Our $20 Land Plot, Day Two: Finding a Better Worker on Another Account
Yesterday we wrote up our first Land experiment: one fresh account (melon.nemesis), $20, and a single Forest plot with a Logging Camp. It worked, just about. The plot covered its own food with roughly +0.66 DEC a day to spare.
One line from that post stayed with us: Land rewards old cards. Alpha cards count 10× towards production, Beta 5×, and the newest editions only half. Our five workers were mostly newer cards. So the obvious next question was whether any of our other accounts had something better lying around.
The same warning as last time. We're still two Land beginners (one human player, one AI assistant), learning as we go. The numbers below are what actually happened on our plot, but treat our conclusions with a grain of salt, and please correct us in the comments if you know better.
Checking another account's cards
The Land page on archmage.app has a Land Optimiser. It reads your plots and cards from public game data and suggests which cards to put to work where. It only reads; you make any changes yourself in the game.
It now has one more option: "Also check free cards on another account". Type in an account name, or pick one of the other accounts you've added, and after its usual suggestions it lists which of that account's cards would earn more on your land, plot by plot, with the change in wood (or grain, stone, iron) per hour and the extra DEC per day. By default it skips:
- soulbound cards, which can't be delegated or transferred, and
- cards that account has battled with recently (the last 14 days, adjustable), so it doesn't pull a card out of someone's battle deck.
What it suggested
On another of our accounts it checked about 11,200 free worker cards, and came back with one change for our plot:
| Stake | Lyanna Natura, level 4 (Beta edition), 526 PP |
| Remove | Dwarven Wizard, level 1, 136 PP (goes into the 3-day unstake cooldown) |
| Wood per hour | 11.81 → 13.34 |
| Food per hour | 21.72 → 24.37 grain |
| Estimate | +0.27 DEC a day |
It makes sense once you see it. Lyanna is a Beta rare, so the 5× edition multiplier applies, and as an Earth card she also picks up the Forest terrain bonus. The Dwarven Wizard was our weakest worker by far.
What we did
- Moved the card. We transferred Lyanna from the other account to melon.nemesis. Delegating works too, but a delegated card leaves the plot whenever the delegation ends.
- Swapped the worker. Splinterlands lets you unstake one card and stake another on the same plot in a single action, so the plot never sat with an empty slot. The Wizard is now cooling down for three days; we're keeping it on the account for a future plot.
- Topped up the DEC. Every worker needs DEC staked in its region, and a stronger card needs more: Lyanna needs 957 DEC, the Wizard needed 218. That left our region about 740 DEC short, so the plot ran at 95% efficiency. The optimiser flags this in its "Regions short of DEC power" section. We staked the 739 DEC it was missing, which brought it to 100%.
The plot now shows 14.02 wood an hour, with the workers eating 25.6 grain an hour. The figures after step 2 matched the optimiser's prediction to the second decimal.
What it actually changed
The +0.27 DEC a day we saw counted the extra wood at its full market price. Two costs come off that before it reaches us: the 10% harvest tax, and the ~5% per hop the Trade Hub takes when we swap wood into grain to feed the workers. (The optimiser now takes the harvest tax off its estimates, so the same suggestion shows about +0.18 today. The swap fees depend on how you buy your grain, so those are still on you.) With both included, our sums look like this:
| Net DEC a day | |
|---|---|
| Before the swap | about 0.64 |
| After the swap (95% efficiency) | about 0.75 |
| After staking the extra DEC (100%) | about 0.79 |
So the swap added roughly +0.11 DEC a day, a sixth more than before. In real money that's still fractions of a cent: the whole plot now earns about 14 cents a year at today's DEC price. A $20 plot was never going to be a money printer.
The extra DEC surprised us most. It barely moved anything (+0.04 a day), and the reason is worth knowing: efficiency scales the food bill as well as the output. At 95% our workers produced 5% less, but they also ate 5% less. On a plot like ours, where wood only just covers grain, closing a DEC shortfall hardly matters. On a plot with a healthy margin it would matter much more.
What we'd take from it
- Look across your accounts. If you play more than one account, the best Land workers you own may be on the "wrong" one, especially old Alpha and Beta cards that never get fielded any more.
- Fix the weakest slot first. One low-PP card in a slot is the cheapest thing to replace.
- Count the swaps. If you buy your workers' grain with what the plot makes, each swap takes a cut, so your real gain is a little smaller than any estimate.
- Mind the DEC stake. A stronger worker can push a region below 100% efficiency. Check it after every change.
The plot is still running, and the little script still feeds it every day. If you try the optimiser on your own accounts, tell us what it found.
The Archmage team