First things first
It's all @azircon 's fault. Just to be clear. This will take a long time to write and explain and yes - I'll try to be as concise as possible. I write this before I even start. It's Friday, 30th of May 2025, 14.43pm. I can here the drums. They're coming.
Prologue
Splinterlands is an amazing game and I'm falling more and more in love with it and the community. It's not an investment to me, but a hobby, and when I see what others spend on their hobbies, I'm still low balling.
But it is an important sales point that you can actually earn money with the game. But... how much? Those who read through my nerd posts know that I like ROI calculations, so this is what you're going to get:
- Conclusion - Das Pferd von hinten aufzäumen
- Spendthrift? - How much I put into Splinterlands
- King of Shards - Summary of SPS earned
- Crystal Queen - Summary of DEC earned
- Gold Standard - Current Asset Value
- Conquest - Projection for 2025
- Let's get nerdy! - How find your personal data
- Geek it out - How to use Excel to excavate your stats.
8.1 Brawls & Battles - How to extract Ranked/Brawls/Land
8.2 DEC - How to extract DEC earnings - Final Conclusion
I'm scared. It's SO many excel sheets. SO many lines. And excited. So much to learn. Let's get to it!
Putting the cart before the horse
Numbers are not everyone's favorite. So I'll present the summary first. Although I must say that there are quite a few hidden gems in the whole article. It might be worth reading it all.
I spent $7330 on Splinterlands in total.
My current assets are worth $7,465 (not counting a BF Arcana 1/20). That's a 1,8% increase 🤑
I earned $14.57 in DEC through renting and vouchers.
I earned $330 in SPS through all those ways you can make SPS.
The total earnings of $347,57 mean that I made a dividend of 4,7% - that's shitty for 5 years. Total ROI would be 6,5%. But now, look at this:
But now we have to consider one thing - of the total money spent, only $270 was spent before 2024, and 60% of it was spent in 2025 ( #conclavearcana ).
If we take only 2024, which was the year that I came back and spent quite a bit, it would be $147 income on $2625 spending, so 5,6% yearly dividend. That's a little better.
I'm still spending, more than I ever did.
Great, now I have Elton John in my head. Why do I have to do those bad puns?
I still buy packs here and there to get my CA-Deck to Gold level, as well as some selected Rebellion Cards. So the ROI will stay down. If I ever stop buying, it might go up substantially - because then the SPS-Price will also have skyrocketed, naturally 😝
SPS is at 0,0095$ as I'm writing this. When it was 0,014$, my ROI was: 35,579 SPS x 0,014$ = $498 ($150 / 42% more) , leading to 6,9% - that's already 2,2% more.
Let the wheel fly...
Also, with time, I will be able to finance more and more of my dirty pleasures from within the chain (e.g. HIVE), that will also help the ROI.
Money spent
This one is kind of easy. I funneled money into Splinterlands through Credits, direct PayPal to a friend who gave me SPS for that, and through a Crypto-App when DEC was way under peg and it made sense to buy it on the secondary market instead of using PayPal & Credits.
Credits: 6,255.10$
PayPal to a pal: $675
Kraken App: $400
Total spent on Splinterlands: $7,330 aka 7,330,000 DEC at peg.
Wow. I could get a car for that. But I don't enjoy cars.
SPS earned
Okay, this one was a huge surprise. Just by tournaments, I made:
Note that German Excel and the Splinterland CSV do not cooperate well on numbers, so it's actually 14,097.733 SPS. It took me one hour (no, not exagerrated) to figure out how to set Excel to the System that was in the CSV.
SPS Airdrop: 222.732 SPS
Staking Rewards was very nice, too: 5,841 SPS
Pool Rewards from UniSwap: 101 SPS
Ranked and Brawls
This data took a while to excavate. Recently, since February 20th, it's possible to at least identify how much of the staked SPS was claimed with a simple drop down. Long story short, I finally figured out how to extract the data, more or less exact, from the CSV. This took me a couple of hours.
