Hey everyone! It's time to make another blog post for this weeks Splinterlands challanges to hopefully earn some cool rewards I can use to buy more cool things in the world of Praetoria!

Today I'm going to make a post about my monthly process in bringing funds in to the game, where most men of my age like to sit in a bar drinking beer and spend their hard earned money this way, I'm... socially awkward 😅 so I rather spend it on my favorite game called Splinterlands - did you happen to hear anything about this game already? 🙂

I'm making this post to take part in this week Social Media Challenge, and this weeks theme is the same as last weeks, which is great actually because it can be used to make posts in so many ways it gives a lot of freedom what to make to the players / authors.

🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out the official Splinterlands post here.

Splinterlands, from just a game to become a part of my daily life.

When I started playing Splinterlands, it started as just one of the games I played, but it evolved in to the ONLY game I play nowadays because like many others in the web 3 space, a game I played died so my assets became worthless overnight and that sucks, it's not only the lost money but maybe even more, the lost time. I mean it's nice to enjoy a game but many of these web 3 games are a real grind.

Not for Splinterlands, and when this happened I decided I would stick to this game only, although I've been warned by others 'not to put all my eggs in to one basket'...
I saw how much fun the game was, even with all the problems that needed to be worked out back then, and it hasn't been always easy but I'm proud my Splinterlands journey is one month away on hitting the FOUR years mark already, making this the game I played for the longest time ever in my life, and I have no intentions of quiting!

So, with everything going on in the game, not only simply playing my battles but also managing my two guilds, making blogs like these, scouting the market to buy cards to strengthen my deck so I can win more, play brawls and when I have time an occasional tournament, another aspect joined - LAND! I decided to dive in to, and with a cool opportunity I couldn't refuse, I now have a total of 15 plots across two accounts, and maybe this isn't a lot for some players but it's pretty big for me already, and when I think about what land one day can become, damn, I definitely want to be a part of that!

Investing

Putting personal money in to the game, as well as dedicating your time to it, is all investing in a way but I think it's important to NOT see the money we put in to the game as an investment, for me it's just recreational money, or 'fun money' like I said before, other people spend in a bar so it's gone once the night is over, leaving you with a hangover... 😅

I think each veteran player has their own way of doing things like this, like my crypto friend @cherokee4life is using crypto incomes from other platforms to partially put in to the game, he recently made a cool post about this, check it out when you have time, his account can use some attention. 🙂

I think making a post like this can make things clearer for newer players and maybe gives them some ideas or insights how they can do things like this for themselves so I wanted to share my monthly process in this post but then I started rambling - I do that sometimes about the game. 😂

Different income streams for my account(s)

With making blogs like these, we can earn nice rewards on Hive, which is awesome and really helps in building my account, it's important to mention you're not supposed to extract everything from Hive so we support both the Splinterlands as well as the Hive ecosystem.

1. Blogging

When you start to write blogs, getting upvotes isn't easy and I think it's important your start to make posts because you like making them and not because you want to earn with them, because earning takes a long time - I think it took me two years before my account got some attention other than the Splinterlands Challenge rewards, so, dedication is important.

Blog earnings are my first income stream, it's a steady flow and divided in to two tokens.
The amounts we see under the posts, the author (me) earns 50% of this and this 50% is split in 50% staked Hive Power (which you are supposed to keep it there to up vote other community members with) and 50% Hive Backed Dollar, or HBD. I use the HBD to invest in the game in various ways and because it's a steady stream of a couple of dollars here and there I just spend it when I receive it, like for the last two weeks I've been buying Mage Wagons with it to take part in the Splinterlands Conflicts.

I still need to buy one or two more wagons so this is still a work in progress and when it's done I usually use my blogging earnings to buy new cards to strengthen my deck and to buy the Wild passes for my two bot accounts.

2. Collecting cans and bottles for the deposit money

In my country, cans and bottles have deposit money on them, a kind of recycling value to incentivize people not to throw them on the ground outside... well.. let's say not everyone thinks the small amount of deposit money is high enough so they do this anyway, small cans and bottles are worth €0.15 and big bottles €0.25

In my daily life and also when cycling I just keep an eye out for them and turn them in once by box is full, the monthly average I collect this way is around €10 I'm using to buy SPS with.

3. Personal funds

In the first years of playing Splinterlands, my personal monthly investment in to the game was €20 but at the start of this year when things started to look bright again and with my boosted land plans, I decided to upgrade this to €50 monthly.

Monthly process

So after payday, around the 20th of every month I start counting how many cans and bottles I have collected.
The next part is all crypto shit, when you're not interested in this (I can totally understand!) skip this part and head over to where I spend it, I agree, that's a lot more fun!

This month it was pretty average with 66 in total, worth just over €10.

I add this amount to my €50 and buy BNB with so I can easily send it from my Dutch crypto broker to my Rabby wallet so I can later deposit it to my hive account.

