Land 1.75 is coming to Splinterlands... and I am not prepared!

With the recent proposal for the DAO to hire @cryptomancer to develop the Secret of Praetoria Land Expansion comfortably passing, it's now a certainty that we'll see Land 1.75 in roughly 4-6 months from now. We don't have an exact timeframe yet, but our best guess so far is Q1 of 2025.

Land 1.75 is going to be the first major update to the Land game ever since farpetrad left the company and it's going to shake things up more than people might expect. Thus far, there only have been three resources produced on land: Grain, Research, and SPS. While research doesn't have a use case yet, I probably don't have to explain SPS. Grain on the other hand was needed to feed your monsters while they were working your land. This lead to a relatively easy to handle production chain. Have just enough grain producing plots to keep your research and SPS producing plots going and you are basically self sufficient. In consequence, grain has been losing value ever since its introduction as people simply produced it themselves, dumping what ever they produced extra on the market without a lot of buyers around.

With land 1.75, we'll see three new resources introduced to the mix. Moving forward, wood, stone, and ores are also going to be needed in order to produce SPS (and possibly research as well). That's not all, though. So far, any plot could be used to produce any resource you wanted to. In land 1.75, any plot will still be able to produce SPS and research, but it will be limited to one of the four basic resources, wholly depending on its geography. So for example Forests will only be able to produce wood while Hills will only produce stone.

@slobberchops already did an article on this matter a few days ago describing exactly what my first reaction to these upcoming changes have been: Since grain is going to be a lot rarer moving forward, I started to clear out as many plots as I could to bring more grain farms online. My goal was to have as much grain handy as possible for when I won't be able to produce it any longer.

As it turns out, this whole reaction was well meant but rather short sighted. Yesterday, @vugtis has been kind enough to run one of his scripts to check my owned plots for the resources they are going to produce in Land 1.75 and to tell the truth, the results have been a bit of a wakeup call for me. Just see for yourself:

So as it turns out, I'll still have plenty of grain producing plots after the update. Wood is also not going to be an issue at all. Ores and especially stone, though, are going to be extremely scarce among my region. Taking a closer look at my owned region, I don't own a single desert or canyon, so the only stone producing type I have are hills and I only own 7 natural hills in my whole region. The other plots listed there are spread out across other random regions across half of Praetoria.

Moving forward, I'll have two options of how to deal with this. I can either produce as little stone as I can in my region and buy the rest from the market or I can try to establish additional stone production in other regions and ship them to my main region in order to be processed for SPS and research. To be frank, I don't love either of them. Buying from the market would mean that I will have to constantly trade DEC for stone in order to keep everything running. If I decide to produce it myself, though, I will not only need to produce the stone in another region, but I will also have to feed my monsters working there. So I would have to produce additional grain and ship it to that region or I would have to get even more plots in another region in order to produce enough grain to make that operation self sufficient.

Peaking at the land market, there are a lot of cheap plots available right now:

Canyon is even one of the land types that I would need for my stone production, so that's cool. The issue is that there's not a single grain producing plot available in that region:

So it really isn't as easy as one would expect to set everything up. The good thing is that probably a lot people are probably in the same shoes as I am - most of them probably without even knowing it right now. So in the next few weeks and months, I expect a lot of additional buying and selling to happen as people will realize that they are completely missing certain resources and will try to remedy that. Because of that, I'm not going to pull the trigger right away and instead monitor the market to see if I can find myself a good region to setup my stone cutting operation accompanied by some grain farming.

On the other hand, though, plots are probably as cheap as they'll ever get right now and not acting in time might very well turn out to be a mistake. Land 1.75 is certainly making things a lot more interesting - long before it even got released. As a major SPS stakeholder, I have to say I'm pretty happy about that. Because no matter what I decide to do in terms of my land operation, in the end, trading volume is going to increase quite a bit. As all resources are going to be traded against DEC and every trade burns DEC, this should help to get rid of a lot of DEC over time. The more DEC we burn, the harder it is going to get, and in turn the closer we'll get back to peg. And as everybody should have understood by now - once (and if) we get DEC back to peg, good things are going to happen for SPS.

So fun times ahead of us and if you are a land holder in Splinterlands and haven't done so yet, you might want to do what I did and check your plots to see what resources you will be missing in Land 1.75 - you might be surprised...