Introduction
Many of you probably do not know me, or have never heard of me. So let me give you a little background. I have been using bots in Splinterlands since September 2021, so as of writing this article, it is almost a full year that I have been experimenting with bots, trying to find optimal ways to use my assets and earn more assets within the Splinterlands ecosystem. When I first started out botting, it was because I stumbled upon Alfredo’s bot. After using that for a couple of months, I then stumbled upon PCJones bot. My reason for switching from Aflredo’s to PCJones’, was simply because I was in the hunt for higher winrates, and PCJones’ definitely had the edge there, was also more intuitive, and quite frankly cost less. Then finally, about 3 months ago, I discovered Alinubu's SplinterlandsRObot. My initial reason for switching to Alinubu’s bot was because at the time PCJones bot was having issues using 0 mana cards, specifically the fiends. That being said, after switching to Alinubu’s bot for that 1 simple reason, I quickly discovered there were actually MANY improvements for my personal use when comparing it to the PCJones bot. Not only were winrates astronomically better, but it gives you, the user, a lot more options to customize, and use the bot in a manner that best suits you. I won’t go into too many details about the bot, as that would make this article into a novel rather than the short story I am aiming for. If you are interested in this bot, you can however check the Github page, or jump into the Discord. The community there, and Alinubu himself are very responsive, and helpful, so do not be shy if this is something you are interested in.
Alright, now that you have a bit of a background on myself, as well as what bot I am currently using, let me go over very quickly why I am writing this article. Quite simply, I have found some optimal settings and strategies to use in conjunction with Alinubu’s SplinterlandsRObot bot, and I want to share them with the community. So quite simply, I want to help you make more from botting.
To get your pallet a little wet, lets go over some results from this past season (ending July 1st 2022). I ran a total of 10 accounts in Bronze, all of which own 0 cards, and ended up with a total of 688 EOS chests, and through out the season received a total of 540 daily focus chests, so on average that is 68.8 EOS chests, and 54 daily focus chests per account, or 123 total chests per account (rounding up). As I mentioned above, these accounts owned 0 cards, so they rented cards. The average cost of renting for each account for the full season was 486 DEC. According to SplinterCards the average $$ value of a bronze chest is $0.027 as of today, converted into DEC, that is about 42 DEC per chest. So, if we do the math, we can conclude that each account on average gained about 5166 DEC per season, and cost about 486 DEC, for a net profit of 4680 DEC per season, not bad!
Chests are King
When I first started botting about a year ago, the best thing to farm was DEC from ranked battles. As you should know by now, that is no longer the case. Since the recent ranked rewards changes, chests have become king, and it is absolutely the only thing you should be focusing on “mining” when you are talking about using bots within Splinterlands. This also applies for playing manually.
As already mentioned above, we have established that the average value of a bronze level chest is about 42 DEC, so it is all about getting the maximum number of chests per season. But what is that number? well it is a little complicated. The more chests you earn (whether that be for EOS or Daily Focus), the harder it becomes to earn more. For example, earning chests 1-3 is almost infinitely easier than earning chest #42 (for EOS) or chest #22 (for daily focus). With this in mind, I have found that it is almost impossible to earn more than 70 EOS chests per season, and almost impossible to earn more than 22 Daily Focus chests per account per day. So now we have somewhat of a goal, lets aim for ~60-70 EOS chests/account/season, and about 20 Daily Focus chests per day/account. How do we get there?
State of the Rental Market
I have already stated that the accounts I am running have 0 cards, and are renting to achieve the results I have detailed. That is perfectly fine, because as of writing this, the rental market has somewhat collapsed to a point where cards are incredibly cheap to rent. Now initially I was renting cards every single day for all 10 accounts, but it dawned on me that instead of doing that, it made much more sense to wait for each account to reach 100% ECR, rent for 1 day, run the accounts extremely frequently for that 1 day, earn as many EOS and Daily Focus chests as possible within that 1 day time period, and then rinse and repeat, until the next season begins. The reason for this, is that with this strategy, each time you “run” it, you are maximizing your profits and minimizing your costs (rental). It is also a heck of a lot easier to manage, as you only have to rent and run each account you are botting with 3 days each season, instead of the ~15 days each season with other strategies.
