First Alpha

Introducing Cryptoverse

Cryptoverse is a game of stellar exploration, trading, and war. It is also my attempt at a decentralized MMO, with a distributed infrastructure and no need for moderation. It’s built on blockchain technology, similar to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Right now it’s in alpha, and I need your help to shape its future!

How does it work?

Right now it’s a barebones command prompt for probing new systems, jumping your ships to other systems, and attacking enemies. The process of probing for new systems can be done without any ships, and is actually how new ships are added to the game world. Every time you probe a new system, you’re also verifying the actions of other players and adding them to the collective history of the game’s universe. In return, you’re rewarded with 10 new ships! The difficulty for probing on the test server is currently low enough that a decent computer will find a new system every couple of minutes. As more players probe for systems, the difficulty will increase so new ones are only discovered every two minutes. Jumping between systems is more dangerous the farther one goes, so it’s advised to jump among the intervening stars to minimize losses to your fleet. Attacking ships is very dangerous, and each ship you send to kill an enemy is also lost, so you’ll have to keep probing new systems to earn more ships.

What’s planned for gameplay?

• A more game-like client in Unity3D to replace the CLI
• More ships and an extended tech tree
• Resources that can be harvested by specialized ships
• The ability to transfer ships and resources to other players
• Static structures like jump gates that can be used to jump farther distances

Future changes to the protocol (technical)

• Peer-to-peer support so servers can keep each other up to date
• Fee support, so you can tip resources to people probing new star systems, enticing them to include your action into the shared history of the game
• Client-side validation of updates from server

To keep updated on new features and vote for the ones you like, check out the Trello board for Cryptoverse.

How do I play?

Download and run the command line interface matching your operating system here. If you’d prefer to build the CLI yourself, you can pull it from GitHub. Once running, it will generate a local.db file next to the executable. This is important, so don’t lose or share it, since it contains the private keys for your fleet! The client will sync with the game state of the test server, which may take a moment depending on how much has happened.

You’re now ready to start probing for new systems by entering “probe” into the command line. Depending upon the number of people probing and the speed of your machine, this can take seconds or minutes. Once it’s done your newly discovered star system will be sent to the test server, where others can download and probe for new systems on top of it. In doing so, you’ve also earned yourself 10 ships! By default, ships start out in the genesis system, the first one that was probed. To find your ships, use the list deployments command “ldeploy”. Your ships can be ordered around by using the “jump” or “attack” commands. For more information type “help” into the CLI, or for help with specific commands try “help <command>”.

How can I help?

The Cryptoverse server and CLI are open source under the MIT license, so feel free to fork us on GitHub! If you have any questions or feedback, shoot me an email.