The Codex

Everything about Degens & Dragons — an on-chain extraction roguelike on Solana — explained step by step. If you only read one section, read The core loop.

Overview

Degens & Dragons is a grimdark, text-based extraction roguelike. You descend a dungeon called the Grind, one floor at a time, narrated by an AI Architect. Each floor you make a single choice: bank what you've gathered and climb out, or push deeper and gamble it all. Death is permanent — fall, and you drop a lootable corpse and lose everything you carried.

Only the token, $DnD, and value settlement live on-chain. Your gold, items, runs and account are server-authoritative and stored off-chain — the same hybrid model the Solana retro-game meta runs on. That keeps play fast and cheat-resistant while keeping the money trustless.

Getting started & the gate

1. Install Phantom and switch it to devnet.
2. Acquire at least 1,000 $DnD. This is the hold-gate — it unlocks all play, free runs included, and ties every player to the token.
3. Open the dungeon, connect your wallet, and you're in.

The 1,000-token hold is never spent — it just has to be in your wallet. Paid Cursed delves charge an additional on-chain entry (see The Hoard & entry).

The core loop

1. Choose a delve. The free Shallows (capped) or a paid Cursed delve (the full deep + the Hoard).
2. Pick a class and a loadout — carry items in from your stash (you lose them if you die).
3. Resolve each floor. A fresh encounter, decided by d20 checks.
4. Decide: descend (riskier, richer) or extract at a waygate (bank everything).
5. Spend & trade back on the surface, then dive again.

Classes

Six classes, each a crypto archetype mapped onto a D&D role with its own signature ability:

Stats are rolled (4d6-drop-lowest) with a bonus to the class's priority abilities. HP scales with Constitution.

Zones & floors

Every 5th floor is a boss. Bosses are tankier, hit harder, and always drop loot.

Encounters & skill checks

Each floor is one of seven encounter types — combat, puzzle, shrine, NPC, lore, trap, and boss — with branching choices. The same type never appears back-to-back, and scenes/variants don't repeat within a run, so a delve always reads fresh.

Choices resolve as d20 skill checks: d20 + ability modifier vs a difficulty class (DC). A natural 20 always succeeds; a natural 1 always fails. The deeper you are, the higher the DCs — and a flat depth penalty weighs on every roll.

Combat

• Attack — d20 + STR/DEX + weapon vs the enemy's AC; damage by your weapon die.
• Ability — your class signature (see above).
• Use item — drink a potion, read a scroll, or equip a weapon mid-fight.
• Flee — a DEX check to escape (the Jeet is great at it; the Degen can't).

Between floors you catch your breath for a small heal — but that recovery shrinks the deeper you go.

Risk & difficulty

Nothing in the Grind is free of risk. Difficulty scales with depth in several ways:

• Descent hazards — every step down can spring a ward, a rotten stair, or an ambush. A reflex save halves the damage.
• Tougher enemies — more HP, higher AC, and a flat damage bonus that grows with depth.
• Enemy modifiers (elites) — deep enemies roll affixes like Vicious (+dmg), Armored (+AC), Frenzied (+to-hit) and Rending (bigger dice). Past floor 10 they can stack two.
• Harsher traps & checks — trap damage and DCs climb with depth, and a depth penalty applies to every skill check.
• Less healing — between-floor recovery drops from 14% to 8% of max HP in the deep.

Items: what they do

Every item shows a plain description in your inventory, the shop, and your character sheet. Item types:

Beyond usable gear, the dungeon drops relics and cosmetics(pure collectibles — sell them or list them) and, rarely, artefacts (below). Carried items are lost on death and banked on extraction.

Supply & seasons

Where do the shop's items come from? Are they infinite?

Yes. The quartermaster's basics — the potions, scrolls and starter weapons listed above — have infinite supply. They're crafted on demand and bought with gold (the soft currency), so there's always a baseline of consumables to buy and a reliable place to sell loot. That keeps the economy liquid and prevents the kind of gear drought that stalls a roguelike. Because they cost gold, not $DnD, they don't inflate the token.

What has limited supply?

