Dark Forest v0.6 Round 2: Inspire Hallowed has concluded! Thank you all who participated and congratulations to the winners.

Nearly 1900 players participated in this round. Of those, 800 players earned their invite key to the next round (the date of which is yet to be announced).

Over 2 million transactions were submitted over the course of this nine-day round, using over 1.7 trillion units of gas. The previous round also saw 2 million transactions, though that round had a two-week duration.

This round saw the highest level of competition we’ve seen thus far, and the latter half had a handful of players fighting neck and neck for the top spot with multiple players surpassing 200 million points. In the final days, @d_fdao campaigned for new allies to donate their Foundries and empires to their cause, with the goal of locking in first place. However, @ghst_gg also came to play and got several other high-ranking players to donate their Foundries and empires to him, giving us all the opportunity to observe an intense race between the two for first place.

At the end of the round, @ghst_gg took 1st place with 485 million points, @d_fdao took 2nd place with 459 million, and @yunyandeng got 3rd with 322 million. And this was all over a nine-day period of time! @d_fdao tweeted their concession shortly before the round ended, while @ghst_gg celebrated their victory.

For reference, @adietrichs won the previous Dark Forest round by reaching 300 million points over a two-week period, though artifact discoveries were not counted towards point totals in that round.

While @ghst_gg is presumably an individual player, @d_fdao is a DAO. DAOs and alliances exist both inside and outside of Dark Forest - they are a natural evolution to permissionless blockchain architecture, and we’re excited to see how things develop further.

Highlights

In addition to the nail-biting race for first, Inspire Hallowed was full of interesting occurrences:

• The first coordinated, large scale space battle happened between @Ner0nzz and @0x000da38758. It occurred after the scoring portion of the round concluded, and the stakes were for fun. Watch a replay of the battle or skip ahead for the results!
• DF player (and new Discord moderator!) Velorum came up with a strategy to use utility artifacts in a creative manner to conduct an artifact heist.
• Beginning to see the forming of an economy, a handful of players began to harness the power of their machines/servers to sell map hashing power and map files. Along with this, we’re seeing a real desire for knowledge to compete at a higher level. If you’d like to buy/sell/trade anything, please utilize the #marketplace channel in Discord.
• Community Resources are being developed! During this round, two new community resources launched: DFWiki.net and Dev Guides. These resources are for general game knowledge and more technical game knowledge, respectively.
• The community continues to grow - the Dark Forest Discord has over 3,000 members while the Dark Forest Twitter account now has over 10,000 followers!

Valhalla

The top 63 players will be awarded planet NFTs in Valhalla on the Ethereum mainnet. If you won a prize, we’ll send an email to you in the near future with instructions on how to claim it. These NFTs can be inspected on Etherscan and OpenSea.

Special Prizes Awarded

Similar to the previous round, we’re awarding a number of special prize NFTs as well to individuals who contributed to Dark Forest in especially creative or community-minded ways. These prizes were awarded by the developer team with input from a few community members. They aren’t meant to be an exhaustive listing of all community projects; rather, they’re meant to highlight a sample of community contributions that we thought were especially cool.

In future rounds, the Dark Forest team will continue to award NFT prizes at our discretion to players who contribute to the Dark Forest community via open-source tooling, content creation, bug reporting, and more.

• Velorum (lvl3): for help with community management - moderation, welcoming new players, answering questions, and more
• Weasel (lvl3): for being an active and helpful member of the community by helping players troubleshoot technical and gameplay questions, and for experimenting with the Dark Forest data economy by transacting maps and hashpower
• 0xBear (lvl3): for being an active and helpful member of the community by helping players troubleshoot technical and gameplay questions, and for various contributions to 3rd-party open-source tools and plugins
• binderdoug (lvl3): for contributions to open source tools, and for being an active and helpful member of the community by helping players troubleshoot technical and gameplay questions
• spencecoin (lvl3): for help with community management, for successfully launching the community-run DFWiki, and for streaming the first Dark Forest duel between Ner0nzz and 0x000
• pec0s (lvl3): for creating Dark Forest fanart!
• Ner0nzz (lvl3): for help with community management, and for participating in the first community-organized competitive war showmatch
• 0x000 (lvl3): for participating in the first community-organized competitive war showmatch
• phated (lvl3): for leadership and maintenance of multiple 3rd-party open-source tools such as the Project Sophon explorer, plugins, etc.
• jacobrosenthal (lvl3): for leadership and maintenance of multiple 3rd-party open-source tools such as remote explorer, plugins, etc.
• modukon (lvl2): for contributions to open-source plugins
• gakonst (lvl2): for progress on a rust client and rust zkSNARK tools
• manan19 (lvl2): for contributions to open-source plugins
• COTG (lvl2): for experimenting with the Dark Forest data economy by transacting maps and hashpower
• rootial (lvl2): for contributions to open-source plugins
• nightlosk (lvl2): for help with welcoming and managing a Chinese community of Dark Forest players
• ecrivaine_k (lvl2): for help with welcoming and managing a Chinese community of Dark Forest players
• snowtigersoft (lvl2): for contributions to open-source plugins

As with the top 63 prize winners, we will email the special prize winners with instructions on how to claim them in the near future.