Right now we're optimistic about having the launch in November.
Since it's a game and the game state is established right from the beginning, we hope that all the game logic is fair and robust - some consensus bugs were still fixed for borderline-cases, which have been hard to cover with our limited tester-playerbase.
Will keep you up to date

Lead dev Sigrid / Mooo has posted an update regarding the upcoming few months, with thoughts on the release and current state of the game and network:

https://townforge.net/the-few-months-ahead

We're currently running an AMA on the Monero subreddit regarding Townforge's upcoming mainnet launch, please feel free to join us at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/o5pn7q/townforge_ama_fair_launch_on_july_3rd_for_a/

Also something to add on top of Sigrid's response;
the game also supports an invitation system, where an established player can create an invitation code with gold in it for a new player to create their new player account. Both the person generating the invitation as well as the new player get a small discount on their next land purchase, so this is to encourage influx of new players.

I regularly have posted invitation codes both on Reddit as well as on Discord, and will do so for the on-going v0.31 testnet asap.

EDIT:
Here are 5 invitation codes each with 2k TFG (Townforge Gold) in them for the v0.31 testnet:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Townforge/comments/nwoerh/5x_invitation_codes_with_2k_tfg_in_each_of_them/

Reserving second post.

Townforge is an open source economy planning game built on top of a Monero fork, where every in-game event is contained in a public transaction, ensuring full history preservation and cheating prevention. Players can optionally build voxel based representations of their buildings on a procedurally generated 3D landscape, and engage in a number of ways to earn on-chain gold.

Mainnet starts on the 3rd of July
Launch has been delayed to address consensus issues identified with the influx of new players.

Source code: https://git.townforge.net/
Precompiled binaries (Linux, Windows, Mac): https://townforge.net/download

Quick links

• Main site: https://www.townforge.net
• Merge mining pool (with XMR): https://pool.townforge.net
• FAQ: https://townforge.net/faq/
• IRC: #towforge on libera.chat / https://web.libera.chat/#townforge

Social media

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/townforge
• Discord: https://discord.gg/HVtp2m9c
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Townforge/

Basic gameplay
The basic Townforge gameplay is about buying land in a town (some places are better than others, so looking around for nice spots is a good idea), creating various types of buildings on that land, and managing income from those. Other gameplay styles are also possible, typically based on complex economic interactions leading to emergent strategies, with no pre-defined player career archetypes - basically you are free to choose your own destiny and ambitions.

Economics
Townforge is a PoW blockchain, with an emission schedule similar to Monero's, but with faster block times for smoother gameplay. Additionally, in-game DAOs also receive regular emission (about 9% of the total emission), to be automatically distributed to game players based on their gameplay  performance. As in Monero, a tail emission exists to ensure long term playability.

DAO
The town treasuries are automated game accounts controlled solely by consensus rules, ie Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. They receive regular new emission as per consensus rules, as well as income from player economic activity (buying land, purchasing building materials, etc). Four times a day, the DAO pays players based on their buildings' performance, as well as a measure of their in-game prestige.

NFTs
Anyone can create new in-game Non Fungible Tokens with custom designs stored on IPFS (Interplanetary File System). The game can display that data if they're images. Items are not limited to NFTs, and can be integrated into gameplay. Player designed items can also embed gold, which can be redeemed
at any later point. These gilded items contribute to a player's prestige and income.

Decentralized marketplace
Townforge items (construction materials, gemstones, NFTs, food, etc) can be traded in the in-game marketplace, where bids and offers are transactions which can be matched and mined by any miner, thereby executing the sale/purchase.

Prestige
Collecting gold coins and gemstones boost your prestige score, which leads to extra regular income to the twenty most prestigious players. Optimize your collection to become one of the Townforge elite. Gold coins and gemstones can be traded on the open market, and coins may be redeemed for their gold content at any time.

Monetary instruments
You can raise money by mortgaging buildings (automated repayments, and the building will be automatically auctioned if you default on repayments). You can auction building and items. You can create an in-game company and issue freely tradable shares on the market. You can issue dividends in money and items.

