Welcome back to our Project Deep Dive series, where we share conversations with teams that are building compelling projects and protocols on Gnosis Chain. Our third interview in the series is with Mithraeum, an on-chain strategy game designed as an eternal world and built on Gnosis Chain.
Mithraeum is a pure on-chain grand strategy game with a strong emphasis on players’ social interactions. It is a virtual world and an infinite game/autonomous world, where players can develop settlements, trade resources on the market, create armies and raid other settlements. Such an environment opens opportunities for diplomacy and social activity, with every player having the power to alter the game dynamics and influence the situation.
After a successful Alpha release, Mithraeum is currently on beta in what we call the “Bronze Age” stage, a series of limited public tests where the Mithraeum community tests and validates hypotheses related to the game design.
In the game, a player starts as a Mithraeum ruler, an owner of a settlement, and from then on, the player's every decision can alter the dynamics of the game. You can read more about the game mechanism here, and to play the game, you will need to wait until the next tournament is live.
Subscribe to our Discord and follow us on Twitter to stay tuned for updates.
The idea to create a game in the genre of the grand strategy that is fully on-chain came to our founder Bohdan Melnychuk back in 2017. A few years later, he proposed that we attempt to create a simplified version of the idea during a weekend hackathon. We generated numerous ideas and even won several prizes at the event. About a year later since the hackathon, we gathered the team and embarked on developing an elaborate, advanced version.
This was during the pre-GameFi, pre-NFT era, and we wanted to create a game for educational purposes. Our goal was to introduce more people to the potential of blockchains through gamification of the educational processes.
Despite fluctuations in the industry, we have remained steadfast in our original concepts, maintaining full on-chain integration and promoting social interactions within the game. Our sustainable economic model was established prior to the downfall of many GameFi products which adopted Ponzi schemes. We have devoted significant effort to translating DeFi's familiar blockchain mechanisms into formats recognizable to traditional gamers, thereby bridging the gap between the two worlds.
The ultimate goal of Mithraeum is to become a natural simulation of the economic, political, and social processes that we can observe in the real world and the problems that blockchains are designed to solve. Since the success of a player is directly related to how they come up with solutions to problems related to these processes, we expect Mithraeum to become a game-theoretic playground for future blockchain primitives, primarily related to coordination and organization, such as DAOs.
On-chain games are games that are built entirely on the blockchain and use the blockchain as the primary infrastructure for gameplay. These games utilize smart contracts to create a trustless gaming experience, which allows for greater transparency and fairness. The use of blockchain technology also allows for the creation of unique digital assets that can be owned by players and used across multiple games in a composable manner, creating a new paradigm for in-game economies.
Furthermore, on-chain games have the potential to create a new kind of gaming experience that is not limited by the constraints of traditional game development, and which can be fully customized and modified by the players’ community. Overall, on-chain games represent an exciting development in the gaming industry that we believe can revolutionize the way we play and interact with games.
We recommend reading the following articles to dive into the topic:
To date, Mithraeum is the sole on-chain grand strategy game that integrates players' social interactions as a fundamental part of the gameplay process.
In 2023, our focus is on enhancing the technical aspect of the game by supporting player-developed modules, introducing new gameplay mechanics, and elevating the game's visual appeal. Our aim is to improve both the appearance and gameplay to a new level. After engaging with our players, we identified the need to reduce hardware requirements, which is also a priority on our roadmap.
We ran the Mithraeum Tournament Bronze Age III tournament at the start of the year with a reward pool that reached over 10,000 xDai. We strive to organize more tournaments, beta tests and receive feedback for newly introduced mechanics from the community this year.
On that note, we would like to invite readers who have tried the game to participate in our feedback survey. Your feedback is crucial to helping us understand how we can improve our product and provide a better experience for our community.
While Mithraeum is open to all types of players, it primarily appeals to individuals who enjoy the intricacies of diplomacy and excel in achieving strategic goals on the edge of conflict. These are players who are willing to think outside the box, using methods such as botting, collaborating, bribing members of rival guilds, and even spreading rumors or misinformation.
On a side note, our friends at Gnosis Builders have built tools that make it easy to play Mithraeum, you can get free xDai to cover gas fees on GnosisFaucet, buy xDai to purchase settlements in the game on BuyxDai.com. If you experience issues with the Gnosis Chain during gameplay, you can try switching your RPC into Gateway.fm’s RPC.
Our team is keen on partnering with other on-chain projects that can provide relevant technology for the Mithraeum world or contribute to the development of the on-chain gaming community. We also welcome those who wish to create modules to enhance the gameplay. In fact, if we come across the right individuals with sufficient interest, we may offer grants or other incentives to support their involvement.
The game benefits from Gnosis Chain's inexpensive transactions and a pre-existing niche community established by other entirely on-chain games. We encountered technical difficulties upon the last tournament’s launch that appeared to stem from our community, suggesting scalability could become problematic if we increase the player base tenfold. However, Gnosis Chain and Gnosis Builders assured us that technical scalability won't be an issue in the future.
Participate in our community: t.me/GnosisBuildersCommunity
Reach out for support & resources: gnosis.builders/contact-us
Use Gnosis Chain apps: gnosis.builders/users
Find the right wallet for you: gnosiswallets.com
Get free xDai: gnosisfaucet.com
Build on Gnosis Chain: gnosis.builders/developers
Become a validator: validategnosis.com
Monitor validators: gnosispools.info
Gnosis Chain Stats: gnosismetrics.com
Follow us on social media to be updated on our upcoming projects and progress:
