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.”

This 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