Grant Proposal: Dark Forest on Aztec, DFArchon team

General
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Dark Forest on Aztec — Further Details & Technical Addendum

In early January, we conducted in-depth technical analysis and research.
This document presents the intermediate results of our investigation, along with adjustments and additions to our previously submitted proposal.

The content is organized into three main sections:

  1. Technical Architecture & Development Feasibility
  2. Detailed Milestones, Extended Goals, and Budget
  3. DFArchon Community Overview & Long-Term Vision

1. Technical Architecture & Development Feasibility

This section analyzes the feasibility of porting Dark Forest v0.6 to Aztec, covering architecture design, engineering challenges, testing strategy, and documentation plans.

Overall, the Dark Forest architecture can be divided into four layers:

  • Circuits Layer
  • Smart Contracts Layer
  • Frontend Layer
  • Plugins Layer

1.1 Circuits Layer

The circuits implement the core verification logic of Dark Forest, including:

  • Keeping planet coordinates private and verify the correctness of energy transfers between planets (moves)
  • Generating spacetypes and planet biome attributes using Perlin noise

We identified a highly valuable open-source codebase from 3 years ago that ports Dark Forest v0.6.5 Circom circuits to Noir:

This repository provides solid reference implementations for:

  • Hidden planet coordinates
  • Perlin-noise-based procedural generation

This significantly reduces uncertainty and implementation risk at the circuits level.

1.2 Smart Contracts Layer

At the smart contract layer, the system maintains and updates the global universe state.
We identified three main technical challenges:

  1. Lazy state updates
    • Smart contracts are passively executed, so planet states are updated on-demand.
  2. Floating-point arithmetic
    • Energy and silver values require fixed-point math
    • In Solidity, this was handled via ABDKMath64x64.sol
  3. Randomness for artifact generation

Engineering Assessment

Challenges (1) and (2) are primarily engineering problems that depend on familiarity with Noir and Aztec’s execution model.

To address this, our team:

  • Studied Aztec’s official documentation in depth
  • Watched NoirCon 3 talks (Devconnect ARG)
  • Reviewed representative projects listed in awesome-noir and awesome-aztec

As a result, we are confident in our ability to build complex stateful contracts in Noir.

Experimental Validation

We implemented an experimental prototype to validate:

  • Storage usage patterns
  • Private functions calling public functions and emitting events
  • Batch reading of planet data
  • End-to-end integration with a rebuilt React frontend

Code reference:

For challenge (3), a standard commit–reveal mechanism can be applied.
We are also continuing research into Aztec’s native cryptographic tooling for further optimization.

1.3 Frontend Layer

The frontend presents two major challenges:

  1. Issues caused by the long-unmaintained darkforest-v0.6 codebase
  2. Migration from an EVM-based frontend architecture to an Aztec-based one

(1) Legacy Frontend Issues

The darkforest-v0.6.5 frontend suffers from several critical problems:

  • Relies on a centralized image server whose backend API is no longer available
  • Some dependencies can no longer be installed
  • Severely outdated libraries (e.g. Node.js v16, ethers v5)
  • Design-level gameplay bugs
    • Example: ships can stack in large numbers on a single planet, causing balance issues

Fortunately, our team has actively maintained and updated the Dark Forest codebase since early 2023.
All of the above issues have already been identified and resolved in our community-maintained versions.

(2) Architectural Migration Experience

In summer 2024, we migrated Dark Forest from an ERC-2535-based architecture to one built on the MUD engine.

Relevant branches:

This gives us substantial experience in porting Dark Forest across architectural paradigms.

Additionally, Aztec’s frontend libraries provide clean interfaces that automatically generate proofs when invoking private functions.
In earlier Dark Forest versions, proof generation required significant custom frontend logic.
Using the Aztec stack therefore represents a major frontend simplification and improvement.

1.4 Plugins Layer

Most of the existing Dark Forest plugin-layer code can be reused.

After completing the core frontend integration, we will adapt commonly used plugins, including:

  • Repeat attack
  • Voyage time estimation
  • Buff highlighting

We were hardcore Dark Forest players during 2021–2022 and developed many widely used plugins.
From 2023 to 2025, while maintaining the community version, we continued maintaining the plugin library and are deeply familiar with plugin APIs and development patterns.

