Hello Cambrians.

We've been busy! Excited to share an update from the development team covering some key things we've shipped recently, early previews of upcoming releases, and other developments across the ecosystem as we move closer to Genesis mainnet and the launch of the Cambria token and protocol.

DUNGEONS V0

Cambria: Dungeons will be our next major release, coming to mainnet in May.

Why Dungeons

Most crypto games ask a lot of players upfront. You need to understand the macro + micro economy, commit significant time to grind levels, buy NFTs, ramp up through tutorials, park capital for long stretches before you see any real payoff. This is perfect for the dedicated audience we've built so far, but it's a harder sell for the broader audiences that we need to scale into.

Dungeons is our answer to this problem. It's designed to be the first touchpoint a new player has with the Cambria universe - short, understandable, streamable, and juicy / dopamine-maxxing. Deposit any amount, hop into a dungeon, and try to maximize your buy-in with your wits and skill. With Dungeons, we're looking to unlock an entirely new audience of players and give the ecosystem a high velocity, 24/7 revenue engine that will form the core of the Genesis ecosystem.

Gameplay-wise, the closest reference point is a cross between Diablo x roguelike dungeon crawlers. The risk structure borrows directly from the best parts of Gold Rush, but with a couple key twists (you'll have to play it to see😄).

A few principles shaped the design:

• Built for scale. The core loop is combinatorial - hard to solve, easy to expand. We can keep adding content without rebuilding the foundation.
• Easy to onboard into. A new player should be able to watch thirty seconds of gameplay and get it. Sit n' Go format, no ten-hour MMO ramp up.
• Streamable. Sessions are short and visually punchy, which means they're fun to watch as well as play.
• Surprisingly deep. Easy to learn, hard to master. Those who can maximize their edge have the highest winnings potential.

Dungeon v1.1: HARDCORE

Dungeons v1 intentionally avoids PvP to keep the onramp clean. But the system is built to expand. After Dungeons v0, we're planning to follow up with an expansion titled Hardcore Dungeons - a fast paced Dark & Darker-style PvPvE mode that is a winner-takes-all, cutthroat scramble to level up, find the best gear combo, farm elite mobs to gain an edge, and wipe out the others.

Duel Arena / Islands -> Dungeons Transition

With the Dungeons release, the new Dungeon lobby area (Ashford's Hollow) will serve as the new hub area for the currently live Cambria game world.

Inside of this lobby area, players will also be able to purchase new Islets, trade Islet goods, and travel directly to Islands, via the Chancery of the Archipelagos. Islands will offer increased bank space, a place to display Dungeon achievements, gate reward thresholds, etc. on top of current Islands skilling & farming gameplay.

Additionally, existing Arena Token games (Sword in the Stone, Pit Fights, Gizmo's Folly) will also be available in the new Tavern area and Pits for some seedy, underground degen action. These will continue to use Arena Tokens.

Dungeons v1 Season

The first Dungeons season will be a continuation of First Landing, w/ Trinkets as the cross-mode points system from either Dungeons or Islands.

GENESIS DEV

Our goal with the full Genesis release is to have Dungeons, Islands, and Gold Rush gameplay all live inside of a single, persistent universe.

We will already be most of the way there with Dungeons v0 + Islands.

Gold Rush is evolving into a more macro-PvP-centric experience, centered on extraction gameplay and competition between small bands of players and guilds. The competitive end game is being built around Raids & Crafting, with each feeding the other: raids generate the extremely rare materials that feed top-tier, high-RNG crafting, while crafted gear is what makes your group competitive vs the rest of the economy.

A key element of the design is the combination of a standard league + season-based structure. Most of the end-game economy is season-based and lasts a few months at a time. Other progression elements - the things you'd expect to stick with your character - are permanent. The intent is to give serious players fresh resets at the competitive level while also creating long-horizon progression tracks.

Latest Updates:

• New Peaks region & NPC factions
• Transports game loop.
• Regional Banking.
• Expanded, real-time Crafting
• A full Combat overhaul

After Dungeons goes live, we'll be starting early playtests of the new Gold Rush experience as we move closer to full launch.

