A Minecraft clone on the Somnia blockchain testnet called Chunked puts every in-game action on the blockchain—from a player’s movement to every block placed, mined, and crafted.
Creator MSquared, a division of metaverse tech builder Improbable, says this is the first of a number of blockchain experiments as the firm looks to see how far it can push the boundaries of crypto gaming.
Playing the game is a smooth experience, even with all the on-chain hooks, as there isn’t noticeable lag when placing or mining a block. That said, some issues can arise when crafting with blocks momentarily disappearing from a player‘s inventory. Plus, the game world’s borders are fairly small, significantly reducing the infinite sandbox experience of the real Minecraft.
MSquared CEO Rob Whitehead told Decrypt that while it’s still in a “tech demo” state, the game is designed to be a true Web3 game—not just a Web2 game with NFTs “bolted on the side.”
Whitehead explained that Chunked doesn’t have a traditional server backing it, with everything being supported by the Somnia testnet. As such, if MSquared decided to stop supporting the game, it would still exist on-chain forever and could be picked back up by the community to continue development.
“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 logic of Chunked is a series of on-chain smart contracts that will be open-sourced. The community can either use the existing world data on-chain, or deploy their own contracts and make their own totally separate fork of the world with different rules.”
Get crafting in Chunked! Image: Decrypt screenshotThis isn’t anything new, he added, pointing to the autonomous worlds movement that has attempted to put gaming worlds on-chain for these exact 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.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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