Early-Access Public Announcement
Added 2020-11-12 23:18:35 +0000 UTCThis is an early-access announcement for Patrons that will be released to the public on November 15th, 2020.
Hello all,
We have made an insane amount of progress on the features of Contagion, and today we are going to be showing that all off. One major component of Contagion is the economy, which is a fully fleshed out system that is complex, yet only as complex as you choose it to be. The system has so much depth, but allows you to make money in simple ways, such as looting buildings and selling to traders, to star-gazing and selling the data you collect. However, an economy thrives off the exchange of currency, so how is this accomplished?
Obviously, we have the basic system: Virtual banking. This allows people to do easy transactions with commands such as `/pay`. This system however will have downsides, there will most likely be a small fee attached to transactions, and transactions will have less anonymity. This is still being decided however.
This is a credit stick, a device which you load digital funds on and then give to another player to transact money. It is 100% anonymous, and has absolutely no limits to how much funds can be transferred. There are absolutely no fees either, however, be careful, as if you lose it the money is gone forever.
This is a ledger, it is an expensive device and is a combination of the credit stick and virtual banking. Like a credit stick, digital funds are loaded on the device. You can then wirelessly transfer money within a ~15 block radius to anyone else who has a ledger. This has the advantage of anonymity, limitless and untaxed funds transferred, however there is a limit in range. This range will be upgradeable in the future.
This obviously raises the question of how do you actually put money on your credit stick or ledger. Does this have a fee? Nope. It is anonymous to preserve the integrity of the economy system as well. You transfer money through an ATM called a ‘ViraBank’. Here are some images: https://imgur.com/a/k5oLoU8. As you’ve probably noticed, the device and the bank account are in different currencies. A player’s virtual bank account will always be in USD, whereas digital devices for currency will always be in MRC (Mercury Coin, a cryptocurrency). There is obviously an exchange rate, which right now is that 1 dollar equals about 3MRC.
I mentioned earlier that there are many ways to gain money. One way to gain money is through mining cryptocurrency. As you can see in the picture, there is a block that looks like a router. This is a network node. You can connect miners to a network node, and the network node will transfer money to a credit stick that is inserted into the slot. (https://imgur.com/a/nMjHcpZ) This system does not magically make money appear however, it is constructed like real crypto-mining. You compete with other people to win the ‘block’ (get a reward of ~2750MRC or about 920USD). A block is mined about every two minutes, and only one node server wide will receive this reward. It works using a random weight system, so even if you only have a power of 50TH/s, you will still be able to win blocks. Extensive simulation was done in Python for this system to choose how long a block should take to mine, making it fair to smaller miners, and making sure the reward is just. As of right now, there is only one miner in the mod, however we plan on adding 15+ variants of miners you can find. You can install different software on the miners, which can significantly boost the power of the miner as long as it is compatible. If it is not compatible software, the effectiveness will be lessened.
This is the beginning of the clans system. It is fairly basic right now and has only simple features, such as being created, viewing details, invites, accepts, and disbanding. In the future, clan specialization, clan payments, contracts, and banking are all planned, along with a nice GUI for you to access your clan details and do all of the above.
The basic looting system has been completed. It takes time to loot an object, and at the end 2-5 items will appear from your efforts. They each have weighted random chances, so there are items that are rarer than others. They take 10 minutes to reset.
The next feature is one I have been hinting at on the public Discord. Personally, I really like this feature, but it’s not too exciting. It’s stock trading- and it uses real markets (it can literally access every market in the entire world). You can short-sell or buy stocks and close to make or lose money. It is for more advanced players who want a more skilled and knowledge-based way of making money.
Finally, I’ve added some nice blocks for our wonderful builders.
Credit to SneakyDanny for modeling all 3D models in this mod. Keep your eyes out around December 15th. We plan on showing all this, plus so much more in an action-packed gameplay video.
Keep in mind, patrons get all of this early, plus some bonus, non-public content. In the future, patrons will get early access content at least seven days prior to the public.
We plan on making development logs more regular from this point forward.