NFTS

As a refresher, our current NFT collections include the Founders (1.5k), Islands (3.3k), and Cores (10k) NFTs. See our Docs for more on what each does.

Why NFTs Matter to Us

NFTs drive a rail of development focused on making the universe of Cambria deep, interesting, and high long-term retention - the MMO-ish systems with less clear immediate ROI but significant long-term ecosystem-building potential.

Our experiments to date with Cambria NFTs have been driven by a vision for Cambria as a community owned game. We're firm believers in the ideals of onchain, decentralized protocol networks as it applies to games, and we think this design space is still vastly unexplored for both fungible and non-fungible tokens. It's been incredible to see the engagement so far from our community with what we've shipped so far - from Cores NFT holders competing in Arena Token auctions, Core tier-gated exclusive skins, and companion minting, to Island NFT holders w/ their small sub communities, to Companion NFT holders having fun with their pets in game.

Island Roadmap

Islands are your gateway into Cambria as a social-world / metaverse layer.

We think of continued Islands development as centered around enhancing the value prop of Islands as mini-communities inside of Cambria - guilds, friend groups, or even just players that play a certain way. Giving Island Communities a core goal and reward structure (points) that they can compete around / dedicate Supply Drives and resources towards is our north star for upcoming Island releases.

We want all future "power users" of Cambria (players that dive deeper into the ecosystem past the quick gameplay) to have strong reasons to get their own Islet in game (Banking & Storage, Achievements / Trophies, Guild functionality, key buildings used in other game modes that the building owner charges fees for use, etc.). Additionally, we're looking at tying specific Guild related upgrades and functionality to tiers, in addition to planned larger land mass / flex utility.

Cores Roadmap

Cores holders are the collectors and tastemakers governing cosmetics, companions, and "flex" in general inside of the Cambria universe. Cores are already deeply integrated into the game, where Cores stakers earn soulbound Shards that are used to summon (mint) new Companions, or burned to claim Arena Tokens (cosmetic currency) from Cosmetic chest opens ingame.

Upcoming developments here center around expanding out the Companions system (flex and convenience utility ingame), rolling out our new Cosmetic override system that applies across all game modes, and shipping the (long awaited) cosmetic shard auctions.

It's been really cool to see the ingame cosmetic market continue to thrive. Excited to see how these all develop with upcoming releases - Cores is another collection that scales quite heavily with active playerbase.

Recently Shipped

The Renown system is now live, with the Renown Leaderboard. Currently this applies only to NFTs, but will incorporate Token related data post TGE.

On the Islands side, v1.1 (First Landing) has covered an incredible amount of early ground: Farming, 4 major Skilling loops, the Energy Collector, Island Arena Token distributions, Cosmetic AT distributions, Arena Token burn mechanics, Auras, and a full Cosmetic Rework. Full Patch Notes here.

OTHER UPDATES

A handful of things worth flagging that don't fit cleanly under any other section:

• Cambrilio - the community Cambria PFP project - is incredibly cool. Kudos to AwesomeKush for the contribution to the culture, the tech is insane and love seeing these PFPS pop up on my timeline!
• Equal shoutout to Kyroh & the Mark of the Zeal guild for creating & maintaining this incredible Cambria Economy Dashboard that tracks the current Duel Arena + Island economy - everything from recipes to item DB.
• Localization. Full game translations (done manually by the community) shipped for Chinese and Korean, with Portuguese & Spanish soon.
• Responsiveness. Major changes to the networking, game tick, and surrounding architecture have all been shipped and tested live. Feel should be significantly tighter.
• Backend Scaling. Islands (3,333 instances) and Dungeons instances (scaling dynamically with players) are now seamlessly integrated. Crash fixes and legacy issues with memory leaks on Islands have been resolved.
• Visual overhaul. Shadows, lighting, glows, and material work across the board. We're stretching the technical bounds of what's possible in the browser with the Cambria Engine.