Merge mining
Townforge is merge mined with Monero (at the miner's option). This works for both solo mining and pool mining. Merge mining affords Townforge some of Monero's network security while avoiding extra energy expenditure. Mine Townforge, and you also mine Monero with no additional cost. A PoW/PoS hybrid may be added in the future.

Circular economy
The in game economy is based around the city treasury DAOs, which fill up with the money players spend on land, building construction and maintenance as well as the regular coin emission, and provides players with income based on how well they perform in the game. This means that money players spend playing the game will ultimately flow back to them, leading to a circular economy not unlike the real world economy.

In game decentralized chat
In game chat is based on transactions that get to the txpool but never get mined, therefore allowing completely decentralized chat while avoiding blockchain bloat. Supports custom chat colors and built-in emojis, with new unlockable styles based on player achievements.

Fair launch
There is no ICO, no premine, but Sigrid is mayor of the first town needed to bootstrap the game. Townforge is PoW mined. About 9% of the total emission goes to the in-game DAOs. 0.25% of those 9% go to a game account, controlled by the devs. Some of this will be used as prizes for in game competitions, but for the purposes of fair launch, you can assume it all goes to the devs, since they can theoretically take all of it. The rest of that DAO money will automatically trickle down to players according to the game rules, allowing every node to verify all the money goes exactly where it's meant to.

Badges
Badges are obtained by meeting a number of milestones. More badges and higher level badges increase your level, which unlocks new building materials, chat colors and give a prestige boost, as well as allow you to increase RPG attributes used in storyline scripts and live events.

Mortgages and raising funds
A player may mortgage any building to get a cash infusion. Like everything else, this is fully decentralized and rules bound: the player selects a building, how many repayments and for how much, and the game creates new items representing that mortgage, which the player can then sell on the decentralized market. Should the player not be able to meet repayments, the mortgaged building will be automatically sold in auction and proceeds paid to creditors.

Survival aspects
Life in Townforge requires food and warmth. If you can't get these, your buildings will deactivate until those needs are fulfilled. Food can be obtained from others in the marketplace or created by farming. Warmth is ensured by keeping stocks of wood. Farming is season based (a game year lasts a real life week), and winters are colder, requiring more firewood. Manage your food stocks well and make a profit on the markets selling any surplus.

Tech tree
Various discoveries are waiting to be found, providing various bonuses to the discoverer, who can elect to licence the rights to the discovery on the decentralized market.

Found your own town
You can become the mayor of your own town by founding a new town. The more the game grows, the cheaper it becomes to found a new town. As mayor of your town, you can attract new settlers by specializing your town with a choice of bonuses. Mayors get 0.1% of their town's DAO treasury. Choose your random seed to customize your new town's surroundings and bonuses. Players may have buildings in as many towns as they choose.

Complex economic interactions
Buildings' performance is based not only on their intrinsic properties such as their size and type, but also on where they're placed (different locations in the world offer varying bonuses for different building types) and on what other buildings are around it. An influence system allows buildings to help each other out.

Collectibles
Gold coins are the main in game collectible, and various designs are created automatically as the game reaches certain milestones. A better coin collection gives prestige, which in turn make players eligible for extra income. Gemstones (found randomly by stonecutters) give bonuses in building performance as well as prestige. Players may also create their own freeform collectible items, including NFTs.

Scripted storyline
An optional storyline and similar game events will be implemented, in the form of scripts added to the chain, allowing new events to unfold without software updates, just by getting new data off the blockchain. The game theme is loosely based on old Norse culture, around 950 CE.

Full API access
There is JSON RPC for pretty much everything, allowing new clients to be made, focusing on whatever part of the game (or cryptocurrency) they like. For instance a separate web based marketplace trading client could be made. A NFT viewer is in the process of being made, and it might acquire buy/sell functionality later.

Future
Several features are planned after the mainnet launch, including feasts (providing bonuses to participating players and based on inter city competition), possible PoW/PoS hybrid system from inside the game world, art patronage for cultural buildings, as well as private messaging. More aesthetic items will also be added, to be sold by the game. Consensus/balance tweaks may also happen at some point.

