Dark Forest v0.6 Round 5 Wrapup

We’re hosting D.E.F.CON at Devconnect in Amsterdam on April 19th! Apply now.

The final round of Dark Forest v0.6 has come to an end! Thank you for participating in Round 5: The Junk Wars.

Nearly 2,000 people participated in this exploratory final round - a round that introduced new features, mechanics, and plenty of memorable experiences over a 10-day period.

Scoring

First off, this round radically flipped Dark Forest on veteran players’ heads; new to the round were Spaceships, Space Junk, Capture Zones, and more.

With the advent of Capture Zones, scoring took a new direction as well: In favor of the new Capture Zone mechanic, silver’s point value was reduced to .1 score per silver withdrawn (instead of 1:1), and artifact discovery value was drastically reduced as well.

Players dove into the round and quickly formulated new strategies and tactics, with the aim of maximizing the efficiency of their point-collecting.

Nearly five players reached 1,000,000,000 (one billion!) points this round. As you may have noticed in the image above, an unexpected turn of events lead to a first-place tie between @orden_gg and @d_fdao. Orden now has four first-place finishes (one of them being a tie) under their belt.

How did this happen? It’s a long story - check out the highlights.

Highlights

DAOs are continuing to break the mold and explore ways new ways to conquer Dark Forest.

• Coming hot off of their back to back to back wins, orden_gg started off Round 5 with a strong lead, until d_fdao revealed that they were the anonymous player right behind them.
• d_fdao raised a call to arms for players to help them topple the orden_gg empire, but during this, shared that they’d found a way to stretch new game mechanics in their favor by creating an energy farm with 10 motherships on a single level 7 planet.
• While it was exciting to see this creative use of game mechanics, it did sour the experience for some players, and this led to a discussion of balance, fairness, and the spirit of gameplay.
• In the end, orden_gg and d_fdao agreed to a “diplomatic draw” and both players decided to halt their scores at 1,700,000,000, resulting in the first official tie.
• Will Chang published a Twitter thread recapping the Round 5 story, and for a deeper dive, we recommend reading d_fdao’s Junk Wars Saga. Part 1 and Part 2 are live.
• P_DAO, a lesser-known group, had a coordinated effort to elevate their individual players instead of the DAO account by having a voice channel open for the duration of the round, utilizing two-person squads, and informing each other when capture zones have arrived on others’ planets. They claim that this resulted in 7 of the top 10 leaderboard spots being occupied by their players!
• Were you at ETHDenver? If you were, we hope you came to the first Dark Forest Community Meetup! Thank you d_fdao for co-hosting.
• We launched Dark Forest Lobbies! Now you can easily customize and launch Dark Forest universes for you, your friends, and for the world. 🪐

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 future with instructions on how to claim it. These NFTs can be inspected on Etherscan and OpenSea.

Please note that a few fake Dark Forest collections have popped up on OpenSea. The ones we’re aware of were taken down, but more can pop up at any time. Please only refer to the official Dark Forest Collection on OpenSea.

Special Prizes Awarded

Similar to the previous round, beyond the top 63 planet awards, we’re also awarding a number of special prize planet NFTs to individuals who contributed to Dark Forest in especially creative and/or community-minded ways. These prizes are awarded by the core 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.

• Weasel (lvl4): for constantly helping the community & helping to triage the capture zone bug
• Fravic (lvl4): for disclosing the capture zone bug
• Nightman (lvl4): for disclosing the whitelist mirror incident
• Velorum (lvl3): for being a fantastic community moderator
• Modukon (lvl3): for constantly helping the community & contributing to the death star storyline
• Nahkd (lvl3): for constantly helping the community with questions & plugin contributions
• D_fdao (lvl3): for disclosing bugs & co-hosting the Denver community meetup
• Classicjordon (lvl2): for helping the community & contributing to dfwiki
• Bulmenisaurus (lvl2): for helping the community
• df_hero (lvl2): for creating a simple sortable leaderboard plugin
• Cristobal (lvl2): for creating the highlight my planets (and another related) plugin
• Orden_gg (lvl2): for the epic diplomacy storyline with d_fdao
• Harryhare (lvl2): for creating a lobbies scoreboard plugin
• DFarchon (lvl2): for publishing transaction metrics for round 5
• Ddy (lvl2): for creating the capture wait time and abandon area planets plugins
• Snowtigersoft (lvl2): for updating multiple plugins for round 5
• Rootial (lvl2): for updating multiple plugins for round 5
• Neronzz (lvl2): for livestreaming lobbies on Twitch!

When projects were launched with either multiple contributors, or with both DAO and individual involvement, the Dark Forest core team used discretion to decide where and how the special prize planet should be awarded.

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

But that’s not all! If you participated in The Junk Wars, you can now claim a special POAP to the address you played with.

Thank you for playing in Dark Forest v0.6 Round 5: The Junk Wars! We’ll see you in v0.7 ;)

-Dark Forest Team