These pictures were part of the Riftwatchers' release eyecandy (shutout to the awesome Splinterlands creative team), and I think these clues are some critical aspects of what I hope will be a big part of Land. The flying ships are what I believe will be an answer to how items and cards will be transported in the much-anticipated Land feature in Splinterlands. In this post, I will write about the ships and share my thoughts on how wagons will be used in a second post.

Ships

Flying Ships are the answer to how you will get your harvested resources from your land to the marketplace. As @aggroed has alluded in BryBro's YouTube Land Stream #6, liquidity pools will be significant in the Splinterlands Metaverse, or as I like to call it, Splinterverse. Lots of items and resources are going to be traded. Resources will need transportation, and flying ships, water ships (or hybrid), and wagons will be a great asset for the game.

The resources we know about now are wood, ore, grain, and stone (https://splintercards.com/lands.html). To whet the appetite, if these resources are going to be used, hopefully, they will require buildings to refine them. Take wood, for example; a simple game will take wood and build a house. I believe the spirit of this game and the creator's intent will allow more opportunities for players to trade and develop more items. I also hope the creators will make the game so SPS voters can propose items to be added in as the game grows. Making the game more realistic and providing opportunities for players to earn tokens. For example, wood will need to be refined at a sawmill and sold to players who need the wood for building. Workers will need to cut down trees, and some form of transportation will be required to transport raw resources. All this will require demand for grain as the cards will need food (speculation for why we need Grain). This will require windmills to make flower and bakers to make bread. The more steps resources need to go through to get to an end result that creates more jobs for cards creating more demand for cards. Think of the support economy this creates to support the supporters. Throw in the possibility of degradation of materials and the need for repair cards to take resources to fix buildings and the need for resources will be never ending.

While I see the first iteration of the game being 1D cards or pictures like we see in guilds. I hope to see a more 3D map such as a Sim City or Age of Empires map in the future. Plots of land will have 3D buildings and the owner could even alter the geography, such as building canals for boats (think Venice and Amsterdam) and water-powered buildings.

How will these ships be used, and better yet, how will you make money from them? I believe Splinterlands will sell the ships and items like an NFT. Owning titles to things will be a great way to generate income, and I hope the corporation Splinterlands sells the titles as a way to pay the bills. Still, as I will explain, Splinterlands will give the economy to the players to generate income to build and expand in all other ways.

First, you will buy the title of the ship; as I said, the company Splinterlands sell the NFT title, and when a player has this NFT, it acts as a blueprint for an item, in this case, blueprints to build a ship. Once the player has the title, they must build the ship at the shipyard. I hope you can see the potential for economic gain in trading these resources as the shipyard will need to buy refined metal from the Metal Refinery factory and wood from the sawmill, etc. The economic possibilities of owning land and the resources needed for an ample supply and demand economy in a free market will generate mass amounts of DEC and SPS. So think twice before suggesting we burn tokens.

Once the shipyard makes the ship, the player can transport items. I envision a ride-share feature with ships, allowing players to accept contracts to move items and cards from one location to another. If buildings need resources to be built, a ship is going to be needed to transport said resources. A ship could be placed on autopilot to take contracts for players who need things moved. Owning a transport ship would be a valuable asset for earning income.

If I were a creator, I would like to see the cards on the ship not just work on the boat but be able to attack other ships. Ships would be made for different jobs such as attack ships and transport ships. A summoner would be the ship's captain and place negative effects on other ships or its own ship. Cards with range could attack other ships, and tanks would board other ships if the vessel went broadside and fight to the death. Magic cards are placed in the boat to fire cannons, and archers would fire their respective weapons. The losing ship would be disabled and transported back to the home dock. The ship would not be a total loss; they would need a repair card at the dock to make it new again. The winning ship would take some tokens from the losing ship. Thus a fighting ship would need a war coffer filled with tokens to fight other ships.

When Land?

I hope this has made you bullish on Land, I am happy to see all the other games like Towers being created for the game. These all will be great assets to building wealth in game ownership. It shows the creators of Splinterlands don't want to specialized in one game but diversify the splinterlands Kingdom. I am looking forward to land ownership and the non-card economy that it will support. The success of this game is the success of my cards and assets in this game. So what do you think? Thanks for reading my post, happy hunting.