The Arrival of Land 1.5 - A Different Way of Playing Splinterlands
Granted, I have not been very active on Splinterlands after the first few months (which was almost five years ago...!) but I realized that this game had a brighter future ahead of it than ... well, pretty much any other game I played on this blockchain. So even though I stopped fighting battles, I held on to my cards and used them in any other possible way.
Renting them out was always exciting, as it offered me a bit of passive income, with that bit of activity I actually enjoyed: looking at prices, rental fees, playing the market, and occasionally using my earning to buy more cards to level up what I had. It all worked beautifully. What I especially liked, was that it only needed my occasional attention, otherwise I could let it run for days, even months on end, if I didn't feel like dealing with it.
As I kept accumulating the in game tokens (I'm not even sure if it was DEC or SPS, though after a while I had both), I decided to put them into good use as well by putting them into liquidity pools on BeeSwap. That was even more passive, but it did provide some income, especially in the long run. The only active part on my side was collecting my earnings, typically once in a week, and putting them right back into the pools.
Land on the Horizon
My excitement about Splinterlands was perked again when the feature of Land was announced. (Not exactly sure when that was, but it must have been certainly more than a year ago.) The promise of using my monster cards in the form of some strategy building game was enticing, so I participated in the pre-sale, and got my hands on two modest plots, which was later joined by a third. An eternity later I had the chance to survey my land, but it wasn't until very recently that the promised functions were implemented, I could actually start having my monsters work on my land.
My three plots are all located in ALTHAINIA, the fabled Land of Prosperity, in the southwestern part of the continent of PRAETORIA. Two of them, the Badlands and the Canyon are natural and common, while the third one, the Tundra is rare, magic, and water. Sounds great, though I'm still not sure if I have managed to get my head around what this all means.
Now That We've Got Land What Are We Gonna Do... With It?
Work it, of course, what else? And this is where things get interesting, since this is not that simple. Dump a few of your monsters on it? No way! It's in fact more complex than that. For anyone who's interested in becoming a landed gentry on Splinterlands, there are some neat tutorials. First you need an energy source. If you have any totems or claims, they will come in handy as well. Whatever it is, you can buy it with DEC, so I went to get me some... Instead of buying it, I took it out of my liquidity pool. Fortunately I had plenty of it. Then I started strategizing about which monster to put on which plot, using this neat table:
Picking the Most Suitable Work Force
Of course, this table only offers you the first rudimentary idea, but then there are other modifiers: what level is your card? What's its rarity? Is it a gold foil? Fortunately, on PeakMonsters there is a category for PP (Production Points) according to which you can list your cards. Also, when you click on managing your plot, the game already suggests you the cards with the highest production points on top of the list.
However, since I had all of my Beta cards, which have been leveling up diligently, up for rent using my second account, I had to juggle a bit back and forth. Since the best ones were being rented out (go figure!) I needed to have a bit of patience before I could transfer them to my first account, and assign them to the right plot.
And I am not even done with it yet... I bet even after assigning what I believe are bet for each plot, I may have to continue fine-tuning it a bit. As a result, I will earn less by renting, but hopefully I will start producing on my land. That's right: what exactly?
Building Up My Properties
For each plot I decided to pursue a different production. The Canyon is going to have a shard mine on it, the Badlands are going for a grain farm, and my magical Tundra plot is going to produce a research hut. What started out initially as taking some ridiculous 700+ days (that's like two years!) has gotten down to a reasonable two weeks to a month. So I am happy. To be completely honest, I have no idea what all this is going to bring me, but I am excited to be playing Splinterlands again, in a different form.