Gardening — How it is going to work
Posted Dec. 22, 2021
Updated Dec. 26, 2021 with updates from FriskyFox
Hubert graced us with his presence again in Discord today and dropped alpha on how Gardening is going to work. I’ve jotted it all down here in this one article rather than as a part of the Lost Annals of Gaia — but once I compile all the volumes into a more easily readable compendium, I’ll figure out the best way to make sure this is part of it. You can see it straight from the discord here.
Let’s get into it.
So the first thing you need to know is that Gardening works very differently for Foraging and Fishing. Rather than requiring a set time to complete, Gardening provides a reward for each stamina spent doing it. Stamina is spent at a rate of 1 per 12 minutes for most heroes, but heroes with the Gardening profession will be able to reduce that rate to 1 stamina per 10 minutes. — Hubert
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: The way stamina is used is a bit different than foraging and fishing — in fishing and foraging its an amount per quest and you select how many quests you go on, here you select a hero they go gardening and will “tic” based on a rate of 10 or 12 minutes as noted above and you pull them out whenever you want.
So the minimum stamina needed to do the quest in 1, and you can also stop Gardening early to just receive the rewards for the time you put in, assuming you spent at least one “tic” worth of time. I will say tic a lot here, and what I mean by that is the amount of time for one stamina to be spent by your hero .— Hubert
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: So it will “tic” faster with the Gardening gene, I.e. you can tic 25x in 250 minutes if you have the Gardening gene, but if not it will take you 300 minutes to tic 25 times, (i.e. 20% slower without the gene).
However, I will say that the quest does provide more rewards for more stamina spent, so keep that in mind. — Hubert
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: So you will get more rewards if you tic more in one “run” rather than going in and out for shorter periods.
Along with this, only one hero is allowed to garden in a specific Garden at a time. Gardens are the incentivized pools you see in the Gardens. You do not need to have LPs in the Garden to be able to quest there, but you will not receive any JEWEL rewards if you do not have some amount of LP in that Garden. — Hubert
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: Remember then — you can’t get JEWEL as a reward unless you have some LP tokens staked in that garden, if you don’t have any staked you’ll just get normal items. Also remember there are 19 incentivized pools as of the time of this article.
Alright, so here is the formula for how much you can earn per tic:
earnRate = launchBonus*(rewardPool*poolAllocation*LPowned*(0.1+(WIS+VIT)/1222.22+(GrdSkl)/244.44))/(43,200-(7200*geneBonus))
- Hubert Cumberdale
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE— just want to emphasize that the above formula is PER TIC.
Here is an explanation of each of those terms:
rewardPool — This is the balance of the quest pool wallet. [SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: HUBERT NOTES IN THE Q&A BELOW THAT THIS NUMBER SHOULD BE RELEASED WITH GARDENS]
poolAllocation — This is the percent of allocation a specific garden has (the allocation for JEWEL distribution).
LPowned — The percent of the liquidity pool that the player owns in the selected Garden.
GrdSkl — A hero’s Gardening skill (only counts integer value (1.9 GrdSkl will have same result as 1.0 GrdSkl).
geneBonus — Provides a 20% bonus to JEWEL returns, increases the chances of finding tears and runes, and decreases the amount of time per tick from 12 minutes to 10 minutes. These bonuses are only present if the hero has the gardening gene. If they have the gene, geneBonus = 1, if not, geneBonus = 0.
launchBonus — A special multiplier applied at launch that will start at 5 at launch, and decrease by 0.5 every two weeks until the value is 1.
- Hubert Cumberdale
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: Wanted to highlight that the Gardening profession gene is a flat 20% bonus on jewel returns and increase of chance to find tears and runes.
In collaboration with several of the folks in the Inner Grove guild (shoutout Rhino, Haku, Petrify and others) we charted out the calculation in excel. As expected, this isn’t going to be something where everyone is going to be raking in huge amounts of Jewel every day. That would both break the economy, destroy Jewel price and bankrupt the quest pool.
