Overview
Asteria is a programming game that lets developers write bots, small programs that play on their own, to race spaceships across a shared grid toward a prize. Coders use it to learn how blockchain apps work by building something that has to follow real rules on a live network. Every ship, fuel pellet, and prize in the game is a record on the blockchain, so every move is an actual transaction1.
Asteria is built by TxPipe, a company that makes developer tools for blockchain apps, and was funded through Project Catalyst, Cardano's community grant program2. The game teaches the eUTxO model, Cardano's way of tracking value as separate digital coins that each carry their own rules. TxPipe's Catalyst proposal names that model as one of the main hurdles for developers coming from other blockchains2.
Key Features
- Hands-on practice with real transactions. Each game action, from launching a ship to claiming the prize, is its own Cardano transaction that the player's bot has to build and submit3.
- A race with simple, fixed rules. Ships move across a grid, and an on-chain speed limit, enforced by what TxPipe calls the Space-Time contract, caps how far a ship can travel at a time1. On the mainnet challenge, which runs on Cardano's main network, ships start at least 50 steps from the center and burn one unit of fuel per step4.
- A prize paid from an on-chain asteroid. A ship that reaches the center of the grid may claim up to half of the ADA locked in the asteroid record, and the ADA that players pay to launch a ship is added to that record3. The mainnet challenge page names sponsor projects such as SundaeSwap, Minswap, and Indigo4. The mainnet prize pool has been claimed5.
- Ready-made templates for every move. The Asteria Starter Kit uses Tx3, TxPipe's toolkit for describing transactions as reusable templates, so a new player can start from working code instead of a blank page6.
- Open code you can reuse. The Asteria codebase is published under the Apache 2.0 open-source license7, and anyone can use it to run a challenge of their own1. The Cardano Foundation reuses the game to create realistic test traffic for Cardano node software8.
What to Expect
The Asteria site opens with a short explanation of the game, a list of challenges, and a link to build your own bot. The mainnet challenge page lists its network, sponsor tokens, and game settings such as how much fuel a ship can carry4. Challenges have run on Cardano's main network and on the preview testnet, a practice network where test ADA has no real value1.
For developers, the How to play page is the main guide. It covers six actions: create a ship, move it, gather fuel, gather tokens, mine Asteria (claim the prize), and quit the game. Each action comes with its rules, a Tx3 file, and JavaScript code, plus a form for running it from the browser3. The starter kit expects some comfort with a terminal, Node.js, and cardano-cli, the standard command-line tool for working with Cardano6.
Spectators can follow along too. A live map of ships and fuel updates with each new block, and TxPipe invites developers to build their own game viewers7. A leaderboard ranks players by how close their ship sits to the center9.
