Devs on Devs: Biomes (Dhrumil Shah and Dhvani Patel)
Edited by vera
Dhrumil Shah and Dhvani Patel are the team behind Biomes, an onchain, Minecraft-like sandbox where you can explore, mine, craft, attack, and compete in user-generated experiences. We’ve known the team for almost a year, back when Biomes was known as Tenet, and the team was building a multi-layer, multidimensional physics simulation engine. Now, Biomes is in full swing on Redstone, as a fully-realized Minecraft-esque game, with docs for users to build plugins and games on top of it. Today, May 3rd, Biomes is being featured for our Redstone Community Spotlight initiatives, and you can learn more about how to participate here.
Building Onchain Minecraft
Dhrumil: Our guiding principles are very simple. The question we ask ourselves is “Can we make the least shitty minecraft possible?” Biomes is onchain so it's going to be worse than normal, off-chain Minecraft because you have transactions. You can't move in real time. If we could literally port Minecraft directly, we would 100% do that and call it a day. The guiding philosophy behind our project is not so much about the game mechanics. Neither of us come from a game background.
Dhvani: And neither of us really care that much about innovating on game mechanics.
**Dhrumil:**We believe that If you put anything onchain, you can now write a bunch of smart contracts on top of it to coordinate over whatever you put onchain. We wanted to go in the direction of doing something that's a sandbox open world where the game is just a bunch of resources in space with physics that guide how these resources interact, but nothing else beyond that.
And that's exactly what Minecraft is. Minecraft is really like toy physics for a bunch of blocks in space. And if you just have that, then things become really interesting because now you can deploy smart contracts to make everything in that world something people can coordinate around.
Dhvani: What is this coordination? What are they doing? What exactly is this behavior? What is this coordination going to do?
Dhrumil: I think one thing that's interesting, if we actually think about where we started from, we started this from a very weird set of digital physics.
Dhvani: Not even that, like a real-world sci-fi thing.
Dhrumil: Imagine you could write smart contracts all over the world.I can write a smart contract that tries to incentivize people around the world to grow corn. And if they grow corn, then they're all rewarded.
Dhvani: I remember the one I really liked. You write a smart contract that, if you take the bus instead of taking a car or if you bike, gives you a rewards. Something that aligns with the green movement..
Dhrumil: Exactly.
Dhvani: And because it's verifiable, somebody else could use that to gate, and say “To enter this club, you have to be part of the green movement.”
Dhrumil: 10, 15 years ago, when AI was still a meme, people would say, “Okay, imagine AI will solve your homework for you.” And it sounds like a meme, but at least people knew what it was capable of and then it got figured out.
And then I saw other people imagining DAO controlled drones that both deliver burritos to your home and like defend your borders from armies.
And this sounds like a meme, but this is literally why we got into crypto. DAO-controlled drones. Write a smart contract, incentivize corn growth, green movement, drones. But all of these things are obviously really, really difficult to do because it's hard to write a smart contract that can autonomously verify physical actions. The physical world isn't verifiable. This seems like a long way out.
So then we said, okay, if you can't do that, then it would just be interesting if you have that experience, but you can do that over like a sandbox virtual world. That'd be great. But building a sandbox world from scratch is really, really hard. Because, that's a lot of simulation. It's a physics engine. Yeah, but if you look at Minecraft, it's like a really playful toy version of that in a way. It's really dumbed down. It's not nearly as deep as our world. But it's a good step in the right direction.
We would love to just port Minecraft and then deploy a bunch of smart contracts over it to do crazy things. For example, have players go around building Optimism statues and submitting that they built it, and if they actually built it, then they get these coupons that they can use to force other Optimism players to drop items from their inventory. Or maybe a thing where I grow food and I'll give a ration of that food to you and in return you're responsible for protecting my village from being attacked.
But if it does get attacked, then you lose some stake. Stuff like that.
Dhvani: Could you do a thing where if there's Base and Base wants to incentivize people to break down those statues, could they deploy that in the same world? Because it's a smart contract, you can't go against the first one.
Dhrumil: For the sake of example, maybe not Base, how about Arbitrum? Arbitrum comes along and puts up a smart contract that says “If there are any Optimism statues and you break them then you guys can get diamond axes from the Arbitrum people.” All of these are just smart contracts trying to get all sorts of different things to happen in the same world. Kind of like what we have in our world where you have a bunch of like competing ideologies. It’s just minecraft but let's make it less shitty and then put smart contracts over it.
This is basically the philosophy.
Dhvani: What would you say so far, out of all the things we've done porting Minecraft, has been the most challenging part? In terms of porting.
Dhrumil: The on-chain positions.
Dhvani: Because people don't like that. Yeah, I think the biggest feedback is that the avatar versus player distinction has just been really hard.
