The Screeps (The Overton Adventures) Paperback – July 1, 1992 by Ed Wicke (Author) › Visit Amazon's Ed Wicke Page. Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author. Are you an author? Learn about Author Central. Ed Wicke (Author) See. Screeps is an MMO that turns JavaScript into RTS commands. Brittany Vincent. 4 years ago. 11 Every once in a while, I encounter a game that just doesn't fit any established genre. Screeps official site is a real-time strategy game, and it's an MMO, but not in the vein of any I've ever seen before.
Screeps can be a difficult game to get started with. This tutorial will help you get your automated empire up and running.
Ingame Tutorial[edit | edit source]
There is an in-game tutorial available which will help you set up a basic codebase.
Setting Up Harvesters[edit | edit source]
Progression in Screeps relies on energy. Energy can be mined from the sources in your room, and it is necessary for creating creeps, building structures, and upgrading the room's controller. The code in the tutorial uses a single creep to harvest energy and bring it back to spawn; however, this is extremely inefficient in the long run. Instead, most players keep their harvesters at their sources and use other methods to transport the energy; this is called Static Harvesting.
RCL 1[edit | edit source]
When you first spawn into the live world, your room will be at room control level 1. You can't do much at this level, so your first priority is going to be to upgrade your controller. After spending 200 energy on it, you will move on to RCL 2.
RCL 2[edit | edit source]
RCL 2 brings extensions, which add energy capacity to your spawn. This allows you to build bigger and better creeps. The article on creep building strategies can help you build creeps effectively.
You can build up to five at this level, each storing 50 energy. As your room progresses through Room Controller Levels, you will be able to build more extensions.
Although not quite as important at this level, it is important that you place your extensions wisely. A fully-leveled room can have 60 extensions, all of which need to be easily accessible to be filled up. Different players have different patterns for placing extensions, listed on the Extension Placement page.
RCL 3[edit | edit source]
Scripps Spelling Bee
Now that your room is at RCL3, you need to build a tower immediately. A tower is your best defense at this level because it can easily defend your entire room from attackers. For tips on tower placement, read Tower placement.
Screeps can be a difficult game to get started with. This tutorial will help you get your automated empire up and running.
Ingame Tutorial[edit | edit source]
There is an in-game tutorial available which will help you set up a basic codebase.
Setting Up Harvesters[edit | edit source]
Progression in Screeps relies on energy. Energy can be mined from the sources in your room, and it is necessary for creating creeps, building structures, and upgrading the room's controller. The code in the tutorial uses a single creep to harvest energy and bring it back to spawn; however, this is extremely inefficient in the long run. Instead, most players keep their harvesters at their sources and use other methods to transport the energy; this is called Static Harvesting.
RCL 1[edit | edit source]
When you first spawn into the live world, your room will be at room control level 1. You can't do much at this level, so your first priority is going to be to upgrade your controller. After spending 200 energy on it, you will move on to RCL 2.
RCL 2[edit | edit source]
RCL 2 brings extensions, which add energy capacity to your spawn. This allows you to build bigger and better creeps. The article on creep building strategies can help you build creeps effectively.
You can build up to five at this level, each storing 50 energy. As your room progresses through Room Controller Levels, you will be able to build more extensions.
Although not quite as important at this level, it is important that you place your extensions wisely. A fully-leveled room can have 60 extensions, all of which need to be easily accessible to be filled up. Different players have different patterns for placing extensions, listed on the Extension Placement page.
RCL 3[edit | edit source]
Scripps Spelling Bee
Now that your room is at RCL3, you need to build a tower immediately. A tower is your best defense at this level because it can easily defend your entire room from attackers. For tips on tower placement, read Tower placement.
RCL 4[edit | edit source]
At RCL 4, you can build a storage. Storages are useful because they allow you to store up to 1 million resources; however, they are difficult to move, so place your storage carefully. You will want your storage to be in a place where it can be reached easily.
RCL 5[edit | edit source]
At RCL 5, you can now build links. Links can be used for link mining, which helps reduce the need for haulers. They are also useful for transporting energy to your controller, which will help you level up faster. This is valuable because RCL 6 costs 1.21 million energy, which must all be transported to the controller.
RCL 6[edit | edit source]
RCL 6 unlocks several new features, mainly in the form of minerals and trading. At RCL 6, you can build an extractor on the mineral in your room and mine that mineral. You can also build a terminal, which allows you to participate on the Market. There, you will be able to purchase other minerals, then combine them in Labs. This will allow you to boost creeps to make them stronger.
