Grain Neutral

Vugtis said this morning "My life in nutshell : click - sleep - click - sleep"

That is the essence last couple of days since the Land 1.5 was launched Tuesday Nov 28, 2023, 11:00 AM CST at Splinterlands. Like everyone else involved in the game I was very excited and started staking quickly on late Tuesday after I got back from work. The trouble is the hurry didn't help at all. I used some of the 'fast-population of plots' using Peakmonsters and that was a mistake. Although it did auto-fill quickly, but I didn't think about the optimal cards to use. For example, I did fill up lot of common natural plots which generate grains with max common reward cards. That was a mistake, because it still takes the max 50K DEC to fill a plot but the production was way too low. Soon I ran out of reward cards, but I had many Epic and even Legendary Natural plot left to fill!

Source: Created using AI images with DALL·E 3 Prompt: Grain Neutral; Content credentials
Generated with AI ∙ December 1, 2023 at 7:29 AM

Current Status

Here is my current status, only about 8% of one region filled up and I am out of cards and DEC!

Not only that, there are much bigger problem. More than half of these plots, especially the natural grain plots are sub-optimally filled, as I mentioned earlier, due to my mistake with Peakmonsters. What is worse that I have ran out of my good cards, and my Keeps are not turned on!

• Castles have a set cost to harvest - 10,000 grain.
• Keeps have a set cost to harvest - 1,000 grain.
• Castles and Keeps do not have a 7 day capacity timer. Instead, they may hold up to 1,000,000 of a resource.
• Consider prioritizing the setup of your castle/keep prior to the first harvest. If any plots are harvested prior to your castle or keep setup, the rewards will get burned.
• Setup your Castle/Keep before the first hour expires and players start harvesting if you want to collect those taxes!

I have forgotten to pay attention to this simple fact above explained very clearly in the Land 1.5 post. As a result 6 of my keeps remains 'dud' still now!

Why do you think I am writing this post and not filling them up first. Well as I said, I am out of both cards and DEC! I can potentially scrape some DEC, but cards, I have to get from my scholar accounts and those kids are not going to like me!

But at least I am grain neutral right now while I wait, which was not the case first few days. I had a stash of 7.7 M Grain which I received during pre-sale. I have transferred 700K to my region #10 Highmoor in Pristine Northwest (this is the only area I am developing), From that I have about 530K grain left from the original 700K. So I have burned through 170K grain in 3 days! Its no big deal, but this is not a sustainable scenario.

So, to mitigate I have turned on few more Legendary grain plots with some meta battle beta cards from my scholar accounts, which I think is a good idea as beta cards will be less relevant in battle. Most of my scholars do not play wild anymore anyways.

The way to check grain neutrality (there is no simple way!), if all your active plots are cleared (this is very important!), is to look at the grain before harvest at the upper right corner. In my case it is 530K, and check after harvest. If that number stays about the same you are grain neutral.

Also you can add the 3 different grain requirement to harvest from Grain, Research, and SPS respectively. In my case the numbers are 47656 + 30353 + 65015 = 143024 Total grain in need. However, I have generated 157910 grain.

Now I have 1 castle and 4 keeps turned on. The total cost to harvest those are 10000 + (4*1000) =14000 grain. Total grain cost therefore = 143024 + 14000 = 157024. Now there is a bit gone in taxes, part of that is a waste (burn), part I get to collect for myself. However, that is as close to grain neutral I can make it!

Now if you excuse me, I better turn on the rest of my keeps!

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