Brawls & Battles: 15,541 SPS
TOTAL: 35,579 SPS or 330,000 DEC
DEC earned
Rewards (that was a 2022 thing): 110 DEC
Rentals & Tournis: 5,469 DEC
Vouchers in DEC: 8,991 DEC
TOTAL: 14.570 DEC
Current Assets
Staked on Land: 67,602 DEC
Worth of cards: 5,867,850 DEC
Land: 2x Land ($52), 1x Wood ($15), 1x Stone ($18), 1xIron ($18), 5xPower Core ($25) = $128 = 128,000 DEC
Liquid DEC: 4,000
Liquid Credits: 25,000
Staked SPS: 145,451 SPS aka 1,373,000 DEC (almost forgot this one)
TOTAL: 7,465,452 DEC This does NOT include my 1/20 BF Arcane Edition of the Ashen Cindergrim. That might be worth quite something.
Worked until 11pm yesterday. I should be in bed by 9pm to keep up with Lily. It's 7am now, she's eating pancakes, I'm drinking coffee and working out HTML codes. Huge thanks to Bravetofu for teaching me that!
2025 Projection
We're 5 months in now. And a lot has changed during those 5 months.
We have a median of $39 of income each month. If I keep on playing like I do, that would lead me to around $470 income this year, around 6,3% ROI.
But I also think that May was an outlier, as CA was launched and I was very hesitant to go into Modern. Also, there just weren't as many tournaments. So, I asked Excel to kindly do a log prediction of what my monthly income could be like until the end of the year:
New Goal: Making $55 income in November.
I'll be with my family in December/January, so maybe not much play time.
The tutorial section starts here. I hope you enjoy it! If you find flaws or have better ways to calculate (or want to build a tool to automatically analyze your CSB... Beaker?)
Where's my data?
I asked my master if he knew of any page that stored the data of earnings and spendings in Splinterlands, but he said that would be too much data to store - but Splinterlands does!
If you're logged in, just click here and you'll get to your activity page. If you play on another browser, go to your SPS page and click on "Activity"
Magically, you'll land on a very, very confusing page with trillions of transactions - your transactions. Go to the little download symbol.
You'll land on a page where you can download .csv files from each year. Of course you can also select which token you want, but I just downloaded all of them. 5 years worth of data. This will be so much fun!
1.030.000am. Did a 30.000min break to eat 2.000 pancakes and bring my daughter to a dance lesson. I feel weird. I think it's affecting me.
Excel in Excel
Who doesn't love Excel? Please leave now. Just kidding, you can use Google Sheets and other programs that support the CSV format.
This is what it initially looks like:
A freakishly beautiful mess. If you don't know how to turn that into something beautiful: Mark the first column (A). Go to "Data", and click on "Text in columns".
First step: Mark the first option.
Second step: Mark "Comma".
Third step: Mark Standard.
Click on "Complete. Done. It now looks like this:
Way better. If you want to do it like me, and do it for all of your years in the Splinterverse, you have to do that with every csv file and combine them together in a single Excel file. Mine is only 39,471 rows long as I was inactive for 2 years. Lucky me...
Two more things: Mark the first row, go to Data again, and click on "Filter". A little dropdown symbol will appear next to each topic, and that is very, very important to nerd on.
With that, you can select groups of transactions, for example all DEC or Credits. And don't worry, yours will be in your language. You did not get the worst virus of all by reading here, which is Excel in German.
Then, second recommendation: Create a Subtotal function to make a sum. Mine would look like this in English: =SUBTOTAL(9;D2:D39742) In Column D are all the incomes and outgoings, and to get totals, that is important.
As you can see, the values are separated weirdly. That will cause confusion, I guarantee. 100.000.000 For example is actually 100,000.000 in English counting punctuation. You might have to change that in your Excel Settings --> advanced --> kind of in the middle.
If that doesn't work, sometimes it helps to convert the number into text, and then back into the correct number system. It's a bit tricky, but I hope your Excel won't make the same problems as mine.
