The Junk Wars Saga Part IV: The Death Star and an Epic Conclusion
This is the fourth and final installment of a casual series about dfdao’s journey in Dark Forest Round v0.6.5. I’m 0xhank, dfdao’s chief historian. (Check out Part I, Part II, and Part III if you missed them).
It was almost a week into Junk Wars, and Dark Forest Twitter was ablaze. After racking up a deficient of hundreds of millions of points versus the great OrdenGG, our guild was finally approaching their score: over one billion points… and they were not happy about it.
Ever since we unveiled Moby Dick, a planet with ten whales, our opponents had criticized our maneuver they deemed an “exploit.” Now, Orden was even more frustrated upon discovering our new super planet, the Death Star.
What is the Death Star?
Earlier in the round, our team found a feature the Dark Forest code base that allowed us to stack up to ten spaceships on a single planet. First, we stacked Whale spaceships on a strategically selected planet, allowing us to generate 1024 times the usual silver. We called this planet “Moby Dick.” However, once we realized that silver collection was a suboptimal strategy, we developed a new use for our ten-spaceship maneuver, the Death Star.
The Death Star was a planet that, like the Moby Dick, stacked spaceships. But instead of Whales, it used Motherships. Motherships double a planet’s energy regeneration, so our Death Star could produce 1024 times the energy of a normal planet. At first, we the Death Star (then known as the Mothership) to keep Moby Dick full of energy, but we soon discovered a better use for it: sabotaging our opponents.
From Mothership to Death Star
While developing our capture zone strategy, described in Part III of this series, we scouted Orden’s territory to see how they were winning. We discovered that Orden’s close ally, Dudendy had invaded but not yet captured dozens of planets. Why did he do this? We hypothesized he was leaving them uncaptured so Orden could sweep through Dudendy’s empire later, capturing his planets and thus earning his points.
After some calculation, we estimated that Dudendy had around 500 million points just sitting in the open, waiting for Orden to claim them. This would erase all the efforts we made to close the gap between ourselves and Orden on the leaderboard. We couldn’t just sit by and allow Orden to earn all these points without any opposition!
We collaborated with our ally Modukon, who had an empire within striking distance of Dudendy. Our plan was to donate our Motherships to Modukon, placing them on a large, upgraded planet within range of Dudendy’s point farm. Once Modukon created the Death Star, he could use its rapid energy regeneration to send dozens of attacks at a time towards our enemies.
The 3am Attack
However, as Modukon was tediously setting up the Motherships on the Death Star, our priorities were thrown out the window.
At three in the morning, with three days left in the round, our Level 9 Asteroid appeared in a capture zone. Cha0sg0d was drowsily piloting, but once he saw the planet, he snapped awake. Our Auto Invade and Capture plugin had already invaded it, and Orden was on the attack! They were coming for our 100 million points, and the only thing in their way was a sleepy cha0sg0d and a nearby Modukon.
By now, we were only losing by around 200 million points, thanks to our capture zone strategy. Whoever captured this planet would get a 200 million point swing (+100 million for the victor and -100 million for the loser) — and almost certainly take first place.
Because move speed was slow, we had plenty of time to craft a plan. Modukon and MJ helped cha0sg0d create a multi-step strategy. On their attacks, Orden had used Photoid Cannon artifacts, which increased move speed by 20x. They were willing to risk it all to capture this planet.
We have provided never-been-seen-before time-lapse footage of the final minutes before the planet became capturable. We owned the planet, Orden captured it, then we immediately captured it back.
At the same time, Modukon finally set up the Death Star on one of his planets. His immediately sent six low-energy attacks to our asteroid. The game only allows for a planet to have six attacks from an enemy at one time, so Modukon essentially blocked Orden from attacking. (This strategy is called DDOS, and is a common strategy in Dark Forest combat). Now we could capture the planet at our leisure and earn 100 million points.
With the points secured, we were confident we could defeat Orden. Next, Modukon began to use his Death Star to mercilessly annihilate Dudendy’s invaded planets.