Alright, so what do I rent? Since we are aiming to earn both EOS and Daily Focus chests each “run”, I rent ONLY for the daily focus + neutral. On top of this, I only rent starter cards + a fiend, + Chaos Legion reward cards. Furthermore, I also rent max level cards for my league So, for example, here is my shopping list for an account with a Fire quest:
Untamed:
All Rare Fire + All Rare Neutral (Level 2)
All Common Fire + All Common Neutral (Level 3)
Chaos Legion:
All Rare Fire + All Rare Neutral (Level 2)
All Common Fire + All Common Neutral (Gold Foil)
Fire Fiend (level 1)
Chaos Legion Reward Cards
All Legendary Fire + All Legendary Neutral (Level 1)
All Epic Fire + All Epic Neutral (Level 2)
All Rare Fire + All Rare Neutral (Level 2)
All Common Fire + All Common Neutral (Level 3)
With the above cards, you should have a daily cost of ~180 DEC for the rental, but remember, you are only doing this 2-3 times per season, so your total cost per account in rentals should be 360-540 DEC/Account/Season
The same can be applied to other Splinters, just replace Fire with Life, Earth, Water, Death. The same can also be applied to other leagues, just replace the Levels with the appropriate max levels for the league you are going for, although personally I think botting Bronze makes the most sense currently.
The thing within Alinubu’s SplinterlandsRObot that makes this all possible, and work is the FocusRate setting. Because we have now basically only rented cards for the specific Daily Focus, we set that setting to 100, and the bot will now only play your specific daily focus (and hence the cards you have rented).
So, a quick summary:
- Wait for your accounts to hit 100% ECR
- Figure out which quest each has
- Rent for that quest for a period of 1 day
- Run bot with 100% focus, Every 5 minutes, and until the 1 day rental period is up
- Repeat step 1
Automation
Another really cool feature within Alinubu’s Splinterlands bot (this is a pro feature), is that it allows you to set up rent config files, and set each account to use a specific rent config file. So with that, you could definitely automate at least a portion of this process by creating a rent config file for each focus, and then set each account to use the correct focus rent config file, and then the bot will take care of renting for every account.
Right now, the rent config files use XP instead of levels, but I have brought it to Alinubu’s attention that Level might make more sense than XP, and I believe he will give us that option sometime soon, he is cool like that, in that he is VERY open to suggestions, and usually implements them, if they make sense.
Sliding Scale
I mentioned already that the more “runs” you do, the less chests you basically get, that is because of the sliding scale of difficulty in reaching that next chest. From my experience, the “sweet spot” in terms of how many “runs” to do, is 2 if you are trying to maximize ROI. However, 3 is also not terrible. Here is my cheat sheet in terms of what you can expect from each of the 3 runs (per account):
Run 1:
44 EOS Chests – 20 Daily Focus Chests
Run 2:
20 EOS Chests – 21 Daily Focus Chests
Run 3:
8 EOS Chests – 21 Daily Focus Chests
So as you can see, doing 2 runs is somewhat optimal, but 3 if you can fit it in is not half bad either.
When to start?
In season’s past, I usually waited 2-3 days before starting my runs. The thinking was that after 2 days, it is faster and easier to climb from 0 rating to 1000 rating (max rating cap for Bronze). However, this season I did an experiment, and ran all 10 accounts the first day of the new season. I wanted to see how much they would struggle, and here are the results:
10 Accounts (1 Run): 444 total EOS chests, and 190 Daily Focus chests, 1723 DEC rental costs.
This is not bad at all! With that in mind, I would say it does not make sense to wait the 2-3 days anymore, as the bot has such a good win rate anyways, that it does not struggle with this “early season grind” that other bots do.
Hopefully this writeup was helpful, but if you have more questions, feel free to put a comment down below, or hop into the Discord channel.
Cheers and Happy Botting!