View the Dark Forest Valhalla NFTs on OpenSea, and check out the Round 3 Wrapup here.

Welcome back to Dark Forest! Round 4: Society Eggnog will begin on Friday, October 1. The round will run for roughly four days and will end on Monday, October 4, at 9PM PT.

This round is named after the planet Society Eggnog, whose “Mega HAT” was purchased by @dropswap_gg during round 3. The round name of the next round, round 5, will also be determined by the largest HAT purchased during this round (tiebroken by energy cap and purchase time).

Objective

This round contains a familiar objective: score as many points as possible. Score is obtained by withdrawing silver from spacetime rips and by discovering artifacts.

Additionally, you may have noticed that the duration of the round is shorter than usual – the round will end faster, but the game is also being sped up to run more quickly. Time literally runs faster in round 4. It’s a lightning round! Will you be able to keep up!?

Changelog

Gameplay:

• Move speed in this universe has been dramatically increased! As a result, your voyages will complete far more quickly than usual.
• Points are gained by withdrawing silver and discovering artifacts.
• The basic universe ruleset has been rolled back to the round 2 version.

Features:

• Added option to auto-dismiss transaction confirmation and rejection notifications.
• Re-added shortcuts which allow you to select how much silver to send: [Shift+number].
• Added settings for disabling hat and emoji rendering, which improves performance.

Bugs:

• Shortcuts within modals now only trigger on the currently selected modal.
• Fixed buggy tooltip implementation - they now trigger properly even if you move your mouse quickly.
• Fixed our ERC721 metadata backend. This means artifacts should show up properly in third-party tools.

The open-source contract and client code will be updated shortly to reflect Round 4 changes.

Whitelist Keys

Whitelist keys for this round will be emailed to all players who successfully scored points in the previous round, in addition to a random subset of the waitlist.

You can earn your whitelist key for the next round by scoring at least one point this round. As a reminder, keys for previous rounds will not work in this round.

As in the previous round, the top 63 players will be awarded Dark Forest NFTs in Valhalla. Special prizes will additionally be awarded at the discretion of the developers for particularly creative or community-oriented projects.

Also, thank you for your patience if you are one of the winners of Round 3 - the Valhalla gods are a boisterous and rowdy bunch, which has caused some delays. Rest assured, you’ll receive your planet NFT in due time.

Resources

There are a handful of fantastic tools and resources out there for everyone:

• [community] Plugins showcase (repo)
• [community] Plugin Dev Server
• [community] Remote Miner
• [community] Dev Guides (repo - open a PR to submit a guide!)
• [community] Jacob Rosenthal’s summary of dev resources
• [community] DFWiki.net, a new community-run Dark Forest Wiki
• [community] Dark Forest local deployment kit
• [official] open-source client and smart contract code
• [official] Dark Forest official npm packages
• [official] typedoc generated docs for official webclient

The round starts at the end of the week, so you have some time to prepare. Get your plugins ready and feel free to utilize the local client to test out how it feels with a faster round.

Best of luck in the Dark Forest!