From the early days of Sky Strife, we knew we eventually wanted the game to run autonomously. After all, we’re building autonomous worlds at Lattice, so the idea that anyone can enter the high-stakes onchain RTS and not only play it, but build plugins, extensions, dashboards, and more for the app in an ongoing way, was always the end goal. Today, we’re announcing that after 3 seasons on Redstone (plus a bunch more on testnet), Sky Strife will be entering autonomous mode. You read that right: autonomous mode starts today.

If you’ve played past seasons of Sky Strife, you’re probably used to buying a Season Pass to initiate private matches with friends and entrance fees, or get access to heroes and exclusive maps. Or maybe you waited hours for free matches to spawn, and came to us on Discord to grumble when things weren’t materializing fast enough. Those days are bygone (for now!). Autonomous mode for Sky Strife means:

• All features (heroes, maps, private matches, entrance fees) are available to all users
• Anyone can cancel matches that have been sitting around for longer than an hour without starting
• No more free daily matches — instead match creation cost stays the same at 100 🔮 and the reward curve stays the same.
• No more seasons or season passes — Sky Strife won’t be taking breaks!

We’re really excited for the autonomous mode era. Over the past few Seasons, we’ve seen a proliferation of plugins and extensions built on Sky Strife — and this was when things were seasonal! We’ve been excited to see things like tournaments hosted by guilds like WASD and World Explorers, and entire betting markets form on apps like Night Market! We think this is only the beginning, and are excited to see Sky Strife move closer to being an autonomous world with a flourishing ecosystem around it.

In addition to being a testing ground for what autonomous worlds of the future might look like (no seasons, extensions galore) Sky Strife was a way to battle-test MUD itself. Sky Strife helped MUD iterate on many features that benefit all MUD applications:

• faster transaction latency
• new indexer tech for faster load times
• improved client state libraries to ensure long-term scalability

What’s next for the Sky Strife team?

Sky Strife is spinning out of Lattice, as an independent studio led by kooshaba, Sky Strife’s creator and core developer. Kooshaba will take over ownership of the Sky Key, which gives the holder limited control over the game, including the ability to establish unit performance, introduce new maps, and tweak the match reward curve. Sky Strife will continue to be maintained by kooshaba, and the Lattice team is excited to see where he and the community take the project!

We’ve had a blast building and playing Sky Strife with you all, and are so excited for the next evolution of the project. See you in the skies!