Amid this period of contentious DeFi forks, yield farming, and early games that incorporated NFTs, a new experiment arose. This experiment was called Dark Forest, and it was unlike anything that had been deployed on the EVM before. Dark Forest was the first fully onchain game — the game logic, and all of its data was written onchain, and game state could be derived from chain history. No servers, no intermediaries, just pure groundtruth, facilitated by the blockchain and accessible to anyone. Dark Forest also was the first game to use zkSNARKs to create an incomplete information game onchain.

Dark Forest attracted hundreds of players, who were intrigued first by the gameplay, but then began building clients and plugins for the game itself. There were marketplaces for in-game NFTs, plugins to automatically schedule moves, a “remote snarker” which sped up the rate a player could hash unknown parts of the map, an exchange that permitted users to reveal the location of one of their Dark Forest planets every day, in exchange for bounties, and dozens of other community-created augmentations to the core game. Dark Forest was becoming a complex, emergent network.

In 2020, Lattice’s founder, Ludens, sent a message to a stranger named Gubsheep, one of the developers behind the game.

Soon, Ludens was on his way to Mexico, where he began collaborating with the Dark Forest team. It was the beginning of the ideas and challenges that would give rise to Lattice and MUD.

But, there were problems. At the time, Ethereum developer tooling wasn’t equipped to handle ambitious applications. Ludens and Alvarius wanted developers building clients and plugins on top of zkDungeon to have a seamless and intuitive experience — but there was no framework that made contributions to the world approachable. Something needed to change.

In the spring of 2022, at the D.E.F.C.O.N. conference in Amsterdam, Ludens announced Lattice, the company and Alvarius introduced MUD and the ECS framework in more detail. Soon, Lattice was joined by Kooshaba, one of the core developers on the Dark Forest team, and Biscaryn, who came aboard as our Chief-of-Staff. In the Summer of 2022, we officially incorporated. That Summer, the team began a full sprint on developing MUD. We held a summit in NYC, began developing the chains, infrastructure, and services that would become the MUD testnet and MODE, and also started hacking on a game called MUD War, which would eventually become Sky Strife. In August 2022, Ludens published Autonomous Worlds (Part 1) which would become the touchstone for any team looking to build complex, emergent systems on Ethereum.

In-house, the Lattice team was hard at work on a new game called OPCraft, a voxel-based onchain game that pushed the limits of both MUD, and Optimism, the EVM-equivalent rollup upon which OPCraft was deployed. In the ten days that OPCraft was live, the game played host to emergent life onchain — new plugins, custom smart contracts, and even a Supreme Leader, all surfaced when the game was live.

In October 2022, at Devcon in Bogota, the team debuted MUD v1 for a mass audience. Directly after, we held an 80-person Autonomous Worlds Symposium to demonstrate the capabilities on MUD v1 in more detail. In November, Frolic, one of the most prolific plugin-builders on OPCraft, joined the Lattice team full-time.

Our focus intensified on improving MUD, and we began building out features to bring MUD v2 to a stable state. MUD v2 is a modularization across the entire stack: we modularized our data model to bypass Solidity’s compiler-driven data storage. We modularized our plugin system, to give developers flexibility in how they use MUD. We modularized our sync stack, to allow for synchronizing contract and client state, with support for querying the client and our automatic indexer, MODE, in SQL. Our MUD v2 feedback loop was informed by our own work on Sky Strife, and by needs of those building applications using MUD. You can read more about the process here.

In Spring 2023, we partnered with ETHGlobal where we saw over 400 hackers submit over 100 different projects, built on MUD v2. We continue to work on MUD v2, as well as many internal initiatives related to EVM infrastructure. We also began to prepare MUD v2 for an audit, which we commenced with Open Zeppelin.

Behind the scenes, we were working on our own solution to this problem. As early as 2022, we began researching ways to scale transactions in MUD worlds. At Devconnect in 2023, this culminated with the launch of Redstone, a Plasma-inspired L2 built on the OP Stack, which prioritizes cost-effectiveness, and achieves it through offchain data-availability. You can read more about the history of Redstone here.

With Redstone, we support autonomous worlds that want to scale effectively. Redstone also represents and expansion of Lattice’s engineering efforts. With the MUD engine, we built software for the EVM, and Redstone is the beginning of our expansion into EVM hardware.

Shortly after the completion of the audit, we were also proud to share the news that CCP Games, the team behind the well-known MMO EVE Online, had chosen MUD as the framework to build their upcoming onchain game Project Awakening. We continue to work closely with the CCP team as they develop Project Awakening and work to realize the autonomous worlds vision.

In April 2024, we announced the Race to Mainnet, a monthlong lead-up to the launch of Redstone mainnet. In that time, we worked with ten different teams building onchain projects, including MUD builders like Small Brain Games, who we first met back in our Fall 2022 residency. It was truly a full-circle moment. When Redstone launched on May 1st 2024, we ran a 15-day long Worlds Expo, showcasing the nascent autonomous worlds percolating on Redstone, and highlighted our engineering contributions to the OP Stack.

For us, this was just the beginning. In the coming months, the team is hyper-focused on building out support for modding MUD projects, and continuing to foster autonomous worlds on Redstone.