Etherlands Playtest Update

What is Etherlands?

We’re are building Etherlands to be the largest multiplayer game ever. It’s simple; more people means more fun. Gaming has evolved from simple single-player and co-op to 256 player FPS games. While games such as Eve Online, World of WarCraft, RuneScape, and plenty of others contain an experience that involves tens if not hundreds of thousands of players, they aren’t all thrown into a single contiguous environment. I shouldn’t need a load screen to visit my next-door neighbor. Our vision is to create a virtual world where one can forget about their past life, forging a new identity in a digital economy: A true second life.

In Crypto, we have games like Decentraland and Sandbox that have been in development for 6+ years and made substantial progress, but have failed the litmus test of building a game. Simply said, they aren’t fun to play. Even if you spent thousands of dollars to purchase land and items, it still wouldn’t be fun. Crypto is nitrous for experimental economic incentives, which change how one interacts with a product/protocol. While MMOs should certainly have robust economies, without the underlyings of a fun game, it defeats the purpose altogether. With Etherlands, our first and foremost priority is to build something fun. The game we wish we had to play as kids, and the one we want to play as we march towards the future.

Etherlands is a massive multiplayer game. Ideated from Minecraft, we have substantially improved the server-side to be significantly more scalable than the industry norm and have incorporated the blockchain (Polygon) to power the economy. Etherlands isn’t a “crypto game” or “blockchain game.” We are a video game that utilizes the blockchain for its ownership and economy. Similar to how CS-GO is an FPS that uses Steam for its economy. In speaking with Minecraft players, we have found that the concept of land ownership, trading, and economy is already cemented in them. We are not introducing new concepts, but instead leveraging blockchain’s open, composable, and permissionless features to improve their experience with land ownership, trading, and economy. Gone are the days of using Paypal to pay for access, bad command line trading experiences, poor economic structures, and trust in the server owners. Etherlands isn’t rebuilding Rome using crypto, but instead leveraging relatively unused tools to provide a 10x improvement on gamers’ experiences in MMOs.

What have we been up to?

While much of our recent work has gone into optimizing existing & writing completely new server software for hosting a multiplayer world, we have some cool front-facing features we’ve finished recently that we would love to show off.

New and improved map

Every good land-based game needs a nice map to see what is unclaimed, owned, and for sale. We’re super proud of the state of the map. It manages a ton of information, and we’ve had to make substantial performance improvements to get it to its current form. Our next major iteration to the map will be showing what is for sale. Right now, we’ve tailored the playtest map for seeing what is claimed/unclaimed. Check it out here: https://etherlands.com/app/map.

Meta-Transactions

We have meta-transactions set up, so players don’t need to worry about having the network token or configuring the best gas price. From the player’s perspective, they are just clicking buttons & authorizing actions — we take care of the leg work.

An entirely new district page

Instead of relying on OpenSea and other NFT sites to view individual districts, we’ve built our own page to view districts. Today, the page is read-only, but we’ll soon introduce already existing in-game land management functionality to our site. See an example here: https://etherlands.com/app/district/303.

Renders!

What was once a fun idea has snowballed into a core feature for Etherlands. Users are constantly building new and beautiful things in Etherlands, and we thought they should have a way to show it off. By putting together a scene in Blender, we render each and every District in four different isometric views. With these renders, users can show their friends what they have built. Much like the real world, people love building things and showing them off. Why should the virtual one be any different? Soon, you’ll be able to see the evolution of your district through time as you build your on-chain identity.

Accessibility

With Etherlands, we want to introduce blockchain and its unique features to an entirely new crowd; because of that, we’re spending a lot of time and resources showing off the features and hiding the pain points. While Metamask is the dominant wallet in crypto, it has an awful onboarding and user experience. We have a lot of Minecraft players who get stuck trying to play Etherlands because of their onboarding experience. With the addition of Fortmatic, players only need a phone number or email to make a wallet. In addition to an easy onboarding experience, they make buying land and interacting with the site a pleasant experience.

It should be noted that Fortmatic is a hosted wallet. While we recommend this process to beginners, users should be wary of those risks, and as they become more familiar with crypto, migrate to a different wallet solution.

In-game NFT Billboards

Etherlands players love building unique things. To complement their design, style, and ingenuity, we have implemented NFT art into Etherlands. Users can create small or large art displays in-game. We have even gone the extra mile to support GIFs! We are looking to support MP4s and other file types in the future.

Etherlands Gamer Profile

As users buy more districts and want to see all of their districts in one place (or another user’s), we have built user profiles. Today the user’s profile shows their name, address, how many districts they own and displays all of them. We’ll be introducing in-game info like their town membership & group in the future, along with fun things like player stats & achievements.

Beginners Guides & Documentation

Like any good project, we’ve been building out our documentation. While the game is rapidly developing, we’re using Gitbook to host our documentation. Check it out! Maybe you’ll find something fun :)

Navigation & UI

While the client hasn’t changed too much, we have added a few improvements. We noticed some players were having difficulty navigating the massive world, so we built a mini-map and implemented a compass.

Trading

We have recently implemented a player-to-player trading system so users can trade with each other. Just send a trade invite to another player online. If they accept, the below window will appear. Each player drags and drops what they want to trade. They can each see what the other is offering, and if they are both happy, they can click the block to accept. While this system is nice, it doesn’t scale well and requires the users to be online to trade. We’re working on an entirely new trading system with details soon to be announced!

What is on its way?

While we have already mentioned a bunch of features, here is what hasn’t been talked about:

• Explore page: A single page to see every district and filters to sift through them. Over time this page will become the predominant place to buy and sell districts.
• Town page: We have district pages and profile pages, but we don’t have a town page yet. We expect Towns to be heavily used as Etherlands gains traction and real value is associated with land and resources. The Town page will include a render of the Town’s land, member information, management tools, and Town stats.
• Town competition: After the success of the first District competition, we’re going to be hosting a similar District build competition but for the best Town. This is to encourage collaboration, promote the roles of Towns in Etherlands, and continue to test Etherlands.
• [redacted] competition: We have a surprise competition coming after the Town competition that we’ve developed the tooling for and are super excited to start! The early bird gets the worm! ;)

We are excited to begin marketing the game more heavily and get more players on Etherlands. The following two months include a ton of development work on the frontend, web & client, and even more on the backend. If all goes well, we’re looking forward to kicking off the Etherlands Beta and turning on the economy. More information will follow as we get closer to our beta. In the meantime, hop on, try out Etherlands and bring your friends!

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