what's zkDungeon?

zkDungeon is an experimental fully on-chain game developed by the Lattice team in 2021. Inspired by Dark Forest, it combines board game and battle royale elements in an autonomous world with unchangeable on-chain physics. Players engage in mechanics like planet initialization, upgrades, and ownership, managed through modular smart contracts using the Diamond Standard, custom events for state changes, and client-side synchronization via RPC calls and event processing. Challenges in zkDungeon—such as high RPC costs, manual state syncing between chain and client, irregular events, and modding difficulties—directly catalyzed MUD's development. MUD introduced an Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture, automatic event emission on writes, a central World contract, and optimized networking/indexing, simplifying on-chain game creation while preserving determinism and extensibility.

zkDungeon, a MUD framework game, was noted in Lattice's wind-down announcement.