Splinterlands (aka Steemmonsters) beginner Overview / Guide (Video + Text versions available)

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Whats up! I heard you're looking for a overview on Splinterlands AKA Steemmonsters?

Well giddy me, aren't you a lucky one! You stumbled upon this overview/beginner-guide of the game!

Wait what? You are not the type of person to read such posts? Well, good for you, since I also prepared a video version of this post!
Check it out here:
Youtube Link
Dtube Link

top icons.JPG

Okay, so lets start here, when you visit the Steemmonsters Website, you will see this bar at the top. Today were going through all of the tabs in it!

  • The 'Jaw' Icon AKA the homescreen or the start-screen

The most usefull thing here is the "How to play" section!
howtoplay.JPG
(The neutral splinter isnt shown in this picture - its cards can be used by all splinters)

In there you can learn alot of the basics of the game! If you want to check out the whole ingame guide you should definitly read it yourself!
The two most important parts are this:
card basic.JPG
Here you can see the so called card basics, there are three types of "attack numbers" in the game, melee, like in this picture, ranged attacks, and magic attacks, each has their own properties.
Melee units without abilities and without certain rulesets can only attack from the frontline position.
Ranged units can only attack from the backline position, all positions that arent the frontline are considered backline.
Mage units, they can attack from all positions, and their attack ignore enemy armor.

Card levels go like this:

  • Commons - up to lvl 10
  • Rares - up to lvl 8
  • Epics - up to lvl 6
  • Legendary - up to lvl 4

You need higher level Summoner-cards to be able to play higher level units.
You can see which summoner-level can play which card-levels by checking out the "stats" tab in the card-screen. There you can also see the changes to cards depending on their level.

  • Next up are the abilities:

abilities.JPG

There is a long list of them, so you better learn them bit by bit!
To make it easier to understand for newcomers, we recently got an update, in which you can hover over the ability-icons. It then will show you the description of the abilities on the card! This works in the market, the card-screen, the pre-battle selection and the battle itself!

- The 'Coin Icon' AKA the shop

shop1.JPG

This is the first screen you get to see when you go into the shop, here you can find the newest information about the current sold boosters. Right now thats the UNTAMED set, you still have around 30 hours (as the time of me writing this) to back the kickstarter!

UNTAMED Kickstarter link

You can also learn about the untamed-airdrops here!
airdrops.JPG
Right now the only way to be participate in all 14 airdrops is via the kickstarter, packs sold through the website only give you chance for aidrop #3 to #14, #1 and #2 are already gone.

On this screen you can also buy UNTAMED booster packs for 2$ each.
You get a 10% bonus in packs if you buy at least 100 packs, meaning you get 110 packs for 200$
or a 15% bonus for 500+ packs, meaning 575 packs for 1000$.

- Next up is the potion tab!

shop2potion.JPG

There are four different kinds of potions!

  1. Legendary - gives you a bonus %-chance to get a legendary card whenever you flip over a card, works on all methods that gives cards. (Orbs, Packs, Reward Cards from daily and season end) - Comes with 500 charges, uses 1 for each card
  2. Alchemy potion - gives a bonus %-chance to get a gold foil card whenever you flip over a card works on all methods that gives cards. (Orbs, Packs, Reward Cards from daily and season end) - Comes with 500 charges, uses 1 for each card
  3. Quest potions - depending on the quality of the potion you buy, you get up to 5 extra reward cards for completing your daily quest. comes with 5 charges, uses one on each day you complete your quest. WILL NOT be used if you skip a quest.
  4. Mystery potion - can give you different rewards like legendary/alchemy potion charges, one copy of a card, an orb or the big prize Lord Arius - hes worth over 300$ currently, a total of 90 copies will be handed out EVER. Meaning you can only get 9 more. One of them is rewarded to a single player every two days. That means all of them will be gone in 18ish days.
    arius.JPG
Sidenote: Potion charges CAN NOT be turned off once you buy them, meaning alchemy/legendary charges will be used for all dailies/boosters you open. So only buy them once you want to use them!

- Next up is the 'orb tab' - here you can buy orbs!

shop3.JPG
Orbs are kind of like booster-packs, they contain 5 cards each with at least one beeing rare or better. They cost 2500 DEC (dark energy crystals) each. They are still over 100k for sale, once they run out, you wont be able to buy these anymore.
The "Winds of Change" set from the orbs consist of the following cards:
winds of chjanggee.JPG

  • Next up is thee 'gift tab' in the shop, as you might think, here you can send your friends some goodies!

shop4.JPG

- Now, for the last tab of the shop we have the 'skins tab'

shop5skins.JPG

Skins can be bought with DEC, and are used on cards to change how they look!
They are only cosmetic and dont affect gameplay, but they look awesome!
Currently you cant trade or sell skins once you bought them, but that is a feature that is coming sometime in the feature!

Heres the ingame explanation of how skins work!
skinswork.JPG

- Next up we have the open-icon

openscreen.JPG

In here you will see how many orbs and boosters you have, aswell as how many potion charges you got.
To open packs or orbs just drag them to th swirly-thing on the right side.

  • Now were at the market! The place to buy or sell cards!

market1.JPG

In the market you can look at all the cards that are put up for sale by the community, you have various filters at the top, rarity, splinter, and set filters. Aswell as a filter to shop/hide gold-foil or regular cards.
By default only cards from the BETA set are shown! If you want to look at all the available cards you need to click on the other sets in the filter-bar.