Most people aren’t going to be able to casually throw 10’s of thousands of dollars into a pool just to be able to do garden quests. So here is some data of what I was able to put together on how increases in Gardening profession increase the Jewel rewards from gardening in staked position vs increasing Wis/VIT.
Here is what I saw — please leave a comment if you find different numbers or disagree.
In terms of how much $$ you’ll actually get, you’ll just need to run it through the equation, there’s a lot of moving parts and everyone’s situation will be wildly different.
Based on how Foraging and Fishing have worked for me, most of my aligned professioners are hitting lvl 8 of the profession skill before they are hitting level 3. So lets assume it would take about the same amount of time to hit lvl 8 gardening as it would get 6 more stats in WIS/VIT. Based on these numbers, (Note you should DYOR and validate the numbers yourself now that we have the calculations, as I may have missed something) That means you would see about a 24% increase (sum all the garden skill increases above) in Jewel reward over 8 garden profession skill levels as opposed to the 6 potential stats over the same amount of time.
OBVIOUSLY stats aren’t going to stay static while garden skill goes up and obviously garden skill won’t stay static as stats go up, this is just an example of analyzing the two in a vacuum, but in my opinion the focus on the gardening skill should be given more weight than the stats for now, and the gardening gene allows you to scale your profession skill faster.
There are many moving parts in this equation. You can see that your hero’s stats and Gardening skill level are represented, but the rewards will also scale based on the size of the Quest pool (rewardPool), the allocation given to that specific Garden (as an example, I believe the JEWEL-ONE pool is at about 50% allocation right now), and the percentage of that pool that you control .— Hubert
So as that quest pool grows, everyone’s rewards increase. Conversely, if that pool shrinks, everyone’s rewards will decrease. It is up to us devs to be careful about how we are allocating rewards to ensure a healthy game for years to come.— Hubert
You also may have seen that launchBonus term in there. We previously announced we would provide boosted rewards for 6 months. Since that announcement we ran many models and came to the conclusion that a 4 month period would allow enough time for us to release higher level Gardening quests and for heroes to get to a state where they can be getting good rewards. So we reduced that to reduce the amount of pressure we are putting on the quest pool .— Hubert
To ensure that everything is working fine, we will only be releasing a quarter of the quest pool with the release of the quest. We will increase the reward multiplier by 4x to account for the smaller size. As soon as we feel confident that we have all of our ducks in a row we will remove that multiplier and put the rest of the funds into the pool. — Hubert
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: Two days after release on Beta — Frisky Fox noted that the rest of the quest funds were sent over to the QuestFund safe, which resulted in an approximate 10x increase in fund size (so they also cut down the rewards multiplier a bit to compensate so that as of the time of the questfund movement on Dec. 24, rewards about 4x’d from where they were at the initial release of gardening. See below note from Frisky
the increase of almost 10x in the fund size means the rewards will go up by 10x, so i also cut the multiplier down to compensate, but rewards will still be about 4x higher now than they were before the increase… we are monitoring the rewards from gardeningquest to make sure they are rewarding enough to incentivize the right behavior, while also being mindful that this is a level 0 quest and should have the lowest rewards overall. I’ve been pushing to have the rewards boosted more at the start while people are leveling up still, since everyone has level 0 gardeners. we are also discussing other things we can do to make it more appealing. Gardening was always meant to be a whale’s quest, unlike fishing and foraging, but we want it to be rewarding for average players as well where possible — Frisky Fox
One thing I will remind you guys is that along with receiving JEWEL rewards, it is also possible to receive three different plant items which are all used in to make potions, and you can also receive tears, runes, and Green eggs as rewards. Like fishing and foraging, your chances of receiving tears and runes are increased if you have the Gardening gene. — Hubert
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: You’ll see this in one of the questions Hubert answers below — but something important to remember is that you’ll always have the chance for the items, its just that in a garden where you have LP staked, you ALSO get the Jewel rewards.