Artefacts are the only hard-capped items, and the caps are enforced on-chain — once an artefact is minted out, it can never be created again.

Relics and cosmetics are unbounded flavor collectibles. Usable gear (potions/weapons/scrolls) is effectively unbounded but rate-limited by drop chance and depth.

Seasons: adding new items over time

Artefacts are organised into seasons. The loot table only rolls the current season's set. When a season's artefacts are fully mined out, we bump the season and register a brand-new set on-chain (each with its own id and cap). Old artefacts stay permanently sold-out and collectible; new ones become farmable. Seasonal rotation can extend to fresh consumables and cosmetics too, giving the dungeon a steady stream of new content without ever inflating the supply of what came before.

The surface has three separate trading desks, each its own menu option: the Quartermaster (gold, vs the house), the Trader (Gold ⇄ $DnD, player-to-player), and the Marketplace (items ⇄ $DnD, player-to-player).

The quartermaster (gold shop)

Menu option 2. An instant, house-run shop priced in gold — the soft currency:

• Buy any basic consumable/weapon at its listed gold value (infinite stock).
• Sell any item from your stash for its gold value — your reliable exit for loot you don't want.

Prices here are deterministic (common ≈ 20g up to artefact ≈ 1,500g, or an item's explicit value). No wallet needed — this is the gold faucet and sink that keeps every run fundable. It never touches $DnD.

The trader (Gold ⇄ $DnD)

Menu option 3. The currency desk where gold and $DnD change hands between players — modelled on how Kintara converts in-game gold to its token: you don't swap against the protocol, you trade with another player, and they pay on-chain from their wallet.

Selling gold for $DnD

• Pick sell gold for $DnD and enter an amount + your $DnD ask (e.g. 500 12).
• The gold leaves your stash into escrow and your offer goes live for other players to take.
• When someone buys it, you receive their $DnD on-chain, minus the 6% rake.

Buying gold with $DnD

• Browse the gold offers (lowest price first), pick one, and your wallet pays the seller in $DnD on-chain.
• The gold lands in your stash the moment the payment confirms.

The marketplace (items ⇄ $DnD)

Menu option 4. The player-to-player market for items — the only place $DnD is earned from gameplay. The protocol never mints it; one player pays another.

Selling (listing)

• Pick sell an item, choose an item, and set your ask in $DnD (e.g. 2 150). A suggested floor from the item's value × rarity is shown to anchor you.
• The item moves into escrow (out of your stash) so it can't be double-spent or used while listed.
• When it sells you receive the ask minus a 6% rake, split 40% burn / 40% AI & infra / 20% dev — every trade is deflationary. Cancel any time to get the item back.

Buying (on-chain, Kintara-style)

1. Browse listings (lowest ask first) and pick one.
2. Your wallet signs a single transaction: 94% to the seller + the 6% rake routed 40/40/20.
3. Once the payment confirms, the server delivers the item to your stash and closes the listing. No counterparty risk — the seller is paid trustlessly on-chain.

How prices are calculated

Prices are player-set — a free market. The UI anchors it with a suggested floor (item value × a rarity multiplier, common → artefact) and shows the lowest active ask so buyers see a live price. There are no oracle prices — discovery is the players'.

How listings are filtered

• Type — potion, weapon, scroll, relic, cosmetic, artefact (the Trader is the gold pair).
• Rarity — common, uncommon, rare, epic, artefact.
• Price — lowest ask first; rarity and remaining artefact supply set the value.

The Black Altar (sinks)

Menu option 6. The altar burns $DnD for dark favors — a pure sink. Each offering pays on-chain and splits 40% burn / 40% AI & infra / 20% dev, then the server grants the effect:

• Cosmetic title (50 $DnD) — a random trophy title added to your stash. Pure flex.
• Reroll charm (80 $DnD) — your next degen rolls stats twice and keeps the kinder roll.
• Revive ward (200 $DnD) — drags you back once from death in a Cursed delve (revive at half HP, same floor).

Charms are consumed automatically when they apply. Buying needs a connected wallet (live mode).

The Hoard & entry

The Hoard is a single, persistent on-chain prize pool. Every paid entry feeds it, and deep extractors win slices of it.

