The Splinterlands team is extremely excited to announce that the first Splinterlands Land Presale event is scheduled to begin on Saturday, November 7th, 2020 at 11:00 AM ET / 16:00 UTC.
The land that will be made available for players to purchase will play a key role in a massive upcoming expansion to the Splinterlands game. This post will focus mainly on the details of the land presale, but we have also published a separate post with more details about the land and the expansion (linked below) and we recommend that you read that carefully in order to appreciate how important and valuable the land will be in the game.
Splinterlands Land Expansion Details Post
Since the time of the Splintering, the elite Wizard's Council have held firm control over the island of Praetoria and have placed powerful spells over it that prevent anyone from entering, with the exception of the sanctioned tournaments on Mount Mox. It is unknown as to why the Wizard's Council so closely guards the island, and many suspect that even they do not know what lurks there and what secrets it holds.
Recently, however, the Wizard's Council has suddenly and mysteriously announced that they have given ownership of a portion of the island to three exploration companies under the condition that they send out expeditions and report their findings back to the council. In order to fund these extremely complicated and dangerous undertakings, the exploration companies are each selling claims in advance to portions of the land that they expect to uncover.
The first to embark on their expedition will be the Mothrook Goathelm Exploration Company, led by six Paladins of the Silver Shield and wrapt in secrecy. The second expedition by Tunnelworks Ventures will use powerful Venari burrowing devices to reach remote and mana-rich areas of Praetoria. The third company, Gobson Wagontech, is getting ready to set sail for Mount Mox with the largest fleet of wagons ever assembled by Goblin hands.
The exploration companies have reported that the total size of the land given to them by the Wizard's Council is approximately 1,500,000 acres, and they are planning to divide that into 150,000 individual 10-acre plots for sale.
Both the claim sale and the land rush that follows will prove historic for the Splinterlands. People and Monsters of all kinds will grasp for the Praetorian land, the Wizards’ land.
Tracts & Regions
The 150,000 plots will be organized into 150 separate Regions, each containing 1,000 contiguous plots. Each Region will be further divided into 10 Tracts which will each contain 100 contiguous plots.
Players will have the opportunity to buy claims for a whole Tract, or even an entire Region in the presale. In addition to offering a discounted cost for "buying in bulk", there will be significant advantages to having land plots in close proximity to each other.
It will be important to keep resource storage buildings close to the associated resource production areas and item and spell factories to reduce or eliminate transportation time and costs, for example.
Even more important, though, is governance. Each 1,000 plot Region will be similar to a state within a larger country which requires management and oversight. Each Region can provide infrastructure and other services to all of the plots and buildings within it, and may charge fees for use of that infrastructure in order to build and maintain it.
Each plot will count as one vote in any matters of governance for the Region, so if you own a Tract then that would be 10% of the vote, and if you own the whole Region, well, then you can run it however you like!
Additionally, a long long time ago, back before the Wizard's Council controlled and guarded the land on Praetoria, its inhabitants built a number of enormous Castles, and even more smaller Keeps, each of which were imbued with an unknown magic.
One plot of land within each Region contains a Castle, and one plot of land within each Tract (with the exception of the one Tract in each Region that contains the plot with the Castle) contains a Keep. The Castle and the Keep are special buildings that are only available on those plots that contain them initially, and the effects of the unknown magic are still shrouded in mystery.
Any player who purchases a Tract is guaranteed to get one plot with either a Keep or a Castle (1 in 10 chance), and any player who purchases an Entire region will be guaranteed to get nine plots with Keeps and one plot with a Castle. Every individual plot claim will have a 1 in 100 chance to contain a Keep and a 1 in 1000 chance to contain a Castle when they are redeemed.
The Presale
The base (post-presale) price for each plot of land within the initial expedition area will be $20 with a 15% discount for purchasing a Tract (100 plots) and a 25% discount for the purchase of an entire Region (1000 plots).
The biggest discounts, however, will come from participating in the presale. Each of the three exploration companies will be holding their own presale to raise funds for their expeditions. The details of each expedition fundraising presale are shown below:
The key takeaway from the above table is that 20% of the land (30,000 plots in total) will be available in the first presale for 50% OFF starting on November 7th, 2020! This is a truly MONSTROUS discount, and we would not be surprised if those 30,000 plots sell out very quickly. Don't say we didn't warn you.
Finally - as if there isn't already enough - any player who makes a bulk purchase of land during any of the three presale rounds (not in the post presale) will receive one of the following transferrable, in-game titles:
- Tract / 100+ plots - "the Explorer"
- Region / 1000+ plots - "the Praetorian"
As we have mentioned in the past, players who have an active title (which includes both the two new titles listed above and the previous titles from the Untamed crowdfunding campaign), will receive special benefits related to the land expansion. Exact details of the benefits will be revealed when the land expansion is released.