The fridge is broken. I'm tipping on the door handle, but it won't show the list of the selectable items. It was working fine yesterday. Hopefully I just have to restart it.
Welcome to... whatever this is.
You made it! This is great! Now you just have to select the right items in the drop-down menus, and you'll be able to extract your data. Only 2 more days! 😵
RUN!
SPS-P Income (Brawls, battles, land,...)
This one is a little more complicated. With the update on February 18th, a lot of the naming has changed and it's now easier to see which parts of the Staked SPS (SPSP in the first column) comes from those rewards.
Compare these two, and you will see that SPSP "stake_tokens_multi" refers to the SPS I earned in Brawls, Modern and Wild. The 6,5 SPS that I delegated to the XBot are not in this selection of the CSV file.
For data before that, we have to use logic. Battles & Brawls are always directly staked, minus the part that you delegate, for example for using a bot. They do not appear as regular SPS as long as you don't unstake. Regular SPS on the other hand is converted into SPSP when you stake it. Meaning, Staking rewards, bought SPS, or wherever you got it as liquid SPS, will appear first as positive in the SPS balance, and when you stake it, it will be negative in the SPS balance. If you compare that to the SPSP, you will have the difference between the two, which is the Battle/Brawl/Land Earnings.
First Column: Select SPS and SPSP
Second Column: leave it be
Third Column: Select $TOKEN_STAKING
With that, you have all the Token Staking - meaning, you have the SPS that went to Staking as liquid, the same as negative, and then all the SPS that went directly to staking without being liquid. Dang, that kind of sounds more complicated than it is. Sorry. Hope you understood!
It'll look like this:
You can see that $Token_Staking is taken away from SPS as a negative and added to SPSP as positive. The two equal each other out, so there's only the direct staking left: Line 3 for example: 51.128 SPSP.
01001001 01101110 01110110 01100001 01101100 01101001 01100100 00100000 01000010 01110010 01100001 01101001 01101110 00100000 01000101 01110010 01110010 01101111 01110010
DEC Income
First Column: Select DEC
Second Column: Select rental_payment, rental_payment_burn_fees and rental_payment_fees, tournament_prize
That gives you the total of your rental income, already discounted the burn and fees.
This does not count sold cards. Those are marked as "market_purchase", but that goes both ways - the ones that you sold, and the ones that you bought. You can use that to calculate trading, but for ROI it's not really good. You don't really need it, though, as it is included in our current asset value, either as DEC or in the new cards we bought.
So let's not count the $300 I got for a BF rare... Yeah, a little flexing, I'm getting tired here. Thinking of that motivates me!
Congratulations!
You're a bit more nerdy now, and can dig through a lot of data in order to bend their information to your will. You now have a power that few posses, and yes, you're allowed to go mad with that power now. Because going mad without power is boring, nobody listens to you. (Russel "Russ" Cargill)
Final Conclusion
Wow. This took me a total of 12h to get through all of it. I had to re-write and re-calculate several times do to reasoning-errors. Was it worth it? You decide! It sure was a lot of fun and definitely a challenge to my Excel, logic and search skills.
I'm very grateful that Splinterlands is saving all that data on a server, although they could enhance the CSV-files a little by including the "Unclaimed" section of the Activity-Log, specifying Ranked, Brawls, Land, and so on. The game code can do it, so it must be lying around somewhere already.
But I have a new skill now - if you don't want to go crazy doing all this analysis, but don't want to wait for one of the really smart people to build a tool to upload and analyze the CSV automatically, I'm sure we can come to an agreement. I always need more Alchemy Packs, or summoners... Would depend on how much data there is to analyze, though.
The return is higher than I had expected - I mean, playing Splinterlands gives you more ROI than a savings account, and more than treasuries. Won't beat my stock performance (yet), but still.
Who can else can claim that they get 5,6 - 6,3% ROI from their hobby?
Please do not tell me that there already is a tool for all that. I rather live in the illusion of having figured out something that is not a few clicks away. Thank you for your comprehension.