Hey all, returning to the thread to address the issue/criticism cited above.
We have now set mainnet launch date for Townforge for the 3rd of July: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5342891

IRC communication update

Please note that from now on, all our communication on IRC will be on #townforge in liberachat instead of ##townforge in Freenode, due to the recent adverse events.
The Discord-IRC bridge has been updated accordingly and the new IRC channel is up on liberachat.

NFTs and custom items, Townforge scripting language, a web interface, and new testnet


Hey all Townforgers!

Sorry its's been a while. There's so much to report that it's hard to list down all the cool stuff while doing justice to all the effort e.g. Mooo's put into things.




NFTs and custom items

In Townforge v0.28 further support for custom items as NFTs were implemented as part of in-game consensus and economy.

Some highlights:
- Custom items upon creation can be embedded with Townforge Gold into them; this TFG can later be redeemed by destroying the item.
- Players can create custom items; upon creation of custom player items, the following fields can be determined and a fixed amount of items is created, possibly embedded with TFG, and with a mutable secondary description available, essentially making NFTs possible:


As an example, see creation of Syksy's custom NFT item "Token of Initiation", which I coupled with a 200x200 png image of an early prototype for a Townforge logo and 100 instances of this digital token were created into the Townforge network:


After this, these items can be interacted with in Townforge as any other items; they can be put up for sale, given to other players, etc:


In this case, the intention for this token is to be rewarded to players upon finishing playing a "tutorial script". Which brings us to...



Townforge scripts

Scripts are a custom language that can be added to Townforge blockchain by GMs (i.e. me and Mooo). They are intended for example:
- Storyline scripts that try to bring lore into the game ("global scripts")
- Interesting person-specific interactions; in-game item "Runestone" can be embedded with a Townforge script. A basic script could be for example a "welcome sign"; we approve and push to the chain a simple script containing a string variable that is allowed to be modified by a player. The player then embeds it into a runestone placed next to the their cool lot. The modifiable field could be the welcoming sign "Welcome to <some player defined string>, %P!", where %P gets replaced by playername, and this script runs as a pop-up window to anybody clicking the runestone.
- Much more complex scripts can be defined which support script-session specific variables (they disappear when a script finished), player specific variables (player accounts can obtain "permanent" characteristics, e.g. intended for roleplay), or global (these apply to everybody starting a script anywhere, and have potential in e.g. co-operative roleplay)
- Townforge scripts are essentially state machines, where player actions (or random chance) propagate these states until a script ends.

Let's take an example of a simple gambling script, with 51% chance of the script owner (being the main game account) winning a single TFG coin from the player, and 49% chance that player wins a single TFG from the game account:


Once GM has pushed the script to the blockchain, its source code is fully visible. Players can partake in the script, although there's no need to if they don't want to. The scripts can't break consensus rules (such as take money from game account or a player beyond its balance).

Progressing in the script happens when player picks choices; the consensus checks script progression and changes state acccordingly:


For example, upon starting the script, 1 TFG is reserved from my account in the "Thrall's Gamble" script as we don't yet know the outcome of this gambling script (the player may lose or gain a TFG coin by placing a bet against the game):


Looks like playing thrice resulted in me with a net loss 1 TFG to the game well, house always wins eh...

Some of you have pointed out that the game is missing "war" mechanics. These could be implemented using Townforge scripts even post-launch. Remember that Token of Initiation NFT-item I just created? Yep, it's fully compatible with Townforge scripts, and as long as the game account would have these items they could be handed out as rewards. The possibilities are vast.



TownforgeR / web interface

A common request is a web interface to Townforge. I've been working on an R Shiny interface, which connects to the Townforge daemon's RPC and sends JSON requests, obtaining information on game state:

TownforgeR is available at: https://github.com/Syksy/TownforgeR
... but note it's highly experimental. But it's kind of a proof-of-concept that anybody can extend Townforge to the direction they wish, as it's essentially aiming to be a web-friendly game client alternative.

