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

A Minecraft clone on the Somnia blockchain testnet referred to as Chunked places each in-game motion on the blockchain—from a participant’s motion to each block positioned, mined, and crafted.

Creator MSquared, a division of metaverse tech builder Inconceivable, says that is the primary of numerous blockchain experiments because the agency appears to be like to see how far it may well push the boundaries of crypto gaming.

Enjoying the sport is a easy expertise, even with all of the on-chain hooks, as there isn’t noticeable lag when inserting or mining a block. That mentioned, some points can come up when crafting with blocks momentarily disappearing from a participant’s stock. Plus, the sport world’s borders are pretty small, considerably decreasing the infinite sandbox expertise of the actual Minecraft.

MSquared CEO Rob Whitehead advised Decrypt that whereas it’s nonetheless in a “tech demo” state, the sport is designed to be a real Web3 recreation—not only a Web2 recreation with NFTs “bolted on the aspect.”

Whitehead defined that Chunked doesn’t have a conventional server backing it, with every thing being supported by the Somnia testnet. As such, if MSquared determined to cease supporting the sport, it will nonetheless exist on-chain perpetually and might be picked again up by the neighborhood to proceed improvement.



“All the world information of Chunked and all [of its] logic is on Somnia, so it is free to be interacted with and skim from indefinitely,” Whitehead mentioned. “The logic of Chunked is a sequence of on-chain good contracts that can be open-sourced. The neighborhood can both use the prevailing world information on-chain, or deploy their very own contracts and make their very own completely separate fork of the world with completely different guidelines.”

This isn’t something new, he added, pointing to the autonomous worlds motion that has tried to place gaming worlds on-chain for these actual causes. Darkish Forest is a main instance of this in play, as an area exploration recreation that places every thing on-chain and takes benefit of zero-knowledge proofs to keep up thriller.

CCP Video games’ upcoming Eve Frontier—a survival-centric spinoff from Eve On-line—will do a lot the identical with Ethereum-based structure.

“The challenges proper now have been chains (particularly layer-1s) simply have not had the uncooked efficiency to deal with large-scale actual time video games like this, with most tasks being a lot less complicated video games with restricted enchantment,” Whitehead mentioned.

Lately, a Crossy Street clone on the MegaETH public testnet went viral as each in-game motion was recorded on-chain. As with Chunked, it may solely be pulled off due to a brand new period of extraordinarily high-performance networks rising; the Ethereum mainnet actually wouldn’t have been up for the duty.

“Proper now we’re operating on testnet, studying what new sorts of on-chain video games are doable,” Whitehead mentioned. “We would like to see this evolve right into a persistent on-chain voxel world in mainnet, which is owned and advanced by a neighborhood of co-creators.”

Somnia is predicted to hit mainnet someday this yr. On this path, MSquared plans to roll out a sequence of different on-chain experiments, with probably the most profitable assessments on account of develop into “full business tasks” as soon as Somnia totally launches onto mainnet.

Edited by Andrew Hayward