Land can be purchased using Dark Energy Crystals (DEC), Credits, PayPal, or any of the numerous cryptocurrencies accepted on the Splinterlands website. If you would like to split up a large purchase among multiple cryptocurrencies and/or PayPal, you can first use them to buy Credits and then use the Credits for your land purchase.
Please note that 10,000 of the post presale land plots will be reserved for Splinterlands to give out as prizes in the raffle drawing, Uniswap liquidity provider rewards, and other contests or promotions.
Players who participate in the presale will receive fungible tokens representing their claims on the newly discovered land once the expedition has been completed. There will be three types of tokens - PLOT, TRACT, and REGION - representing claims to a single plot, tract (100 plots) and region (1000 plots) respectively.
These tokens will be both transferrable within the game and tradeable on the Hive Engine exchange.
Once the expedition has completed, the tokens can be redeemed with the exploration companies in return for the deeds for the associated specific plots of land. The deeds will be tradeable NFT cards - just like the current Splinterlands game cards - and will indicate the location, terrain type, category, and rarity of each plot of land. Please see the land expansion post linked above for more details on the land card NFTs.
Also at that time the remaining post-presale land plots, in addition to any plots that are not sold during the presale, will be available for general purchase at the post-presale prices.
The exploration companies currently expect their expeditions to take six to nine months to complete, however they urge everyone to keep in mind that it can be very difficult to accurately estimate the timing for such a unique and treacherous undertaking.
To be clear, it is at this time - once the expeditions are complete and claim tokens can be traded in for land deed NFTs - that players will be able to view the full map of the area and see the exact locations and all other details of their plots and those of everyone else's. The locations of the plots as well as which ones contain Castles and Keeps will all be randomly determined at the time that the claims are redeemed.
If any players wish to buy land in specific locations, they will need to wait until the presale expeditions are complete and then they will be able to purchase specific plots, tracts, and regions at the base, post-presale price. Please keep in mind that even once the expeditions are complete, the randomly determined details of land plots such as type, category, rarity, and whether or not they contain a special building will not be revealed until the plot is purchased.
If multiple individual plot, tract, and/or region claims are redeemed by a single player when the expeditions complete, the exploration companies will do their best to ensure that the resulting land plots are all located as close to each other as possible.
Land Purchase Pools
A number of players have indicated that they are planning to pool funds together from multiple people in order to buy larger quantities of land at once in order to receive greater discounts. We always love to see and encourage players working together and we want to offer some options for pooled purchases.
If a Tract or Region is purchased in the presale, then the purchaser will receive a single TRACT or REGION token which can only be redeemed for actual land plots once the expeditions are completed, which will be many months out, as we have mentioned in the previous section.
If players would like to be able to divide up a pooled land purchase immediately, they can instead purchase 100 or 1000 individual plots at once and still receive the same 15% and 25% discounts as when purchasing a Tract or a Region respectively.
The key difference is that when TRACT or REGION tokens are redeemed, they will ensure that all of the land plots received will be contiguous and part of the same region / governance area and will contain the amounts of Castles and Keeps as specified earlier in the post. On the other hand, if 100 or 1000 land plots are purchased as separate PLOT tokens, then there is no guarantee as to the location of each plot once they are redeemed or how many, if any, of them will contain a Castle or Keep.
It is therefore up to each pool to decide if they prefer to split up the plot claims immediately - allowing them to be individually transferred and sold - or wait and split up the plots after the expeditions have completed and the Tract and/or Region claims have been redeemed.
Please note that bulk plot purchases will also come with the associated in-game titles mentioned above, which are not able to be split up, so it will be up to each pool to decide what to do with any titles received.
Future Expeditions
In addition to the 150,000 plots on Praetoria that the Wizard's Council has now given to the three exploration companies, they are also believed to control and closely guard additional lands spread across the six continents that, in addition to Praetoria, make up the known Splinterlands world.
The amount of land controlled by the Council is a closely guarded secret, but they have been clear that they will only ever release additional lands when or if the population of the Splinterlands grows enough to require it. It is indeed a possibility that no additional lands will ever be released from the Council's control.
It is most important to note, however, that the current 150,000 plots will be the only land ever available on the island of Praetoria, which gives it significant benefits. The Praetorian land is covered in a magical aura that is believed to originate from large dark energy pools located beneath Mount Mox. That means that these "alpha lands" will receive boosts to both crafting and resource harvesting speeds as compared to lands on the other continents. They are also the only lands that contain the special Castle and Keep building types.