Dynamic entry

A Cursed delve's entry is 250 $DnD + 1% of the live Hoard, so dives cost more as the pot swells. Your transaction includes a slippage guard so a sudden jump can't overcharge you. Of each entry, 75% feeds the Hoard and 25% is the protocol fee.

Winning the Hoard

• Only extractions from floor 8+ roll for the Hoard. Die and you forfeit.
• Win chance rises with depth (up to 60%); the payout slice rises with depth too.
• A single payout is capped on-chain at 20% of the pot, so the Hoard always survives a win.
• The draw is derived from the run's on-chain VRF seed — provably fair and replayable.

Fairness & anti-cheat

• Server-authoritative: the deterministic engine runs on the server, not your browser, so a client can never fabricate an outcome.
• Wallet session auth: you sign a free message on connect to prove you own your wallet; every stash/$DnD action is bound to that signed session, so no one can act for another wallet.
• Faithful replay: each run logs its seed, every input, and a snapshot of the loadout/charms (and any corpse it looted) — so anyone can re-run it and reproduce the exact outcome, even for geared runs.
• Seeded randomness: each paid run is seeded by on-chain randomness recorded before you play. (A move to a fully trustless oracle VRF is planned for mainnet — see roadmap.)
• On-chain guards: only the attestor can settle, payouts are capped, entry has slippage protection, and supply is fixed.

Tokenomics & fees

• Supply: 1,000,000,000 $DnD, fixed. Mint authority revoked.
• Two currencies: gold (soft, off-chain faucet) and $DnD (hard, on-chain, earned only from players).
• Hold to play: 1,000 $DnD gates all play.

Where fees go

Two streams, kept separate:

• In-game fees (Cursed entry's 25% fee portion, the 6% marketplace rake, and altar sinks) route 40% burn / 40% AI & infra / 20% dev.
• Launch creator fees route 100% to dev for runway — separate from the protocol's 40/40/20.

The goal: in-game fees alone fund the AI and infrastructure, so the game is self-sustaining regardless of speculation.

Fee management

The 40% infra and 20% dev shares accumulate in two program-owned vaults (an infra vaultfor AI/infra, a treasury vault for dev). The config authority sweeps them to any wallet via the withdraw_fees instruction, so the operator funds AI inference and dev manually (no auto-top-up worker yet — by design, for now).

Operator tool: scripts/sweep-fees.mjs <infra|treasury> <amount> <destinationWallet>, run with the authority key.

Staking

Staking grants utility only — access tiers, a marketplace rake discount, identity and governance — with an unbonding period and an unstake burn. It deliberately pays no yield and no fee revenue: rewarding stakers from fees would create a fourth bucket and a security/regulatory risk. You stake for perks, not for printed returns.

Looting the dead (async PvP)

Die on a Cursed delve and you drop a corpse on the exact floor where you fell, holding the gold + items you were carrying. It's recorded on-chain and stays lootable by other players for 7 days — async PvP, no real-time netcode.

Looting happens inside a delve, not from a menu: if you reach the floor where another delver died, you'll find their corpse as that floor's event and can choose to loot it — or leave it and move on.

• It's risky. A reflex check decides it: succeed and you strip the dead clean; fail and the corpse's grave-wight rises and you must win the fight (or flee empty-handed) to claim the hoard.
• You still have to get out. Looted gold + items join your carried haul, not your stash — die before you extract and you drop it all again (in your own corpse).
• First-come, once only. Claiming marks the corpse on-chain (claim_corpse, a single-claim guard) before the loot is credited, so a corpse can only be taken once.

Roadmap

• Relic / artefact cNFTs minted on extraction (Bubblegum) — items are off-chain today.
• Real VRF (Switchboard/ORAO) replacing the attestor-written seed (≈0.001–0.002 SOL/run) before mainnet.
• Replay hardening: snapshot the loadout + charms into the run record so geared runs verify exactly.
• Authority handover to a Squads multisig + timelock, and an audit before mainnet.
• Mainnet launch (pump.fun fair launch).

Enter the dungeon →