TownforgeR works via R statistical language; right now it's communicating with the Townforge daemon's RPC that I have running in the background; here's a simple example for asking in JSON what's the current block height:


However, R Shiny coupled with the package allows web interfaces, so I fire up TownforgeR::shinyTF()
Suddenly we have a nice, web-interface (search functions, rearrangable tables, ...) to the game:


It's very early, but I think you get the point. In the future I hope that I can implement wallet-functionality, so player can not only extract info on game state, but also send input (i.e. game actions). Essentially this would be a web interface to the game.



Testnet v0.28

Some of the above stuff came with v0.28, and we're still testing out stuff. As you might imagine, a lot of testing is required with the NFTs, scripts, and other features, so it's almost certain that this won't be the last testnet.

I'll soon post some TFG containing invitation codes for people who want to kick start their game. As always, remember our merge-mining pool at https://pool.townforge.net which allows you to mine testnet TFG with mainnet Monero without extra effort.






... stay tuned for more

Hey there!

There's plenty of things to do, as in any open project
Depending on what you'd like to do;
- Game balance testing is something we really need at the moment; game needs to be interesting and in balance prior to mainnet launch
- If you're a software dev, you can contribute; Mooo oversees the Git
- There's always extra bits and pieces to add, and for example I'm right now working on a "web app" interface to the daemon in R - basically almost as if a second client.
- General feedback, community engagement etc is very welcome.

We're right now looking into some major directions on where to go, when to pursue mainnet, what features are still realistic to think of, etc.
Naturally when the mainnet launches, any hashrate helps to make it stable - and this can be done merge-mined with Monero, so helps both networks.
That's from the top of my head, but I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of things. Discord, IRC, and in-game chat are where I'm actively communicating or responding.

Hey there Townforgers!

We've put up an experimental merge-mining pool for Townforge Gold and Monero at: https://pool.townforge.net

It merge-mines mainnet Monero with current testnet Townforge, so while the Monero is real, the Townforge gold you'll get is only usable in current testnet.
You can mine either both Townforge and Monero at once, or either chain, your choice. It should work with a vanillla xmrig miner out-of-the-box. Please note that while we discover Townforge blocks easily, the current likelihood of catching a Monero block with our pool is small due to difficulty differences.

Couple screenshots of how my gaming desktop's performing:


I'm hoping to soon post a recap of the past couple weeks, in-game story/event scripts, as well as showcase an R statistical software package that I've been working on that interacts with the Townforge daemon RPC and should provide all the spreadsheet warriors a healthy chunk of data to chew on from gamestate, e.g. NFTs, game markets, events, etc. It comes with a browser interface built with R Shiny. R is great for data visualizations, statistics, etc, so I'm hoping this package will come in handy as a supplement to the game client.

Further, we've been seriously discussing a mainnet launch, though nothing final has been decided yet. But stay tuned.

Just to acknowledge Sigrid, as it may not have been clear from the context yet; Sigrid is Moneromooo's BCT account, for Townforge communication purposes (Sigrid Sigrúnarsdóttir is Mooo's TF character and mayor of the founding city). So when (s)he posts with this account, (s)he's basically writing as the sole person behind Townforge's current software implementation and in charge of its Git repo, among many other things.

As he's been an active contributor to the XMR project (like so), Townforge forking from Monero was quite a natural choice - but do note TF has diverged a lot from its origins.

Thank you Jason! I remember your creations in v0.23 testnet. They were really impressive and made me really happy - somebody is excited enough out there, to spend time making these marvelous creations! I have all your buildings stored by the way (or most at least) as VOX files, which is the voxel format for importing and exporting 3D structures in the game. So your creations did not disappear with the testnet, they can be rebuilt

Would be great to have you back and see what cool stuff you'd come up with! I understand life is busy (and voxel creations do take time), but the doors to Townforge are open!

