Land Resource Prices
It has been months since I have written a post about Splinterlands. There are multiple reasons for it. First, I have been travelling a lot towards the end of the summer and early fall. Also secondly, there haven't been much of interesting things happening on land lately. You guessed it, Cryptomancer, our sole developer have also been travelling a lot like me. So, land development have been slow.
Last, I talked about grain factor, was on that post in June 22. That is the time I developed this particular type of plot that highlights an interesting phenomenon called "stone anomaly".
Stone Anomaly is defined as the difference between the price of Stone in Grain Factor, and the average price of Wood and Iron in Grain Factor.
In other words, it is the shaded area in the plot, and the step plot below showing the value.
Fast forward 3 months, and above is the stone anomaly plot today. You can see that there is virtually no stone anomaly, it is 0.04, and the lowest it had ever been! I had defined stone anomaly as such, because in efficient market all resources should trade as per their fair value in a chose system, which land market is. So if there is perfect efficiency, all land resources should trade exactly as per their production difficultly which is defined by grain factor. It took three months, but finally the market caught up with price. Currently, Wood, Stone and Iron are add trading nearly Grain Factor of 0.7. Yes, they are all at 30% discount to fair value.
Why Land Resources are at a discount?
Well, price is an net sum of supply and demand. There is a lot of supply and there is limited demand. On the first plot, I have highlighted the demand mechanism team have been introduced this year. Except midnight potions, I do not see the impact of the others on this chart. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that neither the pickle draw nor the Conclave Arcana wagon repair kits were able to create enough demand for the land resources. Why?
- those items like draw tickets, and wagons were priced too low
- the item that they will produce, pickel card and CA airdrop card, are not very desirable
The other item of note is grain price. As you can see from the plot above on July 18 Grain traded at a low of 8.46 DEC, and since them grain has rallied 23% to current price of 10.46 DEC. Since all resources are compared against grain in the Grain Factor plot. The drop of resource prices from July 18 to today can be just due to rally of grain prices. July 18 stone was 128 DEC, today stone is 77 DEC. That is nearly a 40% drop.
But wait, there is another factor. DEC price. On July 18, 1000 DEC = $0.90, today 1000 DEC - $0.71. That is 21% drop in DEC price. Since grain is priced in DEC, we can safely say that 23% rally in grain prices is just the drop of DEC price in USD. In terms of real dollar value, there is no change in grain price.
Therefore, we can also say, if we assume grain is flat in price, the drop in the resource prices, wood, stone and iron is real. They are really trading at a 30%-40% discount.
What can we do about it?
I have the following request to @davemccoy and the team.
- Please take 32% land usage for a whole year seriously, we must use more land
- Incentivize players to use land, as land is the ultimate sink of the cards in-game
- Price the items higher in land resources, much higher
- Make the products (cards, mechanisms, whatever) more desirable or must have items in-game
We have a massive over-supply of all resources, and we are producing millions of resources in Praetoria and nothing to do with them.
There is a massive stockpile of all resources and if this continues for long bad things are going to happen. We need to introduce sinks of these resources today. We should have done it yesterday!
What a great post again—awesome to see you back in the saddle! 🙌
We were all wondering what was going on with the Stone anomaly, but as expected, the market did its thing, and just like that… the anomaly vanished. Still not entirely sure why it happened, but hey—it is what it is.
As for the current low prices, I personally think it’s mostly a demand issue, not just about supply. There's a clear lack of strong incentives and benefits for landholders—and I don’t just mean monetary ones. Long-term utility and meaningful engagement are what will drive value.
I’m not so sure about this one. Raising prices too much could backfire by pushing away smaller players or making it harder for new landowners to get started. We need to be careful not to create too steep of a barrier to entry.
That said, I do think the team has bigger plans—avatars were mentioned in the past, mostly in the context of Glint, but what if we had craftable avatar items too? Imagine something simple like crafting a basic outfit with Grain, then leveling it up to look cooler or unlock small bonuses. It would be a fun, ongoing reason to use resources beyond just hoarding or dumping them.
Land cards are nice but will probably only be a short amount of time a boost to land demand, depending on how they implement it.
In general, we need a steady flow of use cases, not just raising prices. The current items we can craft are very situational and often only needed for short periods. Adding more diverse and long-term utility would/could do a lot to keep the economy rolling—and keep players engaged.
Just some thoughts, hope the team, and not only cryptomancer can get this back on track
@beaker007 - is there any way on your land tool to see the total consumption and production of resources by rarity?
I have a theory over 50% of production is coming from the most efficient plots (highly boosted epics and legendary), which use the least amount of inputs....
The boosted plots producing so much more than they consume means that it take a whole lot of "inefficient plots" to absorb the excess production these boosted plots produce....
