This ‘ Minecraft’ Clone Puts Every Game Action On-Chain— Here’s Why

A Minecraft copy on the Somnia bitcoin testnet called Chunked puts every in-game activity on the blockchain—from a player’s action to every wall placed, collected, and crafted.

Creator MSquared, a division of metaverse technology contractor Improbable, says this is the first of a number of bitcoin experiments as the company looks to see how far it may push the boundaries of crypto games.

Playing the game is a soft experience, even with all the on-chain hangers, as there is n’t apparent lag when placing or mining a wall. That said, some issues can arise when constructing with stones immediately disappearing from a person’s products. Plus, the sport world’s borders are very small, significantly reducing the eternal playground experience of the actual Minecraft.

MSquared CEO Rob Whitehead told that while it ’s also in a “tech demo” status, the sport is designed to be a real Web3 game—not only a Web2 activity with NFTs “bolted on the side. ”

Whitehead explained that Chunked does n’t have a classic client backing it, with everything being supported by the Somnia testnet. As for, if MSquared decided to stop supporting the sport, it would still exist on-chain long and could be picked back up by the area to maintain growth.

“All of the world data of Chunked and all [of its ] logic is on Somnia, so it’s free to be interacted with and read from indefinitely, ” Whitehead said. “The reasoning of Chunked is a series of on-chain bright contracts that will be open-sourced. The area can either use the present world data on-chain, or build their own contracts and create their own entirely distinct fork of the world with different rules. ”

This is n’t something new, he added, pointing to the automatic worlds activity that has attempted to put entertainment worlds on-chain for these specific reasons. Dark Forest is a primary example of this in play, as a space exploration game that puts everything on-chain and takes advantage of zero-knowledge proofs to maintain mystery.

CCP Games ’ upcoming Eve Frontier—a survival-centric spinoff from Eve Online—will do much the same with Ethereum-based architecture.

“The challenges right now have been chains (especially layer-1s ) just haven’t had the raw performance to handle large-scale real time games like this, with most projects being much simpler games with limited appeal, ” Whitehead said.

Recently, a Crossy Road clone on the MegaETH public testnet went viral as every in-game action was recorded on-chain. As with Chunked, it could only be pulled off because of a new era of extremely high-performance networks emerging; the Ethereum mainnet certainly would not have been up for the task.

“Right now we’re running on testnet, learning what new kinds of on-chain games are possible, ” Whitehead said. “We’d love to see this evolve into a persistent on-chain voxel world in mainnet, which is owned and evolved by a community of co-creators. ”

Somnia is expected to hit mainnet sometime this year. On this path, MSquared plans to roll out a series of other on-chain experiments, with the most successful tests due to become “full commercial projects ” once Somnia fully launches onto mainnet.