v0.33 is out, and the testnet will restart (for the last time, that's the plan) on Tuesday.

See https://townforge.net/v0-33-0-0-is-out for more details.

Mainnet is pencilled in for November.

Feel free to report any bugs in #townforge on libera.chat IRC.

Well, there was a recent burst of testing going by new players, and one consensus bug found and fixed. Since there is a realistic prospect of more testing happening in the near future, I'm going to delay mainnet for now, since this extra testing time will be useful.

v0.31.3.1 is released, and will be the version used for the mainnet launch on the 3rd of July, assuming no showstopper.

The testnet has been reset to use this version as well. If you were on a previous testnet, you'll need to delete your chain before resyncing.

Version 0.31.1.0 is out.

This is the version that will be used for mainnet on the 3rd of July.

Note that it is NOT compatible with the current testnet, so if you want to join testnet to try the game out, use 0.31.0.0 still.

Source: https://git.townforge.net/
Binaries: https://townforge.net/download (mac should be there soon)


And for those who want to know more about how land works, what properties make land more or less valuable, here's a blog post for you:

https://townforge.net/how-to-choose-your-new-land

Thanks

There's no ICO or the like. It's a fair launch, there's no land pre-owned by anyone to be sold to others. To buy land, you'll have to mine (or buy gold from others they'll have mined first).

Land cost is a fixed function based on the location. High close to the center (it's prime land, close to the starting point), goes down and then slowly up with distance to avoid people building at silly distances and add a a measure of scarcity and resale potential.

In terms of absolute amounts, you can get a 32x32 plot for less than 10.5 gold some distance away from the town square (the block reward starts at > 17 gold, so that's a steal). Building on that plot costs extra of course, depending on what kind of building you want.

So from the 3rd of July, you can start mining, and buy land with the proceeds!

There are several ways you can make a niche for yourself in Townforge. Some career paths give you recurring passive income, while others require regular play to earn gold. All of them will be lucrative in some conditions and less so in others, so changing tactics may be a good idea from time to time.

The following list is not exhaustive.

Rent seeker
This is the easy one, which is suitable for "fire and forget" type players who want to get in the game and get recurring income afterwards with minimal involvement. You basically buy land, build a building which receives subsidy from the town treasury, and log in every few weeks to repair and restock. Those buildings include residential, craft, commercial, and more. This is expected to be very lucrative at first, but the more players enter the game, the lower the income will be, since the town treasury will be shared among more players.

Materials producer
Some buildings do not get town treasury income, but produce materials instead, like wood and stone, which are needed to build other buildings. By building stonecutters and sawmills, you can produce materials and sell it to others who need it in the in-game decentralized marketplace. Again, this is expected to be very lucrative at first.

Farmer
Food is required for buildings to tick, so people will be buying food stocks. Building agricultural buildings lets you farm grain or vegetables and sell the surplus to other players on the in-game market. Food is perishable though, and managing sowing/harvest times makes this career path a high risk high reward one, requiring regular play (basically twice a week at least).

Prestige seeker
Collectors of gold coins and gemstones are ranked according to the size and rarity of their collection. The most prestigious players get extra passive income every tick. This is a fairly hands off way to earn gold in Townforge, but one that will likely require a fair amount of up front money.

Speculator
The in game markets are a great place for traders to play the ups and downs of a real economy. Not only you have a dozen or so items with real demand (food, building materials), but rarer items also exist (collectible coins, gemstones, and player designed items). Buying low and selling high is a dangerous but potentially very lucrative endeavour.

3D designer
While building 3D models of buildings to place in the world is optional, good looking buildings will earn their owner badges, giving a prestige bonus, and thus extra income. That owner may then find it financially attractive to pay a 3D designer to build fancy models for some of their buildings.

Entrepreneur
A player may create a company, as well as shares as custom items in the game. These shares can then be traded freely in the in-game marketplace. Dividends can be issued to current owners of said shares. Need I say more ? An enterprising player can start an in game business and sell shares to get funding. Richer players with less time to play can invest in those shares and get regular income.

Lender
Buildings can be mortgaged, so a player wanting to expand their empire can raise money to do so. Mortgage repayments are secured on a building, which will be automatically put to auction if the agreed upon repayments are not met, with the auction proceeds used to pay the debt. This is a great way for rich players to earn gold with close to no play time.

Researcher
There is a tech tree in Townforge, and players discovering tech can not only benefit from bonuses, but can also licence those to other players, since a discovery comes with ten licence items, which can be traded on the market.

Land developer
Buy land and build houses on them along with a nice 3D model, to resell them with a little markup to new players looking for uncomplicated exposure to the game passive income system.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and some of the strategies above are risky, but this shows a good overview of what is possible in Townforge. Since the game rules are intentionally fairly open ended, I look forward to see how enterprising players find other ways to earn gold in game.