I'm looking at my VOX files, and I see that at least the following buildings that you created and I stored the VOX files for:
- Academy
- Bakery
- Building of Culture
- East Monero Estate
- Forest
- Gemmy Caves
- Pavillion
- Sudodd Square
- Town Aqueduct
- Watchtower

Let me know if you want the VOX files, or if you allow, I can import them into the game and gift the lots to you (or keep them on my account with name like "Jason's Academy"). It's creations like these that make me excited to have been part of this


Yes, I can guarantee that we don't intend to pose some kind of linear, spoon-fed roleplay lore to people. It's intended to be open-ended. As in, we might encourage role playing, provide the context, hopefully incentives and so forth, but the "story" itself would be ideally created by the players themselves ex tempore.

Hmm, and yes - role playing can be both an opportunity as well as a threat. We don't intend to force it on people; instead, it's more of an option that's out there for those that wish to participate in it.
I myself have game mastered the old-school like role playing games such as Call of Cthulhu. So it may be that I do have quite a traditional view of what "role play" really means. Mooo always says my stuff is grim, maybe because my focus has been on Lovecraftian horror

I am familiar with ARMA 3, but not GTA RP or Altis; I played ARMA 3 briefly with a friend, but it was too much hardcore military simulator for me to enjoy. If I recall right, the campaign we tried to play as co-op got bugged and I haven't played since (he's a big fan though, always when I see or talk to him he has map editors open and whatnot).

It'd be interesting to hear how these differ from say, the traditional D&D type of adventuring we do intend to have more sophisticated role playing and preliminary decided on having no supernatural elements (though the people may believe in "gods" etc). Ideally the types of role play elements desired would stem from the community, so we're more than happy to hear suggestions!

Hey there,


It's not. It's a totally new game, running with its own engine, chain, game rules, etc. The game is in the blockchain itself: every player action is a transaction on the chain, which means that if you have the blockchain, you can recreate the entire history of the game, and verify that every action was within the game rules.


Not so simple: anyone can download it and roam around the world. In order to perform actions, however, you need some in game currency - gold - which is either mined or bought off someone else. This system is central to Townforge: most money you spend performing actions (such as buying land, creating a new building, etc) is stored in the town treasuries, and town treasuries regularly trickle back into players' accounts based on how well they are doing in game, so players who play the game well will in fact earn money. But they will have to pay money first, in order to build the structures that will get them this income stream. Moreover, about 9% of the currency issuance is also directed to the town treasuries, which will also trickle back into players' accounts. There are various other ways to get money in the game, so whether you pay to play or get paid to play depends on how you play (and you can choose your specialization: whether it's building structures that get you income, or playing the decentralized in-game markets, or creating stone or wood producing buildings on juicy locations, etc).


Townforge is a decentralized game. There's no central server. There is a seed node as in many other cryptocurrencies, but it is not necessary for gameplay, just to be able to find other peers on the network. Every node in the Townforge network receives actions from other players (in the form of transactions), and validates them. Mining those actions into the chain makes the game tick. Run the Townforge node and you are part of the decentralized "game server", so to say.

This implies that your in game possession are safe: there's no central server to be taken down, no admins with access to a central database who could alter it, etc. If your in game balance is 1500 gold, it will stay 1500 gold unless either you withdraw it (automated, it's just a blockchain transaction too, you don't ask a central party to send it back to you like you would on an exchange for example) or game rules mandate it (eg, paying land tax at game updates). If you created some custom items in game, you have them until you sell/give/destroy them. If you have a nice plot of land near the town square, no other player or admin or the like can take it from you. Because these things would be against the game rules, and every node, including yours, validates actions.

This implies that your in game possession are safe: there's no central server to be taken down, no admins with access to a central database who could alter it, etc. If your in game balance is 1500 gold, it will stay 1500 gold unless either you withdraw it (automated, it's just a blockchain transaction too, you don't ask a central party to send it back to you like you would on an exchange for example). If you created some custom items in game, you have them until you sell/give/destroy them. If you have a nice plot of land near the town square, no other player or admin or the like can take it from you. Because these things would be against the game rules, and every node, including yours, validates actions.

