Worlds Overview

In this document you will learn how to use Decentraland Worlds BETA, a new service that lets you deploy isolated scenes that you can access with the Decentraland Explorer and using your digital identity.

The name Worlds was given to scenes that exist outside the Genesis City boundaries. Worlds can be used to do experiments, create new experiences, as scenes portfolio or even as a Scene Preview Service to test the content before uploading it to the Genesis City. Worlds scenes are attached to Decentraland NAMEs (a NAME NFT within the DCL ecosystem that can be assigned to your avatar or LAND and costs 100 MANA to create or can be purchased from a previous owner in the Marketplace) and the NAMEs are used to tell Decentraland Explorer which World to load.

WARNINGS: The Worlds Service is in BETA state #

Consider that this product is in BETA state before making it a key part of your product road map.

The BETA is open to anyone to use, to kick-off the product and be able to assess the scaling, a World scene must meet the following limitations:

• Scenes have no parcel limitations since January 2023
• 100 MB is the maximum size for the scene deployment
• Up to 100 users will be allowed to join a World scene concurrently

Publish a World #

The starting point for this product is having a scene that meets the size requirements mentioned above. If you wish to know more about how to create a scene, check out the Decentraland SDK documentation.

If you are a Content Creator, you may be already familiar with how the publishing of a scene works, the experience is quite similar, but with a small caveat:

You need to specify under what name your deployment is to be made. Add the following section in your scene.json:

{
  "worldConfiguration" : {
    "name": "my-name.dcl.eth"
  }
}

Of course, the name specified there needs to be owned as a Decentraland NAME token by the wallet signing the deployment (or by any wallet that has been given permission explicitly via Access Control Lists (ACL), as explained further down).

Keep the following in mind:

• The wallet signing the deployment must own the Decentraland NAME specified in the scene.json file
• The total size of the scene must be less or equal to 100 MB
• The scene has no parcel limitations (since January 2023)

Publish via the Decentraland Editor: #

1. Open VSCode in a Decentraland scene project.
2. Click on the Decentraland icon on the left sidebar.
3. Click on the three dot menu at the top right of the sidebar, next to the green reload arrow button, select Publish Scene To Your World
4. Approve the transaction
   • If you need to use Metamask on the browser, click Open in Browser to open this same window on a browser tab. Then approve the transaction on the Metamask browser extension.

Publish via the CLI #

To deploy a scene to a world via the CLI, you need to specify the target server in the deployment command-line and use the Worlds Content Server URL.

For SDK6 scenes, use the following command:

dcl deploy --target-content https://worlds-content-server.decentraland.org

For SDK7 scenes, use the following command:

npm run deploy -- --target-content https://worlds-content-server.decentraland.org

Once you run the command, you will be prompted to sign the deployment with your wallet and a set of validations will be executed to allow or reject the scene.

Joining a World #

Once a scene is uploaded to the Worlds server you can access it by using the Decentraland Explorer with the following friendly URL https://play.decentraland.org/world/NAME, where NAME should be replaced by the Decentraland NAME to which the deployment was done to. You may use the NAME with or without the .dcl.eth suffix.

On the other hand, NAMEs also work as realms, so you can leverage the existing change realm mechanisms to access a world. One way would be by typing the /changerealm NAME.dcl.eth command in the chatbox and another possibility is by changing the query parameter in the Explorer URL: if your NAME is my-name.dcl.eth you can use the following URL to access the world: https://play.decentraland.org/?realm=my-name.dcl.eth

Migrating a World to the Genesis City #

If you are a LAND owner and you wish to deploy a World scene to the Genesis City, it is completely possible. You just need to re-deploy your scene to the decentralized Catalyst network, the targeted content server for Genesis City

Things to remember:

• remove the worldConfiguration section from scene.json
• the size limitation for Worlds (100 MB total size) is different from that for LAND parcels (15MB per parcel), so make sure your scene is sized correctly for deployments to Genesis City!

World defaults #

A couple of optional custom settings can be specified in the scene.json when deploying a world scene:

skybox: This property indicates how many seconds have passed (in Decentraland time) since the start of the day, assuming the full cycle lasts 24 hours. Divide the seconds value by 60 to obtain minutes, and by 60 again to obtain the hours since the start of the day. For example, if the seconds value is 36000, it corresponds to 10:00 am. If no value is set for this field, the world will follow the same day/night cycle as Genesis City.

fixedAdapter: indicates which Communication Service should be used by the scene. For the time being only the offline:offline value is allowed and when set, the scene will have no Communication Service at all and each user joining that world will always be alone. If not set, the Worlds content server will generate a proper value based on how it is configured.

Example:

{
  "worldConfiguration" : {
    "name": "my-name.dcl.eth",
    "skybox": 36000,
    "fixedAdapter": "offline:offline"
  }
}

Access Control Lists (ACL) #

When a team (more than one person) are contributing to the development of a scene, it may be beneficial to have each contributor have the ability to publish the scene under a single NAME. As stated above, the NAME owner is the only one allowed to run such deployment.

So the concept of Access Control List (or ACL for short) was introduced. The idea is that the owner of the NAME can grant other wallets permission to publish a scene under his NAME. This way the whole team (or a group of selected members) can be added to the world ACL and those will be able to publish the scene.

This ACL is stored in the World Content Server where the world is deployed. It is not stored on the blockchain. This makes it much more flexible, giving more granular control. For e.g. if you want to deploy a scene under the same NAME in two different World Content Server hosting providers, then you can have different sets of permissions in each server. And also, there is no transaction fees involved in maintaining the ACL (granting or revoking permissions).

A new command has been added to Decentraland CLI that allows to show the current ACL stored in the Worlds Content Server for a given NAME, and it also allows granting access to more wallets or revoking access to wallets that are already in the ACL.

In order to grant permission for publishing a scene to another wallet you have to:

• Make sure to have the latest version of Decentraland CLI (v3.16.2 or later).
• Make sure you own the NAME for which you want to manage the ACL.
• Use command dcl world-acl NAME.dcl.eth grant 0x1 0x2 ... 0xn where those 0xn are a list of addresses separated by spaces.

By default, world-acl will act on worlds-content-server.decentraland.org. If you are using a different hosting provider, make sure to add --target-content https://your-hosting.com to each of the subcommands (show, grant and revoke).