May the peace of Gaia comfort you! We bring tales of the dev team’s travails this week, in another edition of the DeFi Kingdoms Dev Update!

The Front-end Team spent the latter half of last week squashing bugs and cleaning up mobile views after the gen0 launch, and started this week by bringing Vithraven’s Awakening, aka the gen0 re-roll, to a Portal near you. At the time of writing, almost 900 gen0’s have had their genes re-rolled. This event helps ensure that appearance, class, and subclass genes are evenly distributed across the gen0 population. Gen0 Heroes can be rewarded with experience, stat boosts, and Enhancement Stones and Attunement Crystals, so if you own a gen0, level up and then go see the Archdruid for your re-roll!

On Wednesday, the Stone Carver appeared at the Portal as well. He makes Enhancement Stones to improve Summons and is always worth a visit. Beware, though, as he sometimes has other urgent business to attend to! Make sure to grab enough stones to cover any summoning you might intend to do during his absence! There have been over 1400 stones carved, resulting in a burn of over 2.8 million gold, 1400 potions, and a number of runes and loot tokens. Gardening and Mining went live on the production site, too.

The Front-end team is now prioritizing our bugs list and beginning the massive undertaking of preparing for pets.

Speaking of pets, the Solidity Team has delivered the first contracts for pet hatching. The API Squad is using these contracts to begin building everything they need to listen for hatching events, populate the pet catalog and pet viewer, and create a caching layer to serve the pet viewer and pet auction systems. Those with a sharp eye to the development cycle may realize this means we aren’t in alpha yet, so don’t get too excited. Our development cycle is very tight, and we try not to commit too much to hard release dates since disruptions can happen and cause delays. That said, while anything may happen and releases may be delayed, we still feel like we’re on track for our internal target date and we hope to release pets on time so that you may begin to enjoy them in…an expeditious fashion.

The Art Team is smashing out pets. Since someone may have shared this information already, we’re happy to confirm that on launch, there will be over 225 unique combinations of pet breeds and colors available from just the blue and gray egg pools alone. Some will be relatively common, while we expect that others may be so rare that they occur only once, if at all. The Lore Team has also been adding descriptions and flavor text to give some backstory to your new furry (or scaldefiney) friends! We are very excited about pets not only as tools to boost Hero power and productivity, but also as awesome pieces of art made even more collectible by their rarity.

Next week’s update may be a little shorter than usual, as we don’t have a release planned for Wednesday and many of our teams will be heads-down prepping for the following week. But, before we go…

The Design Team is inputting the last of the first-pass Hero abilities into the combat engine. Many of us will be meeting next week to lay out a testing strategy, which will combine manual playtests with a number of simulation techniques. We’ll be identifying classes, abilities, and passives that are too strong, too weak, or don’t behave as intended, and the Game Designers will incorporate those findings and continue to tweak the system. This represents a huge milestone in the process of combat development and we’re all stoked to get our first taste of PvP in a test environment. We’ll probably spend a lot of time in future updates discussing the art and science of game balance and matchmaking, and this is such a cool first step down that road.

To everyone reading, we love and appreciate you and can’t wait for you to see all the great things we’re working on. Please make sure to stay hydrated, breathe deeply, and touch grass. WAGMI and BULLISH!

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