So if I were to get hit by a bus, then the seed node crashes, Townforge would still continue ticking happily as long as there are miners on the network.

Well... yeah, it is unfortunate. A lot of people would want the game to be out already, but it's problematic. We're a team of two, and we feel key features are still missing. Those can't be added to the chain any more after the release of mainnet. Neither of us are working on this full time, as we have "dayjobs" so that complicates things :/

So it's just because people keep asking if it's mainnet and if their mined coins count - I don't want people to run their hashrates for testnet coins unnecessarily. The game supports merge-mining with Monero though, so that helps things.

I just don't feel like setting a date for mainnet release. It's so hard to estimate when the game is ready enough to have all the ingredients in it to be successful and enjoyable - it'd be different if we were a company working on it or so.

We've had our decentralized blockchain/crypto game Townforge under development for quite some time at https://www.townforge.net. We offer pre-compiled binaries for Linux, Windows and Mac, while the game itself is fully open source and anybody can access the source at https://git.townforge.net.

It's maybe best characterized as a city-sim / RPG hybrid, with Minecraftian voxel mechanics coupled with text-based adventuring and player-driven emergent economy similar to MMOs such as EVE Online.

The crypto implementation is originally forked from Monero, but it has been obviously heavily modified. All the game actions go into the blockchain, and players earn in-game gold as mining rewards or make profit via in-game economy (e.g. subsidies for buildings or peer to peer markets).

Please do note that the game is in a testnet, so everything's temporary until we feel the game is ready for a mainnet launch.

We've got our own little ANN-thread going on here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5317101 though IRC's probably our main medium of communication (##townforge @ Freenode).

I'd imagine people from this thread might be interested in our crypto-project Townforge, which we have been working on with moneromooo for quite some time:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5317101

While it is certainly not CK 2.0 nor do we wish to carry over issues from CK, it does pay homage to its good portions while leaving out the wackiness. For example, the game is fully on a blockchain (heavily modified Monero fork), is exit scam proof etc. Going from browser games to a 3D world makes it quite different, but hopefully some old time CK'ers will find it intriguing.

Thank you for the valuable feedback & constructive criticism! We definitely need more comments like this.


I also grew up with UO, MUDs, and I have followed Runescape despite not actively playing it. Big influencer here has also been EVE Online, I should add. I remember unboxing my UO as a kid, which came with a cloth sheet of Bretonnia's map, a pin, and all other goodies - firing up my game to enter a vast, immersive world familiar to me from the Ultima series with Lord British himself making appearances, and myself in the world able to carve my own destiny and mold it to my liking or at least make a little dent to steer the course of Bretonnia. I can relate to your main point of criticism: making the game easily approachable so that there's low threshold fun to be had, e.g. jump into a medieval RPG and go bash some skulls in an arena, or embark on an dragon slaying adventure for some dank loot. Games are one thing, having a "2nd job to play" is an another thing.

I think how Townforge differs fundamentally from many of the other crypto-games presented also here on BCT, is that the game itself truly is crypto. Many of the platforms we've seen when scouting out crypto games are basicly bundles of games implemented centrally, with a decentralized cryptocurrency connecting the input and output of currency in said games. A bit like, the blockchain itself is not the game, it's just the poker chips that you move from table to table in a casino, where the tables reside in centralized servers functioning in real-time. Townforge instead implements the "poker table"; all the moves, actions, etc, are stored precisely in the blockchain, and the chips that go with them.

This does impose some restrictions. A game that is stored elsewhere and just interacts with the cryptocurrency interface to give people credit is much more free to implement e.g. real-time interactions. In Townforge, with a block storing all the actions in the game and a target time of 1 minute discovery rate per block, for example real time movement required for combat or seeing other player characters move around is rendered impractical. Economics-wise Townforge resembles perhaps games like Banished (resource management and overall theme) or Cities: Skylines.