It's really hard to say, but a possible indication is that since the emission curve is the same as Monero, scaled by 2 IIRC, then if you consider it might be valued at 0.1% of Monero for its market cap, it'd be... $250 / 2000 = 12.5 cents. Of  course it's kinda circular reasoning since this number relies on estimating the  market cap to be worth 0.1% of Monero's, so it could be $1.25 if you think it should be 1% of Monero's, or 1.25 cents if you think it should be 0.01% of Monero's In the end, it'll be whatever people in general think it should be.

To get gold, you either mine it or buy it. It might or might not get added by an  exchange, but if not, I'm sure people will offer P2P exchanges. Once you have some, you just click on "create account" in the game, and fill your player name and how much to deposit. The fee will be taken on top.

I imagine the first few players will just mine some to start with.

It is open source, so you can run it for free and explore the world.

You will need to pay to perform any action though. This includes the tx fee (every game action that impacts the world, such as hunting, building, buying items, seling them, tech research, etc) is a tx on the chain (though they're small, typically about 100 bytes for a lot of them).

So basically read mode is free, write mode requires gold, which you can mine. There's a 1 gold fee to create a game account to avoid jokers creating millions and gumming up the works. After that, transaction fees are something like 0.0002 per action, so super cheap.

I filed a request with Tradeogre about it, it's got a fair chance I think. Otherwise, any exchange is free to add it. If they support any Cryptonote, it's basically the same (except no payment ids, so it'll have to be subaddresses).
If that doesn't happen then I guess it'll be P2P

Since this is going to a potential confusion point, I want to make it clear upfront:

Townforge is a game where you trade, earn and lose the cryptocurrency (gold) that is on the chain.
This means that as your in-game balance goes up and down as you play, this balance is withdrawable to your wallet address at any time you choose, so you really play with "real" money.

This implies that you have a vested interest in knowing how to play the game before mainnet starts, so you can hit the ground running. Find out how to play, then find out how to play better. Find out what's where, how to make money, how the various parts of the game work together.

Find out how prestige works (the 20 most prestigious players get extra income). Find out how the two groups of buildings (production based and treasury income based) work. Find out how to mine (basically same as monero). Find out the various career paths you can take in the game to carve out your niche as a canny player.

Basically, people who know what they are doing when mainnet comes will have an advantage over those who have to work things out later, same as any other game. But in Townforge, there won't be matches, there will just be a long game with no save games to reload.

The manual is your friend. Hopefully it's up to date but there are so much things in the game if you find something that's off please let me know

Good luck to all


Edit:
also, there is a testnet running atm still. That's how you get to know the game Add --testnet to the game command line (ie, townforge --testnet).

git submodule sync

Townforge 0.29 is out, and testnet will restart on saturday.

Do not use 0.29 before then, nor 0.28 afterwards.

Everything will be cleared again, buildings, gold, etc.

If you want to carry over a 3D model, export it with 0.28 prior to updating, then import it with 0.29.

Are you sending to an integrated address ? Those are 106 characters long, instead of the usual 95.

If so, then the Trezor is likely splitting that address into the correspdonding standard address and the short payment id.

You can check this using monero-wallet-cli, and run:
integrated_address ADDRESS

Replace ADDRESS with the address you want to be sending to. If the command prints the address you're seeing on the Trezor, you're good. If not....

Townforge 0.28 is out, and the testnet is restarting on sunday.
This brings various consensus fixes and tweaks, as well as IPFS hosted NFTs. Player created items can now also contain gold, which contributes to the player's prestige score.
Remember to remove your previous chain after updating to 0.28.

To give some point of reference, since this is an economy based game, Aren's castle shown in Syksy's post above cost:
- Land: 34.3 gold
- Materials: 11.3k sandstone, 30k pine, 210k labour. At full price, this sets you back about 182 gold
Total: about 216 gold

This building currently gets an income of 66 gold per tick (4 times a day) against a puny land tax of about 0.05 gold.
It really is a no brainer as the castle pays itself back in less than a single day. Of course, this is because there's very few players so far, which means the treasury emission gets shared among those very few people. When mainnet starts, we expect people to join early so they can share in the bounty too.

The stonecutter adjacent to the castle cost:
- Land: 30.6 gold
- Materials: 23.5k sandstone, 23.5k pine, 282k labour, so about 442 gold at full price
Total: about 473 gold

The stonecutter does not get automatic income as the castle does. Instead, it produces stone blocks, which you can use to build your other buildings cheaper, or sell to others, undercutting the full price supply. This particular stonecutter gets you 738 sandstone per tick (4.4 gold), using up 306 pine and 3.8k labour (1.83 gold), leaving you with a 2.57 profit per tick (assuming same price as above). A lot less than the castle, right ? But this production stays constant, while the income from the castle will go down as more people join the game, get building and start sharing in the treasury emission.

