Nine Chronicles: Fully decentralized world of fantasy

Nine Chronicles
Nine Chronicles
Published in
6 min readJun 29, 2020

⚔️ Nine Chronicles

The great war between the gods ripped the Nine Worlds apart, and even though the gods eventually put an end to their conflict, the scars of war had already started to cause Yggdrasil, the world tree to wither. Then one day, a stray cat in Midgard wishing to be reborn as a human, was called by the goddess and reincarnated as a half-cat, half-human being.

Together with this cat, now you will aid the goddess Freya and gain powers to face the great evils that lie ahead!

Nine Chronicles and Libplanet

Nine Chronicles is a 100% decentralized free-to-play RPG that is also the first title to be developed with Libplanet. A major characteristic of Libplanet is that it enables the game to run on a P2P network of players without requiring any central server to host. The entire game, from crafting an item to complex battles, takes place fully on-chain. This means that the game can continue to run smoothly even without depending on the game company. Except for occasionally pushing patch data on-chain so that updates can be broadcast between the clients, everything in the game can be said to be completely owned by the users.

The reason why we are creating an entire game on the blockchain is to achieve true serverless RPG experience. In a typical online game, even if all in-game items are stored permanently in the blockchain, if the game company shuts down its servers, the items become useless. This means that the value of the items are not guaranteed simply by being on the blockchain. On the other hand, if the game was fully developed on on-chain distributed network, the game could live on by the users even without the game company.

Since Nine Chronicles is open-source, anyone can add features and modify the environment as they desire. For instance, multiple users can come up with their own version of the game and launch a new network, just like how Minecraft is being modified by its players as they see fit. Just like how League of Legends was born out of Warcraft 3’s custom user map, player-driven innovation has always played a huge part in the history of game development. And we wish Nine Chronicles to be the foundation that paves the road to decentralized and community-driven online games.

Game Features

Let’s have a look through in-game features that are currently available.

1. Dungeons

The world of Nine Chronicles has 9 regions in total. Yggdrasil, the first region of the game, is inhibited by cute little creatures that the players will be facing as enemies.

Fights in dungeons are automatically simulated. Even so, with all the critical hits, shining loots, and varied enemies, we hope your time will fly like an arrow to a knee! You may proceed to the next stage when you fully clear the current stage, and new regions will be unlocked as you move through the depths of each region.

2. Crafting

You can craft an item or upgrade the ones you have with the help of Dvergr, the renowned cat blacksmith in the town. You can gather various crafting components during your journey through stages, or you could simply buy them from the others in the marketplace.

Once you start to craft an item, you can see its progress in the ‘Workshop’ tab. The progress is measured not in physical time like seconds or hours, but in a number of blocks produced.

3. Trading

Jade, once a great thief who was audacious enough to steal heavenly jewels from the gods waits for you at the marketplace located at the town gates. Of course, now all this is but a history of the past, and she diligently watches over her shop. Through Jade, the players can buy items they need, or sell unwanted ones that others might find helpful. Since Nine Chronicles is 100% decentralized, the shop will always be full of items created by players, not developers.

4. Strategy

Dungeon gets harder to clear as you progress. Of course, you can proceed to the next stage by leveling up and finding better gear, but you can also take a more strategic approach to clear the dungeon with less effort. You can take advantage of the elemental properties of your equipment as well the enemy’s, and boost your stats with consumables to clear dungeons you find particularly difficult. Here’s your chance to triumph over the challenges of the Nine Worlds.

5. Battle

How does your build and strategy stack up to other players? In the battle arena, you can challenge other players to prove your worthiness among them, and climb up your way to the higher rankings. Anyone meeting the requirement can compete in the arena and discover other players on the list. There is a fitting daily reward for the highest rankers, and with Devon’s strict and disciplined guidance, you can be sure that no cheating will occur.

Conclusion

Other miscellaneous features aside, we’ve covered the main content of Nine Chronicles. The game is undergoing closed beta testing, and more classes, regions, items, and features will be added over time. We wish Nine Chronicles to be the game not only developed by us, but also by the users with their creativity blooming in forms of various MODs and other types of content. We will do our best to deliver our vision in the next open beta phase of Nine Chronicles.

In the following part, let’s have a closer look at ‘Libplanet’, a blockchain game engine that powers the world of Nine Chronicles.

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