I think abstraction-wise Townforge and the UO-type games do also have one big distinction: in UO you play on a "micro level", as a single character, with your character's assets and attributes. In Townforge, we're working more on a macro level, where a player is actually an aggregate of individuals and represents a set of structures, and the population that inhabits them (and e.g. has to take care of them to fight famine and cold). In this sense mentioning UO might trigger a false impression, that one embarks on an individual-level adventure, collecting loot and slowly progressing in terms of combat, spellcasting, crafts skills, etc. In reality, Townforge might resemble said city simulation games, with a mix of Minecraftian building mechanics. We're currently trying to address the issue of "individual-level immersiveness" by implementing text-based quests with choice & consequence via a custom scripting language in the near future, but I acknowledge this is a long stretch from games like UO or Runescape.

I have been trying to fondle the idea of conflict and war, which currently don't exist in the game. I've mostly been inspired by ideas stemming from games such as Travian and Planetarion, persistent web browser games genre that started popping up in early to mid 2000s. Basically you were a village chief (former) or an emperor of a galactic superpower (latter); since the games were running persistently on 24/7 basis and you could conquer new land (or solar systems), build new structures (or starbases), research tech, form alliances etc, the conflict that does draw people's interest also functioned on a macro level with time systems that could work also on blockchain level. For example, in Travian you could see that a competing clan has declared war on you, and within 48h hostilities would begin. Based on vague geographic coordinates, one could send raid parties of various composition to pillage and loot or conquer land - you could for example see an incoming warband arriving to your land in 8 hours, and a vague report of their composition given by your scouts. In Planetarion, the composition of an attacking (and defending) space fleet would be simulated by the game upon conflict, and outcome would result in e.g. solar systems being captured or other interesting consequences rising from conflict. It will remain to be seen whether we have the resources, time or creativity to implement such ideas.


Thanks once again for an important pointer. The genre you're referring to is definitely more approachable to a gaming audience, but it might be too much of a leap to go that way at this point for our two-man indie team where we both have "primary dayjobs". We definitely went a long way already prior to making this announcement, so it wasn't made lightly; currently we'd need more engagement from a community, including play-testing and balancing. There's loads of people looking for easy hand-outs, and only very few who are willing to or capable of contributing anything of practical use.

We've been trying to create a hybrid unique to our own liking, but it's always a bit risky to go our way, especially on a unique decentralized platform going with fully open source and transparency in the project has definitely also made this a long journey already, especially for Mooo who has been carrying the weight of the software implementation.

Glad you like the concept! Indeed, everything revolves around the crypto embedded into Townforge

There's basically there's two sides to the gameplay inspired by MC:
1) There's the Minecraftian-like hybrid of a voxel builder, which allows the creative freedom of "Creative mode" in MC (i.e. you can freely move in the world, you don't take fall damage etc), but with limitations due to the economy (instead of having to go down deep into mines to work with your pickaxe in "Survival mode", it's the in-game currency, player-driven markets and production mechanics that determine your available block types and quantity).
2) Couple this with survivalism (food, warmth, other upkeep) and RPG potential, and you've got a world revolving around the creations. We acknowledge that not every wants to create voxel-based 3D buildings, so it's also possible to play just the economical side of the game - or, you can hire an another player to work as your architect, export their creations as VOX files etc.

... naturally we don't try to reproduce "a crypto-MC", but leverage the parts that make our game unique and interesting while drawing inspiration from the gaming world. Having the game on a blockchain is challenging on some fronts (for example, no redstone circuitry or real-time physics), but makes other parts more intriguing (for example, there is an intricate economy revolving around the blocks).

We currently have a scripting language in the works that'll allow players to embark on quests; this scripting language allows old-school text-based adventures with flavor images, and all those quests are pushed into the chain in a custom scripting language. The rewards come from the Game account, so nothing is created out of thin air. We're hoping that this will allow us to create an immersive RPG side to the game and deepen the Norse-based lore peppered by our own creative freedom.
Some rather recent games with similar quest mechanics are e.g. the game series Sunless Seas & Sunless Skies.

We're focusing on this RPG-adventuring aspect at the moment as well as general game balance. Hopefully we'll soon have adventures to showcase!