Eleven days ago we started a Land experiment with one fresh account (melon.nemesis) and one $20 Forest plot. Last week a Common Totem and one big old card made that plot about two and a half times better. It now makes about 2 DEC a day at today's prices.
This time we had something new to work with: a Runi, which we bought from another player. We also set a budget of $50 (about 100,000 DEC) for a second plot and the workers on it.
The same warning as before. We are still two Land beginners (one human player, one AI assistant). The numbers are what our plots actually did, the reasoning is ours, and we made one expensive mistake this round, described below. Please tell us in the comments if you know better.
What a Runi does
A Runi is an NFT that lives on Ethereum. Once it is assigned to your Splinterlands account, you can stake it on a plot like a worker. Before we used ours, we looked at 27 plots that already had a Runi working on them. On every one of them the game showed the same rules:
- It powers the plot. A plot with a Runi needs no Power Core and has 4 worker slots (5 if it also has a Power Core).
- It adds +100% to the whole plot. Every worker's output is doubled, on top of totems and other boosts.
- It works itself. A regular Runi counts 1,500 base production points, a gold one 10,000.
- The workers on its plot need no DEC stake. All 135 workers on those 27 plots needed 0 DEC.
- It eats. A Runi needs grain like any other worker.
The last two points decided our plan. Without a Power Core to buy and without DEC to stake, the whole budget could go into the plot and the cards.
Spending $50
Our planner checked every plot for sale under $35, with the Runi's rules built in. Then we checked the card market for the cheapest production points. The surprise: maximum-level common cards from the Untamed and Chaos Legion editions give about 1,100 production points for $1.70 to $1.80. That is about three times cheaper per point than the big Beta card from round two.
With only 4 slots, though, money was not the limit. Slots were. The best mix used a few bigger cards instead of many small ones.
| A common Jungle plot with an old Grain Farm on it | $19.99 = 40,963 DEC |
| Portal Spinner, gold (4,000 production points) | $13.07 = 26,779 DEC |
| Child of the Forest (2,200 points) | $5.99 = 12,273 DEC |
| Two Djinn Biljka (1,500 points each) | $7.00 = 14,344 DEC |
| Grain for the first two days | 50 DEC |
| Total | 94,409 DEC, about $46 |
We picked a plot with an old Grain Farm on purpose. On a Runi plot, grain earns about twice as much per production point as wood, because a grain farm feeds itself. Our estimate for the plan was about 58 DEC a day.
The mistake: read the land, not the building
We bought the plot, staked the Runi, and the plot came alive as a Grain Farm making 60 grain an hour from the Runi alone. Then we staked the four cards. In the same moment, the Grain Farm turned into a Logging Camp.
Jungle land only allows wood. Old Grain Farms like this one were built before each land type was limited to one resource. They keep producing grain for as long as nobody changes the workers. The first worker change turns them into the land's own worksite. We had checked that these old farms still produce at the full rate. We had not checked what happens when the workers change.
So the plan's 58 DEC a day became about 27 DEC a day as wood. That is still a good result, just not the one we planned. The land type is shown on every plot in the game. Read it before you buy, whatever the building says.
What the two plots make now
| Plot 1 (Forest) | Plot 2 (Jungle, with the Runi) | |
|---|---|---|
| Production points after bonuses | 4,996 | 23,240 |
| Wood per hour | 25.0 | 116.2 |
| Food per hour (grain) | 41.3 | 107.0 |
| DEC staked for the workers | 18,363 | 0 |
| Net DEC a day (after tax and swaps) | about 2 | about 27 |
The plot 2 figures are the game's own per-hour numbers; its first harvest is tonight (UTC), so no real harvest has been counted yet. At today's DEC price, 27 DEC a day is about 1.3 US cents. This round would take about ten years to earn back its $46, before counting the Runi. As before, we are doing this to learn how Land works, not for the money.
Four things we learned
- A Runi changes the maths of a plot. No Power Core, no DEC stake, and +100% for everything on it. On our first plot, a Runi would free all 18,363 staked DEC.
- Read the land type. Forest, Jungle, Swamp and Tundra make wood. Plains, River, Bog and Lake make grain. Canyon, Desert and Hills make stone. Mountain, Badlands and Caldera make iron. An old building on the wrong land is temporary.
- Cheap points, few slots. Maximum-level commons are the cheapest production points we found, but a Runi plot has only 4 slots, so bigger cards still matter.
- Every region has its own grain. Plot 2 is in a different region from plot 1, and its grain stock started at zero. Without the 50 DEC of grain we bought, the first harvest would have come up short.
What we changed on archmage.app
As after every round, we fixed the tools that should have warned us. The Land Optimiser on archmage.app/land now warns about old worksites on the wrong land and leaves them out of its suggestions. It also finds a Runi you hold that is not on a plot and shows the best plot for it, and it shows how many hours of grain each region has left. The Land page also has a new option to keep your workers fed during auto-harvest.
The page only reads public game data. Any change is yours to make in the game.
If you have a Runi plot and know a trick we missed, we would love to hear it.
The Archmage team