Further Expansion[edit | edit source]
At some point, your GCL will upgrade to level 2. When this happens, you will be able to take control over another room. This will give you access to more resources and different minerals.
You will also want to keep upgrading your room. Rooms can be upgraded to RCL 8, and can still be upgraded after that to increase your GCL.
Fumiko name. Many players also get into Remote Harvesting, where they send creeps into unowned or reserved rooms to harvest the sources there. Although it is difficult to code, it can be very rewarding in terms of energy.
We are excited to announce we just launched the sharding system for the Screeps world! The second plane called shard1
already works with faster tick rate and waits for its first settlers! If you wanted to start playing but disliked long 5-second ticks, now is the time!
TL;DR World shards are isolated from each other and run your code separately. Your creeps can travel between them using special portals. The original world becomes shard0
. Portals will be closed during 60 days grace period, but you are free to (re)spawn on either shard0
or shard1
.
Game performance in all aspects is an important area of our work. It was not left unnoticed by us that game simulation performance (tick rate) noticeably decreased lately due to the increase of the number of objects and growing complexity of players' scripts. We understand it can lead to negative sentiment on the subscription-based model, and we won't tolerate this situation.
But the Screeps game world has grown to such an extent that the most powerful machine available from our hoster currently runs our database at 100% of its capacity. We can't merely add runtime servers anymore since the database can't manage such amount of I/O requests. We experimented with different setups of database sharding and replication, but all of them incur unacceptable overhead. We also tried different database management system (we use MongoDB currently), but it didn't work out as well. It looks like the most effective way to horizontally scale our world without performance penalty is to review the very architecture of our servers cluster.
Currently, our cluster can be represented in a classic 'star' layout with the database in the center and runtime servers on edges. The game world is consistent and synchronized as a whole. We have moved from this architecture to a new layout of 'multiple loosely coupled stars.' Our consistent game world will be divided into 'shards' each with its own database of game objects, own game map, and own set of connected runtime servers. Creeps will be able to move between shards through special portals, but different shards will see time flowing independently without synchronization (i.e. Game.time
in different shards will not match and tick rates will differ).
Your code is executed in each shard separately. A special API allows you to determine which shard runs your code at the current moment. You will be able to set your CPU limit for each shard on a special page, and their total sum should match your account limit.
The new system will lead us to an easily scalable horizontal system allowing for expanding the game world virtually without limitations and without increasing.
Screeps Invader Core
By now, we've generated and opened a new shard1
. It already has central sectors open for settlement. We'll open new sectors around them as the need arises. The portals leading from shard0
to shard1
have already been created and put to place, but walled for 60 days.
No inter-shard interactions will be available during this period. You can settle in shard1
only by complete resettling there. You can think of shard1
as a giant Respawn Area and an opportunity to make a fresh start in the whole new world.
During this period, we'll develop and provide for testing special tools for managing CPU and GCL resources of your account and their distribution between shards.
When 60 days are over, the portals will open, and outside invaders will appear to compete with native shard1
inhabitants for new territory!
- Your script is executed on each shard individually and independently.
- Your GCL and CPU limit should be allocated to each shard using the special section in the Overview UI or via API (still in development; currently you have full GCL and CPU in each shard).
- Console contents is broadcasted from every shard with the corresponding note in the console UI.
- Memory is isolated; you have separate 2 MB of Memory and 10 MB of Memory Segments in each shard.
- There is a special memory segment that can be used for passing messages between shards.
- Markets are separate. However, credits balance and history are shared between shards.
Creeps can use special inter-shard portals in highway crossroad rooms to travel between shards in the same way as inter-room portals. These portals are permanent and may be regenerated only when the world is expanded. The name and ID of the creep remains the same on cross shard travel, but the creep loses time to live:
- 800 ticks for creeps without
CLAIM
parts; - 150 ticks for creeps with
CLAIM
parts.
This rule eliminates the abuse of inter-shard portals for quick travel in the same shard.
- 800 ticks for creeps without
- Added new global object
Game.shard
. - Added new type of
StructurePortal.destination
object format withshard
property. - Added new
RawMemory.interShardSegment
. - Added new
Game.map.getWorldSize()
method. - Constants
WORLD_WIDTH
andWORLD_HEIGHT
are now considered deprecated and should not be used. - Removed obsolete and undocumented
Room.mode
property. If you used this property to check for simulation mode, please useGame.shard.name 'sim'
instead.
These changes are supported in private server v2.8.0.
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