Splinterlands: Let’s Explore the Land Ecosystem

Land Phase 1.5 or The Secret of Praetoria refers to the land ecosystem of Splinterlands and this post will be about why this feature looks set to be a complete game changer for Splinterlands gameplay.
When I first heard about the Land plots being launched by Splinterlands I was not very interested as I had seen land system being launched by most of the NFT based games and NFT projects. Even BAYC launched it’s land plots. Almost all of these land plot systems were running on hype and more or less fizzled out once the initial hype was over.
Now that Splinterlands Land is functional and I have seen how it works I am convinced that like all their previous features this is a well thought of and meticulously planned projects. Hats off to you Splinterlands team, take a Bow as what you made is just Wow!

Before we get into the details I want to clarify that none of this should be construed as financial advice and everything I am going to talk about is my personal strategy built upon my own risk appetite.

Why do I think Land will take Splinterlands to the Next level?
Splinterlands already has more than a million accounts registered on their platform but still somehow it is a step away from mass adoption. It is still viewed as card collectors game where more and better cards you have the more you win. New players used to lose interest as it required a steep investment to match up to the cards being held by long term whales and very few new entrants will be willing to shell out upwards of $500 for a game which they just got into.
Lands is going to change the whole perception of the game from a card collection game to a proper strategy based game.
If we look at the Roadmap for Lands the first two steps of launching the 150,000 land plots and phase 1.5 with card staking for resource production has been launched. In the coming quarters we will see the Buildings, Item & Spell crafting and final phase of using the items & spells created in gameplay.

This shows the long term vision of the devs. Functionalities will be released in batches and all elements of the land production will have end utility rolling up to the main card based battles.

My First Impression of the Land Ecosystem and Resource Production
As I mentioned earlier, I was not very excited when I first heard about the Land plots being released but I anyways bought a plot as I always make sure to have some NFTs of all types launched by Splinterlands starting from the Alpha collection. I was thinking of just keeping it in my inventory as I was not very hopeful on the gameplay. All this changed when I accidentally chanced upon a YouTube video on resource production on Land. How Runi provides the energy core and top ranking cards offer higher production via staking. I was mesmerised and I just dropped what I was doing and opened the Land section of Splinterlands went to my plot and staked my Runi and some gold foil cards.

Now let’s talk numbers as no matter how glamorous the gameplay is it will not be viable if it does not give a positive return to long term players.
I will give an example from the Grain production I have just setup. It took 4 days for the Grain production unit to be setup and it asked me to deposit 15,000 grains before it starts production. As this was the first run I had to buy grain from the system which was worth 15,000 Credits/DEC which is worth about $15. Not a small amount considering the spell book was $10 to start with.
Once I started farming I saw that my production rate is about 540 grains/hour so for the 15,000 grains I have invested I will be able to get 45,000 grains output in about 30 hours.
Currently there is only the option to buy Grains through Credits or DEC and there is no official platform for selling Grains but there is an informal channel in Discord where people are selling their Grains for as low as 0.03 DEC. It is strange why people are dumping it so cheap. I guess speculative trading will continue till Splinterlands offers a formal mode for trading out of Grains which we may see in next phase.
Till then I continue to keep farming and stacking up my Grain volumes and if a big airdrop comes my way I am planning to pick up a few more land plots.

Cheers,
Sam