Dhrumil: It's not as rapid as Minecraft. The UX is going to be shittier than Minecraft but because of the smart contract stuff, you get a new type of experience that you just can't have anywhere else. There are early adopters for whom that’s really interesting and then over time we can make the UX less bad but. The smart contract stuff opens up a huge new area, and it becomes okay.
Dhvani: The smart contracts are the game. If you want to play Minecraft, you can just go play Minecraft.
Dhrumil: We believe that maybe you don't have to actually create a new fun game. Smart contracts themselves are the game. So as long as you put anything over and have a base layer of the game that's really susceptible to smart contracts, you'll see something very special.
Why Redstone and What We Want to See on Biomes
Dhrumil: We picked Redstone because we needed a really cheap Layer 2. Redstone is the really cheap layer 2.
Dhvani: We're also building on top of MUD and Redstone is going to integrate nicely with MUD because of the gas tank stuff where you can just deposit to a gas tank and then use that gas across any MUD app across Redstone. That's pretty cool. It's sort of just an integration ease. And because we're such a small team, the more we get out of the box from infra, the better. That's also why we're using MUD, for that matter. We get to do a lot less work on client state sync and like on-chain storage optimizations. You get that out of the box if you use a framework.
Dhrumil: We want to see people using smart contracts to do a bunch of Mr. Beast type stuff onchain. I was talking to Proof of Jake who wants to deploy this experience where teams try to build the largest glass cube they can in an hour or in a day. And whoever builds the largest glass cube, they get the reward pool. Peter Pan wants to do this game called Make It Rain, where he showers ETH on a part of the map, and then everybody frenzies to get there first, and you have to prevent others from getting there, and it's a race. There's a bunch of these Mr.
Beast-type things that happen inside of Minecraft that you can't do on normal Minecraft because it's not verifiable.
Dhvani: Yeah, exactly.
Dhrumil: If you look at existing games, the surface area for economic activity in those games is limited to whatever was programmed by the game dev. So if they added in a way for you to buy in-game resources or if they added a trade system that’s the only economic activity you can have. And sometimes you have third-party markets, where there are trust issues. But that's about it.
But over here the economic activity you can have will increase by 100x because every single possible action that can happen in the world is open to economic activity. It’s just not an experience we gamers can have anywhere else.
A longer term thing that will be interesting to see is if we’re able to port over an existing game and make it less shitty, and make every single action in that world turn into economic activity.
We can take a very, very small fee of that economic activity and redistribute it to grow the ecosystem. By growing the size of the world, it could be an alternative form of a game studio. That'll also be interesting.
Let A Thousand Biomes Bloom
Dhvani: Why is the initial launch called Biomes 1? Does that mean there's supposed to be many of these Biomes, you know, Biomes 2, Biomes 3? Are we going to build 100 Biomes. It's like Nouns.
Dhrumil: There's Nouns 1, Nouns 2, Nouns 1,000. Hopefully there's 1,000 Biomes where anyone could have made the Biome and the Biome that someone made is just as credible as the Biome we made.
Dhvani: I can't imagine our team solely making a hundred different Biomes. It would be good to get an ecosystem of Biomes because there's no distinction between the ones we make and the ones other developers built. That is by default possible, first party versus third party.
Dhrumil: And I think one of the good things about this Minecraft direction is like this already exists in Minecraft. Minecraft mods are a big thing. People are totally down to make Minecraft mods, because there's already distribution. We don't have the distribution of Minecraft. But if we have much stronger economics, then it's possible for modders to actually do a much better job that way.
I think when people think about crypto games, they still primarily think crypto games are about making virtual resources economically valuable. Whether that's like, you have fungible resources everywhere, or you have NFTs everywhere.
Our team actually doesn't think of crypto games in that way at all. We view crypto games as like sandbox environments where you can use smart contracts to have a lot of coordination and generate a lot of drama inside of that sandbox environment. This is a side of crypto games that I think is totally not the dominant meta of what people think it's about. So we hope to push on that as well.
Dhvani: Yeah, it’ll be interesting if more of the games have the same hooks and delegations support.
Dhrumil: The North Star outcome of this project is people changing their idea of crypto games.
And even beyond that, in a small way, make people understand that this is what crypto can be used for. And obviously you can hear about it, but now you see it. You can participate. Even just for games, not for real stuff. It is a small push towards it.
That's what it's for. It'd be very great if in these next couple years, sort of the frame begins to change from crypto as solely being a way to create virtual scarcity. And into the idea that crypto crypto is a way to drive collective action.
We're at the center of the collective action as a computer program. And perhaps people can really experience that viscerally in these game worlds, which are specifically designed for that. If that takes off, then maybe in 10 years, we can have DAO controlled drones.
Dhvani: Yeah, that'd be cool.