and** that was weighted by points scored in a previous round. For a longer story around this vote and its significance, check out dfdao co-founder Will’s post.
2. First use of a public local version of darkforest-local for gas-free testing.
3. First time with 2 new game mechanics: a shrinking universe and the ability to destroy planets.
4. First time with multiple scoring functions and leaderboards.
5. First time having the scoring function be determined by an in-game challenge.
6. First time running a round without a whitelist server where anyone could participate — players just had to sign up in our Discord. @Velorum also wrote an awesome Discord bot to whitelist players directly from our server.

Prizes

In our launch announcement, we said that the top 7 players on each scoring function leaderboard would receive a dfdao POAP, and only the leaderboard that was selected as the winning scoring function by the player that held the 0,0 planet at round end would be awarded prize NFTs.

Given the amazing enthusiasm from everyone who played the round and the correlated warm fuzzies this enthusiasm made us feel, we wanted to expand the scope of prizes a bit. This means that the following awards will be distributed:

1. The winning player (Orden_gg, who topped the silver & artifacts leaderboard) will receive a unique tier 1 prize NFT;
2. The top 2–7 Players from the silver + artifacts leaderboard will receive a tier 2 prize NFT;
3. The top 7 players from both the from center and destroyed planets leaderboards will receive a tier 3 prize NFT;
4. Everyone who participated in the round will receive a POAP designed by @komosotweets, who created the artwork for our Community Round.

Shoutout to komosotweets, scotato and Velorum for the NFT designs.

The NFTs have already been minted and distributed using Rarity Garden. If you earned a spot on one of the leaderboards, check your Community Round burner wallet for your NFT on Gnosis Chain!

POAPs will be available to claim for all burner addresses that played in the Community Round from January 1–4, 2022. Stay tuned for an update in Discord and on Twitter when these are available, likely within the next 24 hours.

Community Round Builder’s Guide

Our lead developer for the round, @cha0sg0d_, has been hard at work putting together an open-source Builder’s Guide that walks readers through the process of building their own Community Round of Dark Forest.

This is a living document that may be updated and edited as we gain more expertise about building in the Dark Forest universe, but the goal will remain the same: teach Dark Forest enthusiasts how to build and deploy their own rounds.

If you have feedback or questions about this document, or suggestions for how it can be improved, we encourage you to join our Discord and let us know or submit a PR on Github! Our Discord server invite link can be found on our website.

What’s Next for dfdao?

With this wrapup, distribution of prizes, and completion of the Community Round Builder’s Guide, we have met all of the deliverables we set out to achieve when we started planning this round.

This was an incredible experience, and made us even more enthusiastic about Dark Forest and the community of dedicated players that has formed. We are going to continue to contribute to this community and help it grow. In the near term, this will include two big educational initiatives: so stay tuned for news about those very soon.

We also want to continue to grow the partnerships and connections we made with the friends who made this round possible! This includes the folks at the Pocket Network, members of other Dark Forest guilds Orden_gg and MarrowDAO who helped us build and plan, and the individual players who joined the planning committee to work on this project.

A sincere thank you to everyone who participated in this Community Round, players and builders alike. We will see you again, in the Dark Forest.