I use BNB because it is fast and cheap to send, it only takes a couple of minutes before it's approved and sent to my Rabby wallet, the positive thing in the last months is the Euro is worth more compare to the US Dollar, I sent €67 in total, which is worth $79, maybe a dollar less because I always leave a small amount of BNB to cover transaction fees.

Withdrawing from my broker costs €0.25 and sending the BNB to hive only costs $0.0016

It soon arrived and now I have the BNB in Hive, I use TribalDex because it gives me less problems than Hive-Engine.

So now I swap the BNB to Swap.Hive and then use part of it to swap for SPS and the rest to DEC, to invest in my Land.

0.8 swap.hive in fee so that's not too bad!

The price of SPS dipped a little today great timing for that!

with the $17 in total I collected (deposit money plus some change I found) I can buy 2384 SPS.

There is some slippage in the swap of course and some fee so I ended up with a total of 2372 SPS.

After that, I could swap the rest of the Hive to DEC, 71K ready to spend!

Spending is easy!

There's nothing is easy as spending the money because Splinterlands is a money sucking black hole for sure 😅 but I should spend it wisely on my land plots... Beaker made an awesome tool for that, and it now has a cool new feature which now as soon as I logged in, alerts me there is a plot that needs my attention because a building is finished, great update thanks for the hard work @beaker007!

And thanks to this alert, it's easy because now I don't have to decide what plot to focus on, this plot is only barely active with only 2 workers on it, so let's get some reinforcements, I have to keep in mind though, I need about 40k DEC to stake on the lands when I get more workers...

Scouting the market

So, I'm not a land expert so I first have to calculate what gives the best dollar to production point value, and also decide how high I want to go, max common reward cards are cheap but only give 1000 P.P for every max level monster, I also have to keep in mind the elemental synergy for my plot of land, which are Earth and Water.

Also, it's a common plot of land without a totem on it, so there's no point in putting expensive cards on it, it's best saved for my rare plots with totems, how and where I'll decide that later, 70k DEC is spent quite fast so this is a long term project.

The cheapest common water reward card is around $3.73 for 1000 P.P.. let's keep that in mind!

Next rarity is Rare cards, that's already a much better deal with $2.30 for 1100 P.P.

I'm not sure how to see what amount of DEC I need to stake for each rarity, but since that's only staked and not gone, let's ignore that for now and just find out.

Let's continue!

Epic reward cards are around $4.64 for 1249 P.P. so that's a bad deal...
Legendary reward cards are around $5 for 1500 P.P. both of these probably require less DEC staked but so far, rare cards are the best deal I think but let's not forget the Gold Foils...

I think a lot of players are buying Gold Foils because there are not that many already combined, so this will take a little more work, combining them myself to 38 C.C for a max level, there is one max level for sale now, for $6.20 for 1999 P.P.

There's no point in looking for the higher rarity gold foils, as a single C.C costs 80 cents or more so a max card will be over $17 for 4000 C.C so that's not for my common plot...

Rare Chaos Legion Reward Cards it is!

I like to scout the market on monstermarket and they already give a good fee rebate (much better than buying in-game!) but I like to buy my cards with Elmo Burns, this site gives an ever better fee rebate and will burn SPS with the profit they make after expenses, that's a win-win for everyone.

Let's start with buying three Goblin Towers, they're already max level so it's less work, and they're put right to work!

So, rare cards also require 10k DEC each so a total of 30k DEC, with 34K DEC left, I require one more worker to replace to Spirit Druid with only 300 P.P. that was just put there to develop the building.

I've bought a max level Venari Wavesmith for $2.30 plus another 10k DEC staked, so now my plot is up to producing 118.8 grain per hour, and I still have 22K DEC left to start up another plot!

Using beaker's tool again, I can see I have a Gold Foil Flying Squid that isn't max level yet, I didn't have enough money left a month ago plus the cheap ones were gone...
Note this is a rare plot with a totem on it for an extra 10% boost so it's ok to put more expensive units on this plot, like the Arbalest.

On peakmonsters I can look back at a cards history to see the buying price, I bought it at $3.64 for 20 C.C. so that's $0.182 per C.C.

When I look at the market prices today, they're actually a bit cheaper!

18 more C.C to make my monster a max level...
Elmo Burns easily displays how much copies I have selected, many sites still use the old abbreviation, BCX.. it's the same as C.C.

So, now there's the bad part, I have to take the Flying Squid from the land to combine it.. but as soon as I do, there's a three day cool down.. this is to prevent players using them both in battle and after battle, put them back on land and I get it, but it's really really annoying!

I will be in France tomorrow for a two week holiday, so for now, I will just put the 18 C.C. worker on the land as a separate worker, and deal with the cool down and combining next month.

I needed to stake an additional 3827 DEC for this worker as well, 15k DEC left!

There's another plot with only two workers on it which require a Life or Dragon synergy for a change, well.. I guess you all know the process now...

That's one more worker for this plot, plus 10k more DEC staked and now I'm out of funds for this month 😅 so like I said.. a long term project for sure!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!

Have a great day!