Grant Proposal: Dark Forest on Aztec, DFArchon team

General
1

The migration of Dark Forest to Aztec can be divided into four major steps:

  1. Preliminary research – Conduct initial investigations, such as random number generation, designing schemes for hiding planet coordinates, Perlin noise generation, and floating-point support. Preliminary validation of the technology is crucial for the implementation of subsequent functionalities.

  2. Core module development – Implement the basic modules for planet and universe generation, as well as the fundamental protocols for transferring energy and silver between planets.

  3. Basic Artifact-related features – Implement functionalities related to artifacts, such as artifact generation and the various effects triggered when artifacts are activated on planets.

  4. Advanced features — such as the introduction of more innovative artifact functionalities, the development of a player guild management framework, and the abstraction of time and space protocols.

  • Start and End Date: we can start ASAP

  • About You:

DFArchon is a community team focused on large-scale decentralized applications.

In 2021–2022, we were a hardcore player team for Dark Forest. From 2023 until now, we have been actively maintaining the community fork of Dark Forest. In 2024, we ported Dark Forest to the MUD engine.

During the three years from 2023 to 2025, we typically developed new features over periods of 2–3 months, followed by periodic public testing events where the player community was invited to participate. So far, we have conducted 10 rounds of public tests, continuously bringing innovative features to the project and moving forward toward Onchain Reality Universe.

We are very familiar with the overall architecture and technology of Dark Forest.

You can check the following information to learn more about us.

Community twitter: https://x.com/DFArchon

Dark Forest on MUD engine: https://x.com/darkforest_punk

Website: https://dfpunk.xyz

Github: https://github.com/dfarchon

Blog https://paragraph.com/@dfarchon/

Youtube https://youtube.com/@dfarchon1759/videos

While maintaining the Dark Forest community fork, we also actively play and research various fully onchain game projects. We maintain a website that aggregates information about the fully onchain gaming ecosystem. https://web3gamehub.xyz/

  • Technical Approach:

The interface between Dark Forest’s smart contracts and frontend is very clearly defined.

In the process of porting Dark Forest’s circuits and smart contracts to Aztec, we aim to reuse the original interface definitions as much as possible. Nonetheless, there are still many technical details and challenges that need to be addressed.

  1. For the planet hidden coordinates, corresponding cryptographic modules need to be developed on the frontend to perform hash computations.

  2. We need to investigate how to implement Perlin noise generation in Noir, as Perlin noise is used for planet and universe attributes generation.

  3. We also need to understand the Noir’s support for floating-point numbers; in Solidity, this is primarily handled using the ABDKMath64x64 library.

https://github.com/dfarchon/DFARES-v0.1/blob/main/eth/contracts/vendor/libraries/ABDKMath64x64.sol

For the frontend modules, the main focus is on updating the data synchronization and transaction submission modules to integrate with Aztec’s tech stack.

For the smart contract part, the focus is on writing comprehensive test scripts. For the frontend part, the main approach is to involve Dark Forest community members in interactive testing.

For innovations

We have many ideas for expanding Dark Forest, including abstracting the temporal, spatial, and planetary mechanics into a set of protocols, and designing infrastructure with greater extensibility and composability. I gave a talk on “expand Dark Forest into Onchain Reality Universe” at Devconnect ARG, and the slides below include some of our team’s innovative ideas.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HMChedMApjnIXqM3ebwTb2JmdH3GRx49_DmHA8NFSl8/edit?usp=sharing

  • Grant Milestones and Roadmap:

From now until March 22, 2026, there are approximately 10 weeks.

From the week of January 19, 2026, until March 22, 2026, there are about 8 weeks.

The official Dark Forest team developed from 2019 to Q1 2022, spending roughly three years to reach the maturity of Dark Forest v0.6.5. We aim to complete the migration of the entire tech stack within 10 weeks, so the development timeline is still very tight.

Week 1-2 – Conduct preliminary research on potential technical challenges during development, including initial designs for hiding planet coordinates, technical solutions for Perlin noise generation, floating-point support, and generating random numbers.

Week 3-5 – Develop the basic mechanisms for planet and universe terrain generation, and implement the basic operations for sending energy between planets.

Week 6-7 – Develop the mechanism for transporting silver to spacetime rips and withdrawing silver for scoring.

Week 8-10 – Develop the feature for randomly generating artifacts, supporting core artifact functionalities such as wormholes, cannons, and bloom filters.

  • 2-3 stretch goals (e.g., new mechanics, NFT minting, performance optimizations)

Later on, features related to guild management can be developed, and more complex artifact functionalities can be introduced.

More features and designs can be referenced in the “For Innovations” section above

  • Grant Amount Requested: $75,000

  • Grant Budget Rationale:

We currently have four members available to contribute to the development of this project, primarily as contributors to Dark Forest Punk. https://github.com/dfarchon/darkforest-punk

The specific timeline can refer to the above Grant Milestones and Roadmap.

  • Questions:

We would like to learn more about Noir’s technology regarding Perlin generation, floating-point support, and random number generation.