Alternative: you can visit Peakmonsters - a third party website with more market features. Here you can bid for cards and even rent them! (more on peakmonsters coming in a future post)
peakmonster1.JPG

  • Next up we have the card screen, this is YOUR collection :)

You have access to the same filters as on the market, the cards are sorted by splinters per default.
The filter "playable" is also used by default, that means all cards that you can play with are shown here, that means cards you own, cards that are delegated/rented to you, aswell are "phantom" cards.
(Phantom cards are the starter-cards you get by creating an account, they cant be sold or traded)

card screen1.JPG

  • Now were at the second big part of the game! The 'battle screen' where you actually play the game ;p

battlescreen.JPG

At the top you can always see how much time remains in the current season of ranked play. Seasons last around 15 days each.
In the middle, your current league logo is shown and to the right side of it how many reward-cards you get by the end of the season.
You always get rewards-cards based on the highest league you archived on each seasons end. Meaning you would still get the Gold 1 rewards even if you dropped down to Gold 3.
leagues.JPG
rewardcards.JPG

Beneath the play-buttons you can see a bar showing your quest progress, or the time until you get a new quest.
Quests rewards are based on your CURRENT league, not your highest, so try to claim it in the highest league you can archive per day! But dont forget to redeem the quest before you stop playing for the day, since you cant have two active quests at once!

Lastly for rewards, the top 50 placed players per league get some nice extra rewards :)
top50reward.JPG

To play games we have three different buttons- the practice, the ranked and the challenge button.
Practice lets you play without gaining or losing ranked points, but its not really worth your time, the queue times are super long aswell since barely anyone uses that.
The ranked button is the bread and butter of the game, it matches you up with someone close to your own rating. Sometimes there can be a different of a few hundred between your ratings if the system cant find a player fast enough.

The bigger the gap between rating points the rating you win/lose after a game! If you win against someone higher than you, you gain alot, but if you lose against someone way lower than you, you lose alot.

The challenge button is used if you want to play against a friend, just type in their name, and own them!
challenge friend.JPG

At the bottom you see a log of your last battles, if you click your name, or an opponents name you can see their/your stats.
stats.JPG

- Weve arrived at the 'events' tab - currently this is only used for tournaments.

tourney1.JPG

Here you can join, view and participate in tournaments! The rewards are listed in USD, but most pay out in DEC.
Many of the tournaments are free to enter, and get reward a good amount of DEC, some have an entry fee and have bigger prizepools.
Different events have different card-level limits, these are shown by the league-icons on them. Aswell as some card restrictions. For example: there are tournaments where legendary cards are not allowed, or where you can only use cards from the alpha set, or only gold foil cards.

When you view a tournament it looks like this:
tourney2.JPG

It shows the prizes for the different end positions, the event info, aswell as a little description.

Its best to join all free tournaments you might want to play at some point, since the early people that join wont have to play in the qualifier round and get a pass for it.

A check-in timer starts 15 minutes befores a tournament starts, in that time you need to open the tournament info screen and click "check in" otherwise you wont be able to participate.

- Next up we have the guild tab, here you can view all the guilds, join them, and access the guild-features once you joined one.

guilds1.JPG

Wondering what guilds do for you? Well first off you can join a squad of friends, challenge them and chat with them.
But you also get some nice boni!
guildbonus.JPG

There are two buildings for each guild, one of them grants a DEC-gain bonus, and the other offers a shop discount for all purchases made with DEC (Orbs, Skins, Potions)

- You mentioned DEC (dark energy crystals) a few times already, WHAT IS IT?

dec.JPG

DEC is the ingame earned currency, it can be used to purchase stuff from the shop, buy cards on peakmonsters, or you can transfer it into an exchange, like Steem-Engine to sell it for steem.
The higher your ranked game rating is, the more DEC you earn per win.
Others ways to increase DEC-gain.

  • be part of a guild
  • use alpha and/or gold foil cards
  • be on a winning streak

DEC-gain has a build-in diminishing returns system. When you start the game your ECR (energy capture rate) will be at 100%, it goes down by 1% of the current value after every single ranked game, doesnt matter if you win or lose. That means on 80% ECR you lose 0,8% per day, and at 20% 0,2% per game.

If you want to optimize your DEC-gain, try to never let it hit 100%. You restore around 25% ECR per day.

If you dont want to bother with third party sites, you can buy DEC directly ingame for a 5% fee by pressing the green "+" next to the DEC value.
dec2.JPG

If you want to buy and or sell DEC, check out Steem-Engine

steem engine.JPG
(More about Steem-Engine in a future post)

- Last but not least there is a ingame FAQ you can look at!

faq.JPG

If you have any more questions after this, feel free to join the offical Splinterlands discord!
Discord Invite Link

All the members there are really helpful! If you want to ask me specifily tag me (@shyaren) there! Same name as on here. :)



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4 comments
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Woohoo!

You have been manually curated by the @steemmonsters team!

Thank you for SHARING your Splinterlands content with the world! The more the merrier!

Enjoy your juicy upvote and keep creating excellent Splinterlands content!


THIS IS AWESOME!
Imma give you a 100% upvote cause you shared the video to Youtube... BUT! If you happen to use other social media, you should share THIS POST! It's so informative!

Dtube is on the steem blockchain and even creates a post here automatically, so is not really 'other'... until they totally leave us, which they may never do. 😍@carrieallen

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Thanks!
Ill try sharing it on twitter, although I dont really have an audience there, but who knows :)

Posted using Partiko Android

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You have an amazing Splinterlands post and video here! NICE work!
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Congratulations @shyaren! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You received more than 100 upvotes. Your next target is to reach 250 upvotes.

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