I’ve been aware of the new Land Functionality being developed for Splinterlands but I generally don’t like to invest in Vaporware so haven’t really looked deeply into it previously. However, the functionality has been coming out recently and there is a lot of chatter in my Guild and HIVE Community so thought I better check it out. As such, I’ve started a new experiment. The question I am asking is – "What is the Land Experience like for a Newbie to the Ecosystem?"
Of course, I am not a newbie to the Splinterlands game generally. I have some battle experience and am familiar with a lot of the Legacy features of the game, but I am pretty ignorant with regards to Land stuff so for this experiment I probably don’t really need to pretend to be a Newbie...I pretty much AM one. The first thing I did was read up The Secret to Praetoria Whitepaper and there is a lot there to digest. That can be a little daunting but I picked up some basics. The Getting Started Guide within the game was also fairly helpful.
I decided I wasn’t going to buy a PLOT on Hive-Engine and go through the Claim / Survey process. I started looking for the cheapest land on the Internal Market because that’s what a Newbie would do and my own experience suggests that the Secondary Market is often where the value is. The cheapest land I could find was at $39 USD and after trawling through some Regions near my friends (I have no idea whether Proximity will ever play a part in the game) I settled on a plot of Common Swamp which I picked up for $40. I thought the extra $1 was worth the +10% Bonus for Water and Death workers on the Swamp. I paid another 5000 DEC for a Power Core and assigned a few spare monsters that weren’t Fire or Life so that I could avoid the -50% penalty on those.
Next up I Staked 10754 DEC to get my Production going at 100% and selected a Grain Farm – which I figured would be the common starting point for Newbies since Grain is an important resource. The game then told me that I need to wait just over 12 Days until my Grain Farm is built. All up I’ve invested less than 60,000 DEC, or about 162 HIVE, or just under $60 US if you prefer. My Production is currently quoted as 5,104 per Hour.
So for now I guess I’ll just wait until that Grain starts coming in. I’ve been warned that if I change my lineup I’ll trigger a Harvest and that’ll cost me 1 DEC / Grain to pay my workers so I don’t want to do that. That little feature sounds like a trap for Newbies and no doubt I have made some other mistakes that might cost me. If so, I’d be keen to hear about it because that’s part of the experiment. How about you? Have you experimented with the new Land functionality? Did you make any mistakes and are you happy with your progress? If you have any tips then I'd love to hear those too!