Now, this is a bit more complex than that, I did not count costs of food and heating material, and this is something you should get familiar with on testnet while there is still time before mainnet launch.

Android/iPhone:
Android/iPhone would be nice (OK, I'd love it to happen), but I'm not going to do it myself. If someone with the right skills shows up, it's a free software project, patches will definitely be considered. Both Monero and Urho3D work on those platforms so making Android/iPhone builds should not be a huge undertaking, it just needs someone familiar with the platforms and the processes for the app stores.

NFTs:
NFTs are possible. A player can create custom items and item groups at will. Those are then tradable, giftable and generally usable as other items. They can also be destroyed by whoever owns them at the time. The in game UI is not great at the moment, but it'll get better in time.

You mention building, so you might have been thinking of land and 3D buildings: these are tradable and giftable too, and also destroyable, and very definitely non fungible. They can also be mortgaged to raise further funds or auctioned. I'm not quite sure what you're after so if you want to ask a more precise question I can answer that.

There's also the collectible gold coins, which are in a category between fungible and non fungible: there's a number of designs and a collection game mechanic. Coins may be minted for a game year (a real week) after a design is released (automated game function), and coins are fungible within their design, but different designs have their own age (older coins are more valuable), gold content (heavier coins are more valuable), etc.

As an example, if you wanted to create, say, a set of items representing every Pokemon, you'd create a "Pokemon" custom item category, then a new item for each Pokemon in that category. You can then sell then on the Townforge marketplace. There's no image assigned to player items currently (there's a possibility for abuse) but it'd be nice to have that at some point.

PVP/PVE:
There's no direct conflict in this game. There is no representation of a player in the 3D world, only the land and buildings. You cannot loot another player's belongings. The most you can do is position your land and configure your buildings to give penalties to other players' buildings (and of course snap up the most productive land for yourself).
I'm planning a system of "feasts" for later, which will bring some extra competition between towns, but this will still be nowhere near PvP.

Now, Townforge is an economic game, so there's a lot of scope for economic based competition, including the embedded decentralized marketplace, the auction system, the mortgage mechanics, etc. A shrewd player will be able to exploit any mispricing in those areas, and since pricing will depend in large part on player interactions and other dynamic factors, I expect money will be made and lost there. But it's still no PvP

Other blockchain:
I considered using Monero to start with, since it's what I'm familiar with. However, two main reasons made me use a new chain:
- the game is actually embedded on the chain, rather than using a chain to pay for in-game items, so this would have required consensus changes to Monero - a no go
- I don't want to spam the Monero chain with game transactions which would weight the chain down forever

I already have a chain I'm familiar with, being one of the main Monero contributors, so that's what I went with. I am able to make any modifications I need without being dependent on anyone else for it.

How will early mainnet play out ?

While it's impossible to tell for sure, I expect the following when mainnet starts:

- Since about 9% of the total emission lands in town treasuries, early players will get a larger slice of that pie until more players sign up and start playing

- Building materials can be obtained at a high price from the game, and it will take a bit of time before players have set up substantial wood and stone producing industry and start undercutting the game's "last resort" wood/stone supply, so cost to build will start dropping after a delay

The first point favours early adopters, while the second one disfavours them. Regardless of which one ends up taking precedence, it seems safe to say that the people who have been playing on testnet to get to know the rules and get a feel for the game dynamics will be at a significant advantage, at least until newer players get the hang of it too.
   
If you decide to check it out before mainnet, here are are few things you'll want to have looked into as they are instrumental to an efficient play style:
   
- Farming timing and amount: grain and vegetables only grow when temperature is high enough, and crop damage happens when it drops too low, keeping on eye on season and temperature is a must if you specialize in farming.

- Ground potential maps: some locations are good sources of stone, others have more stable ground, or more fruitful land for farming, or grow different types of trees. You'll want to make sure you build your structures on land that lends itself well to your   buildings' types.

- Prestige: prestige accrues to players with the most impressive collection of gold coins, as well as most in game achievements. Four times a day, the twenty most prestigious players get a gold bonus on top of what income they earn through their buildings and other endeavours. Keeping your prestige up will be a great way to ensure money flows back to you.

- Inter building dynamics: this is probably the most complex part of the game mechanics: buildings influence each other: you get bonuses (or penalties) depending on which building types (whether your own or not) are close to your own buildings. You will learn how to place buildings in locations where bonuses are the best to maximize income. This can lead to impromptu player interactions: alliances where players cooperate to place each others' buildings in mutually advantageous locations, or conflict where players can even attempt to give other people's buildings certain penalties.

And there's much more! When you've checked out these, you may want to look into player created custom items, loans and mortgages, or creating your own city with a different map and 3D topography and its own specializations.