Understand Grain Factor
Midnight potion was officially announced yesterday, and will be online April 29! This is the first time activity in land will be directly connected to the trading card pack opening part of the game. Also this is the first time "Research", which I love to call "purple" or "City Bus", will actually have a use case. So I should stop calling that! For the record though; Aura Lab IS purple.
Before going into the details of Midnight potion, what people first need to understand that how land resources can be produced and priced. The reason you need to understand this is simple, money! These resources cost money and if you don't produce it, you will have to buy it. Trust me, you WILL buy it if you want to be competitive in this game. That is coming much sooner than you think and the market is responding, because market is always forward looking.
We stake cards on our land plots. When you have enough DEC staked, these staked cards generate resources based on their Production Point. You can look up production point, PP from now on, either in-game or popular sites like Peakmonsters. The original Land 1.75 post explained the production mechanics as follow:
Production Rates Per Production Point Per Hour:
Grain – 0.02
Wood – 0.005
Stone – 0.002
Iron – 0.0005
This is the fundamental principle in the construction of the Grain Factor. Which is nothing but the production difficulty ratio for each resources with respect to grain. If there are no external force, then resources should trade according to their relative production difficulty. However, market is always dynamic, so the grain factor on each resource are typically higher or lower than 1.0 grain baseline. If the market is at equilibrium and fairly priced then all resources should trade at grain baseline.
| Grain Factor Chart | Cost in DEC of 1000 Resources |
|---|---|
 |  |
https://splinter-lands.streamlit.app/
Below a chart that represent what the factor is against grain based on the whitepaper
Grain: 0.02
Wood: 0.005 1 Wood = 4 Grain
Stone: 0.002 1 Stone = 10 Grain
Iron: 0.0005 1 Iron = 40 Grain
What happened to this Chart?
First, let us look at the chart to the right, which is easy to understand. It is simply the price of 1000 grain, wood, stone and iron in DEC.
1000 grain = 8.93 DEC today
1000 wood = 32.76 DEC today
1000 stone = 106.47 DEC today
1000 iron = 348.97 DEC today
This chart plots the data once a day (00:00 UTC), and now have 1 month worth of data.
Notice, the price of these resources were high in the beginning, simply because there weren't any of the new ones around. As people started to produce them, they begin to sell them in the internal market (pools), and price began to drop. You needed these new resources only to produce Research point and SPS. However, both Research and SPS was optional. Research didn't have any real value, and SPS was cheap and can be earned in a variety of different ways. So after land 1.75 implementation, people simply turned off Research and SPS plots and converted them resource plots. I did the same in the beginning.
All that changed with the rumor first and then announcement of Aura Lab and midnight potion in the last town hall. People immediately started buying these resources, because you will need them to craft Midnight Potion. Not only that, its production rate is the hardest and equal to iron. So it will be slow and it will consume a lot of resources. Therefore, you are seeing the bump in the price of the resources. Now, stone is again trading above grain baseline, and both iron and wood are nearly at the baseline, wood prices went 2X in 10 days!
IMPORTANT – Prepare Now or Get Left Behind!
So, where do we go from here? One thing I do not do is predict prices. I have no clue where price of anything will be tomorrow, day after, or 1 month from now. What I do however is tell you what I am doing. I also tell you what I fundamentally see in terms of supply and demand.
- I bought nearly 100M grain, I simply needed to a stockpile to run my region for 1 year
- I do not produce enough stone, so I am buying stone whenever I can
- I have ramped up iron production, as it is the most expensive natural resource so far
- I have turned off all SPS plots; I simply do not need them. As I can easily buy them from market
- I have activated all my research plots to best of my ability
- I will be switching some of my occupied plots to Aura Labs on April 29
It is important that you pay attention to how effectively you are managing your land positions. I was guilty for a long time that I neglected it. I am paying penalty for it in prices. Please consider not making the same mistake I did, and fix it now. Sooner the better.
If you have plots, activate them. If you don't have plots, consider purchasing a few. If you have all of them just farming grain, reconsider what more can you do with it. The message is simple:
Prepare Now or Get Left Behind!
PS. don't be a vcdragon/pikadragon on discord: no one like cry babies