The Fallout
Needless to say, our rivals were irate when they saw thirty simultaneous attacks from a single planet coming to obliterate their point farm. Orden was not happy. Dudendy was not happy. And P_DAO was not happy. Many took to Twitter to disavow our Death Star, with some even addressing the Dark Forest core team, imploring them to ban our weapon.
Our team, on the other hand, watched the fallout with glee. We were sleep deprived and elated to finally be making Orden squirm after three rounds of losing. We didn’t know if it was ethical or fair, and at that particular moment… we didn’t care. We had just built a machine gun planet, and as far as we knew, it was within the rules of the game!
After three sleepless nights invading, capturing, and abandoning thousands of planets, we finally overtook Orden. It was a moment of pride — only a few days ago, everyone, including this author, had been convinced that Orden would run away with another first place finish. Thanks to our tireless strategizing, ingenious plans, and brilliant plugins, we were going to claim top prize this round.
But the Death Star lingered in the back of our minds.
Modukon Goes Rogue
The Death Star had been pummeling Orden and Dudendy for a full day. We agreed that for the sake of sportsmanship, it was time to shut down our super weapon. The atmosphere of desperation was gone; our empire was no longer in dire straights, and we were on a path to victory. Velorum messaged Modukon and told him to stop — his Death Star had done enough.
Modukon did not receive the message well, sending this message:
As if this round had not already been thrilling enough, our ally Modukon was challenging us to an intergalactic duel. At this point, everyone on our team was too tired to respond, besides the ever-caffeinated Velorum.
Just as Modukon started firing his machine gun at our own empire, we maneuvered one of our Motherships off his planet. Even without all ten Motherships, the Death Star was still powerful and could damage our empire.
However, right as the battle began heating up, we were saved by Ner0nzz ex Machina. Like the eagles saving Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom, Ner0nzz, The God of Dark Forest War, emerged from the ether to fire his Titan spaceship at Modukon’s planet. Once it was launched, Modukon could do nothing to prevent it from cruising onto his planet. The Titan halts energy regeneration on a planet, so it halted Death Star’s massive energy regeneration. It was dead at long last.
Our Diplomatic Draw with Orden
After a long week of Dark Forest, our team was exhausted but content. We built a comfortable lead ahead of the Orden, and we were guaranteed to dethrone the long-reigning Dark Forest champion and achieve our first win. Once we came down from the high of victory, we took stock of the last few days. And something wasn’t sitting right with us.
For dfdao, the best element of Dark Forest is its collaborative nature; to play Dark Forest is to build Dark Forest. It is a playground in which we can explore blockchain development with an awesome community.
One of our core tenets is maintaining a strong relationship with the community. Many players felt that our Moby Dick and Death Star made this round less fun. So, as Velorum said, while we don’t believe our strategies were against the spirit of the game, if we won this way, it would feel like there’s an asterisk on our victory.
Across the world, Ukraine, Orden’s home country, was being invaded. While we were struggling to beat them in Dark Forest, they were experiencing a literal war. This put everything into perspective. In this time of crisis, when Orden was posting videos of homemade Molotov cocktails, did we want to claim victory by bending game rules?
Will, a co-founder of dfdao, reached out to Orden and proposed a draw, to which they agreed. We put the decision to a vote in our Discord, and the proposal passed. Both Orden and dfdao would stop gaining points once we reached 1.7 billion.
The announcement drew controversy. After all, the spirit of Dark Forest is to use all the tools at your disposal to win. However, we were satisfied with the knowledge that we had done best for the long-term health and mutual respect of the Dark Forest community.
What’s Next?
We just concluded a Gitcoin grant round in which over 3800 contributors donated $8,531 in funding. Using a quadratic matching algorithm, Gitcoin sponsors matched these donations for $45,000. For the first time, dfdao has a development budget! Thank you to all who contributed.
We have multiple exciting initiatives that will be announced in the coming weeks. We hope to reward your constant support with continued fun, experimental, community-based Dark Forest projects. Stay tuned for more details! It’s going to be a fun 2022.