@azircon - here's an "alternative suggestion" to use more of that 9B grain - if we have grain used as an input for crafting products, it ensures grain is not avoided by the highly efficient grain producers.
However, I would echo beaker's concern that too much demand for early and intermediate resource - could hamstring the "overall" demand for land products as a result of too much cost or risk at the end-product stage.
So my thinking is that grain probably needs to be highly available and affordable, or all further production cycles will stagnate.
There should be SO MANY opportunities to spend aura that no one, (except maybe vugtis), wonders'"how am I going to spend all this aura".
At this time, unless people are spending way more on raffle tickets than they can possibly win, there is simply no way to spend more aura than we are producing. And that's the case where only 30% of land is active - imagine if more was active?
Raffles and auctions are a start but we need lots more like this.
Continuous demand for aura, as the last level of production, it drives all the inputs before it.
One might think that at first, and to be honest, I had the same thought when I saw your question. 😅
But once I loaded the actual data… I saw something quite different. Really interesting stuff!
Feel free to write a post about it if you'd like 😁 Would love to see your take on it.
Its live on the site (tab compare):
https://land.spl-stats.com/region-overview
Oh I hadn't found this info on your site yet! Thanks for pointing it out!
It's an interesting result - I'll dig in a bit deeper, since my initial hypothesis doesn't seem to be supported by the data.
Is the Production by Rarity and Resource available in both boosted and base PP?
I'm assuming it's only boosted in the chart - being able to slice and dice the consumption data based on which types of plots are consuming it is pretty powerful - having base PP would allow a pretty close approximation...
Hi,
It was not on site before 😁, just added it.
It's production per hour (that is always done on Boosted Production Points, in the spl api called rewards per hour).
Consumption is always done on Base Production Points (this is calculated via the consumption ratio)
Nice!!!! you work fast!
yeah I was thinking about questions like "how much stone is consumed by common aura plots, also wondering if there is a way to see utilization of each plot type as [# of plots worked / #total of that plot type] - like "how many magic leg plots are active, and how many are inactive, etc.
Not sure if that data is available already, you have made so many tools :D
First part of the question. You can use the filters. When you filter on Aura, you get only plots that produces Aura. Same for rarity.
For the second part not 100% sure what you mean. But you can also use the filter on legendary magical on active tab you can see how many plots are active and inactive.
So common plots are producing most grain wood stone and iron. I expected this.
Their numbers are just higher
My question is what is "too much"?
I can demonstrate that current pricing is not consuming enough land resources.
I have a theory. Stone prices were anomalously high. We told people that :)
They produced every ounce of stone they can produce and they sold them. Supply increased, price came down.
I understand that. But suggest an alternative. How are you going to burn through 9B grain?
Yes I agree that we need constant consumables not just occasional ones.
@nateaguila has talked about a personal lounge area or custom battle field.. let players fill that common / rare /epic / legendary items to show off, is this idea still alive or on the enormous backlog of future (never) release 🤣
The team has to joggle with all the tokens and give them all attention vouchers / glint / merits / GP / eventually 30 land resources... this will then all have its effect on DEC and then SPS. Not a easy task at all, but for now land is not heading the right direction....
Also the unbound scrolls can be ongoing spending.
This is the main point I am trying to make. It is interesting that in 2025 so far, despite the largest advancement in land game, the occupancy rate remained at 32% and all resources went down.
Ultimately this is a metric the game makers will be judged.
Land situation looks pretty grim... We need a lot more players and a pump in all Splinterlands assets to make land really desirable. I don't feel like doing anything about my 11 plots, just have them produce with the cards and DEC I have, but I have been considering putting a little bit of cash into cards and DEC to improve production.
It's not particularly grim today vs say a year ago. It's just flat. Considering many other things that is not necessarily bad. But there are room to improve
Missed these land articles, a great read once again.
Am I understanding correctly that I am currently better off producing just grain and converting that to other required resources on the market rather than producing the resource myself with the 30% discount as fees will be a lot less than that? Or am I understating market fees and the cost of feeding workers?
Not really. You produce what you like to produce. All resources are effectively similar priced based on production difficulty. I don’t think there are advantages or disadvantages in producing one particular resource over another.
It might not be the best use of developer resources right now, but I think there could be a market for cosmetic items made from land. Player avatars, card skins, card borders, custom backgrounds for battles, etc. This could create demand and hopefully some level of excitement.
agree with this. Land game should not cannibalize Splinterlands card gaming. Features/benefits of land should cater to superficial things like what you mentioned (skins, custom backgrounds, etc) and not features that would be a disadvantage to non-land owners.
We can do many other things to integrate land to the game. Similar to wagon repairs and such. Just more of it and more resource intensive
Splinterlands is so frustrating for me. It's my own fault that I didn't take more profit when I had the chance.
It is a process :)