EVE Online developer CCP Games has announced the winners of its latest hackathon to build mods and third party tools for its blockchain-based survival MMO, EVE Frontier. The winner, CradleOS, took home $25,000 for its in-game civilization-building tool, with a remaining $55,000 split among other winners.
Blockchain’s still a dirty word for me, but EVE Frontier is the only game I’ve seen to make a convincing argument for its own implementation. It’s also still in active development in the Year of Our Lord 2026, long after the gold rush ended, and that’s a commitment I admire.
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- CradleOS: A bespoke UI and system to manage, coordinate, and govern resources and territory in-game, with an in-universe story about a mysterious AI attached.
- Blood Contract: A bounty system to functionally create PvP quests for other players.
- Civilization Control: A similar, but seemingly less far-reaching UI for managing territory and assets in Frontier, with a focus on usage permission for space structures like gates or autoturrets.
Two of the secondary category winners also caught my eye: The “Most Creative” winner, Bazaar, renders Frontier’s marketplace menu as a playable social space, a 2D, sprite-based, isometric environment resembling the OG Diablos or Baldur’s Gates. The “Weirdest Idea” is also pretty sick: Shadow Broker Intel, a marketplace specifically devoted to trading actionable information about other players’ activities.
EVE Frontier remains in a long early access state, and if you’d like to participate in its grand MMO modding experiment, CCP offers “Founder Access” on its website.