On top of the monstrous discounts, Keeps, Castles, and Titles, participants in each of the three stages of the land presale will also receive one ticket for each dollar they spend for the Splinterlands Land Presale Raffle! The raffle tickets will be fungible tokens that can be transferred and traded both through the game website and on the Hive Engine exchange.
The prize drawing for the raffle is expected to take place in January of 2021 with the exact date and time to be announced as the drawing gets closer. The drawing will be done in a provably fair and verifiable manner using unpredictable data from the Hive blockchain.
The prizes available in the raffle will be as follows:
| Prize | Quantity | Est. Value |
|---|---|---|
| Land Region Claim | 1 | $15,000 |
| Land Tract Claim | 10 | $1,700 |
| Land Plot Claim | 1,000 | $20 |
| AZMARE Dice Pack | 10,000 | $3 |
| Untamed Booster Pack | 10,000 | $2 |
| Legendary Totem | 200 | ?? |
| Epic Totem | 1,000 | ?? |
| Rare Totem | 5,000 | ?? |
| Common Totem | 25,000 | ?? |
In total, the raffle will offer over 50,000 prizes with an estimated retail value of over $100,000 - and that doesn't even include the potential market value of the totems!
For more details about the totems, please see the land expansion details post linked at the top of this post.
Don't forget that there are also 100,000 raffle tickets available as rewards for players who provide liquidity to the DEC-ETH pool on the Uniswap exchange! You can find out more details about that and how to participate in this post.
The ability to trustlessly rent out Splinterlands cards is - in our opinion - one of the most innovative and underappreciated parts of the product, and it should come as no surprise that a similar mechanic will also be available with the land in the Splinterlands.
The management of land, buildings, and resources will be an involved process, and require a good deal of learning and tinkering to run efficiently - especially for players who have large numbers of plots!
There will no doubt be some players who have acquired land and for whatever reason do not want to deal with managing it, or perhaps they have more land than they can manage themselves. Rather than letting it sit idle or having to sell it, they will instead be able to trustlessly rent out the use of that land and/or the buildings on it to other players for an agreed upon fee.
Players may want to rent land/buildings for a wide variety of reasons. As one example, a player may have collected the resources necessary to produce certain types of items and spell cards, but they don't have the required item or spell factory. In that case they can simply rent out the use of an item or spell factory from someone else and craft their cards there.
There are way too many examples and use cases to cover here, and players will likely come up with many that we've never even considered, but hopefully this provides a good idea of how expansive and involved the economy around the land and Item & Spell production can be!
Risks
We want to be very clear that contributing to the Splinterlands land presale is equivalent to contributing to a crowdfunding campaign on platforms like Kickstarter. We are using the presale as a way to raise funds in order to build out the expansion to the game as described in these posts.
There are no guarantees that the land expansion will ever get built, that it will be built exactly as described here, that the timing of receiving or being able to redeem rewards will match the planned timeline, or that the items received during the presale will have any real world value in the future.
These risks are the reason behind the large discounts being given out in the presale. Anyone who does not fully understand or who does not wish to accept these risks should wait until the expansion is completed and then purchase land at the full retail price.
That being said, we have every confidence that we will be able to deliver barring any significant, unforeseen circumstances, and we hope that our past track record shows our unwavering commitment to building, improving, and growing the product and rewarding our supporters.
Before we wrap this up, we want to remind everyone that Splinterlands always accepts DEC tokens as payment for items in the in-game shop at a minimum rate of 1000 DEC = $1 USD. The land presale will be no exception.
This is the case even if DEC tokens are trading below that rate on external markets, which means that there are sometimes additional discounts to be had for savvy cryptocurrency traders who can purchase DEC tokens at a lower price on external markets and spend it in the Splinterlands shop.
DEC tokens currently trade on the Uniswap, Hive Engine, Steem Engine, and TronTrade markets.
Finally, we also want to remind everyone that there are a total of 3000 land plots set aside as rewards for liquidity providers in the DEC-ETH Uniswap pool. These are in addition to the 100,000 raffle tickets that are also available for liquidity providers. For more information and to learn how to participate, please see this post.
Unlike Monster & Summoner cards, Item & Spell cards will NOT be available through booster packs and will NEVER be sold by Splinterlands. Instead, Item & Spell cards will be exclusively minted by players using the land to produce resources and construct buildings.
Millions of dollars have been spent purchasing Splinterlands cards through booster packs over the last few years, but with this expansion nearly ALL of the funds spent buying Item & Spell cards will go directly to the players.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Land in the Splinterlands will be the ONLY way to produce Item & Spell cards in the game, ever, and the upcoming presale will be the only way to get land at such a MASSIVE discount as we raise funds to build out the expansion. Don't forget about the titles and raffle tickets too! Check out the graphic below for a full list of presale benefits:
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
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NOTE: All rewards from this post will be burned.