Plugin library:

1.5 Testing & Documentation

Testing Strategy

  • Noir contract tests written directly at the language level
  • Invocation scripts for functional testing
  • End-to-end tests between frontend and smart contracts
  • Multiple rounds of community-based functional and stress testing

Documentation

  • Developer docs:

    • Detailed explanations of contract logic and frontend integration
    • Designed to lower the barrier for community contributors

  • aztec-react-starter:

    • We plan to maintain a React-based Aztec scaffolding tool
    • Helps React developers onboard into the Aztec ecosystem

  • Player docs:

    • Updated and expanded based on our existing guides

Player guide reference:

2. Detailed Milestones, Extended Goals, and Budget

2.1 Development Milestones

We will prioritize building the core gameplay loop first:

  • Planet generation
  • Inter-planet energy transfers
  • Early smart contract ↔ frontend integration

This allows us to deliver an interactive demo as early as possible.

In 2025, we also restored and maintained earlier Dark Forest versions, giving us deep familiarity with version evolution:

  • Dark Forest v0.3: dfarchon/darkforest-v0.3
  • Dark Forest v0.4: dfarchon/darkforest-v0.4
  • Dark Forest v0.5: dfarchon/darkforest-v0.5

(NOTE: Due to forum limitations, please search for the dfarchon account on GitHub to find the relevant repositories)

Timeline

  • Week 5

    • Universe map generation
    • Planet attribute generation
    • Core energy transfer logic

  • Week 7

    • Planet silver generation
    • Silver transport and withdrawal

  • Week 9

    • Core artifact functionality
    • (Photoid Cannon, Bloom Filter, Wormhole, etc.)

Artifacts in the EVM version already follow ERC-721.
In the Aztec version, we will implement artifacts following Aztec’s NFT standards.

2.2 Extended Goals

From early 2023 to 2025, we continuously introduced new features and ran multiple public test rounds.

References:

We plan to selectively integrate these features into the Aztec version, leveraging privacy to enable:

  • Hidden resource information
  • Private resource transfers
  • Anonymous, guild-based governance mechanisms

2.3 Budget Rationale

Team size: 4 developers
Estimated duration: ~2.5 months

Item Budget
Core development (Dark Forest v0.6 → Aztec) 50,000 U
Developer docs, player guides, videos 5,000 U
Technical testing & Q/A 5,000 U
Community ops, public tests, player incentives 5,000 U
Extended goals R&D 10,000 U

3. DFArchon Community Overview & Long-Term Vision

3.1 Who We Are

DFArchon is a research and development community focused on large-scale decentralized applications.

From 2021 to Q1 2022, we were hardcore Dark Forest players and consistently ranked near the top in DF official test rounds (e.g. ddy ranked #9 in Dark Forest v0.6.3).

During this phase, we built:

(NOTE: Due to forum limitations, please search for the dfarchon account on GitHub to find the relevant repositories)

3.2 Community & Ecosystem Presence

  • Gitcoin 2022: ~10,000 U donations
  • Mask Network 2023: 10,000 U grant
  • OP Foundation 2024–2025: ~60,000 OP grants

Appearances:

  • Speaker at d/acc Day, ETH Singapore 2025 (Led by Vitalik Buterin) — Talk on Decentralized Development of Dark Forest
  • Devconnect 2025 – Gaming District (1-week exhibition)

Community size:

  • Twitter: 2,600+ followers
  • Discord: 1,900+ members
  • WeChat: ~200 members

Public tests generate high onchain activity and gas usage
(contract references available in the 10 Community Versions & Experimental Features).

3.3 Long-Term Vision

From 2021 to the present, over the past five years, we have continuously worked toward building the future of large-scale decentralized applications, developing numerous projects centered around Dark Forest. Through deep experience with Solidity smart contract development, we have gained a clear understanding of the limitations of Solidity-based architectures, which has driven us to actively explore the possibility of building experimental projects on alternative infrastructure stacks.

Looking further into the future, we believe that onchain reality is one of the most promising emerging application paradigms. On networks like Aztec, it becomes possible to form unique connections with many participants while preserving privacy. This, in turn, truly empowers participants with true freedom, inner peace, and happiness.

This is the future we are building toward.

Request for Grant Proposals: Dark Forest on Aztec | Up to $75,000