Project & Development Update #9

March 29, 2022

Good afternoon, pilots. It's time for the next internal project update.

In this post, we’ll start by giving updated launch timelines and summarizing the changes that are in the works for our Whitepaper and Yellowpaper. We’ll then discuss the progress that we've made since our last update, and our current areas of focus moving forward.

Let's dive in. 👇

🔹 The Home Stretch

This month, we finalized our partnership with Machinations and successfully passed their economic audit. Thanks to their work, we’ve been able to make substantial improvements to economic balance of the game, as well as the player experience.

The caveat with these improvements is that, because of the new mechanics they introduce, they have required significant changes to the game contracts and the infrastructure that depends on them. In turn, these changes have demanded significant work and time from the team over the past couple of weeks.

However, we’re proud to announce that, as of yesterday, we have officially (re-)entered code-lock for the final audit process with Solidity Finance! These final contracts include all of the new mechanics, balance changes, and UX improvements we’ve added as a result of Machinations’ insights.

This means that we’ve officially entered the home stretch of the project (up until launch)! We're expecting launch to occur sometime in April, no specific dates.

🔹 Whitepaper & Yellowpaper Updates

We're currently in the process of updating the Whitepaper and Yellowpaper to match all of the new balance changes and additional mechanics since their publications back in January.

If you loved the 42-minute Yellowpaper, just wait for the feature-length version heading your way. We expect to have everything completed and ready by either Friday (4/1) or Monday (4/4).

For the meantime, we've assembled a summary of the changes and additions that will be covered:

New

• Fully decentralized ship type and trait selection through the construction bay
• Onchain deposit and staking system for the construction bay
• Outposts and additional return targets
• Instant reveals on L2
• "Reactor” mechanic
• Veto power and the unvetoable proposal
• Emergency multisig and the third parties involved in it

Expansions

• New ore types
• Officer Ships (Previously Rumors)
• Overhauled ship art
• Additional economic details, with insights from Machinations

Balance Adjustments

• Rebalanced power and propulsion numbers for small, medium, and large ships
• Updated fuel efficiencies that better match the map dimensions
• New bounds for Ouroboros, Outer Ring, and the Abyss
• Adjusted guidelines for belt generation and ore densities within each region
• Refined numbers for taxes on outpost returns
• Restructured upgrade cost structure
• Adjusted miner and marauder supply split
• Adjusted tax and burn percentages for travel, ore claims, and the construction bay ㅤ

🔹 Progress

• Completed the economic audit with Machinations
• Completed the subgraph mappings
• Completed enterprise onboarding with Vercel
• Completed the community resource on DAO structure
• Completed the community doc on using Polygon
• Completed the art refresh for all base ships
• Created a client library for The Citadel’s subgraph and contracts, so that it is easy to integrate pull our data programmatically
• Finalized the display options for metadata
• Optimized the discord bots using subgraph queries
• Adjusted DAO/burn splits for fuel costs and the construction bay
• Added support for the new reactor mechanic
• Added anti-bot functionality to the wallet verification system
• Started work on the Discord bot that notifies pilots of new belts
• Started work on docs detailing the functionality of the DAO
• Discussed the handoff of our updated contracts with Solidity Finance, for the final audit

🔹 Ongoing Focuses

• Completing the GUI
• Completing the soundtrack and SFX
• Completing the art refresh for minor in-game elements (map, icons, etc.)
• Completing the remaining art for officer ships

• Completing the final audit round with Solidity Finance
• Completing the Discord bot that provides asteroid belt notifications
• Completing the UI for the governance system
• Load testing at scale w/ Vercel

• Finalizing and publishing the updated yellowpaper
• Completing the DAO portion of our community resources