Speaking of the Alchemist, I have a bit of bad news there. Due to some of the bugs we ran into while developing this quest, our resources were focused on resolving those. This means the Alchemist will not be able to make potions this week. We have moved the timeline for that to next week. — Hubert
And lastly, to prevent people from trying to game the system, please be aware that the Gardening quest will calculate earnRate twice. Once with the state of your character and the game at the moment you started the quest, and again at the moment you completed it. You will receive the lesser amount between those two rates. — Hubert
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: I think what he’s getting at is that you won’t be able to start the gardening, move LP around and try to play hot potato with your LP and complete your quest once it gets into each pool.
skill ups are random, but are actually higher for gardening than other quests, to offset the extra time it takes to garden. i’ve seen some people get 0.9 gardening skill from a run. plant rewards are lower than fishing/foraging because the main draw is supposed to be the jewels, but shvas runes and tears have a slightly higher drop rate again, due to the increased time it takes — Frisky Fox
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: This was an update Frisky shared a couple days after Hubert’s intro to Gardening mechanics. Want to highlight here that Shvas runes and tears have a slightly higher drop rate due to the stamina consumption mechanics and taking a bit longer as opposed to Fishing/Foraging.
gardening is a tricky quest to balance, because we have so many plans for the long term rewards that we will use the quest fund for, and the more jewels that feed into the quest fund, the more we can give out in rewards. That said, we also have to take game theory into consideration. what rewards will drive the behavior we want to see (more people buying and using gardeners). We want to make sure that the different professions are balanced. And we want to make sure that people can have a positive ROI from their heroes and quests. Sometimes raising rewards higher will spur more in-game economic activity and result in MORE funds sent to the quest fund, rather than less. So we will be constantly monitoring and balancing as needed. As higher level gardening quests start to come out, we will likely set the lower ones back to the original intended amount, encouraging people to grind their heroes to those higher levels to get those higher rewards. — Frisky Fox
^SAMICHPUNCH NOTE: reading between the lines here — some may be disappointed with the amount of Jewel they can farm from this quest because its largely based off of how much LP you have staked in the gardens. If you have a very small amount staked there, you will only be able to farm very small amounts here. NOTHING THE TEAM HAS SAID CONFIRMS THIS, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more tweaks to this over time, so as always, you need to remain nimble and ready to adapt your strategy and stay up to date on all the latest developments.
QUESTIONS FROM THE COMMUNITY ANSWERED
With all of that said, I will open the floor to some questions. I am excited to see all of you trying out this new quest, and appreciate the patience you all have had as we have worked longer than announced to get it ready. Love you guys! — Hubert
Does stamina replenish while hero is gardening?
No. It will only start replenishing when you finish the quest. — Hubert
Will the rewards be from your lps yield?
The rewards come from the quest pool. They are not tied to the emission rate of the gardens in any way. This means that even after all JEWEL has been minted, there will continue to be a profitable reason to provide liquidity to the DEX. — Hubert
Can you send 6 heroes gardening at once like in fishing or foraging?
You can sent 6 heroes to different gardens, but only one hero per garden at a time. You will need to do individual transactions for each hero, unfortunately. — Hubert
Will mining be setup similar to gardening? Similar to how foraging/fishing are similar to each other?
Mining will have a similar mechanism in terms of gains per tic.
Will heroes in the Queue for gardening (not questing just queueing) still recover stamina?
Oh yes, I forgot to mention queuing. You will be able to queue heroes to take over gardening after your last hero is finished. As far as I understand how we have the contract set up, the stamina your hero has is locked in the moment you queue them up. I’ll talk to Fox to see if there is any leeway we can provide there, but no promises. — Hubert
Can we have more details about the gardening plants?
There are three of them. One looks very orby.
Hubert Cumberdale do we pick the garden pools ourselves or will they be randomly selected if we quest multiple at once?
You can’t quest multiple at once in the interface. You select the garden you want and the hero to send on it. — Hubert
Hubert Cumberdale you stated: Like fishing and foraging, your chances of receiving tears and runes are increased if you have the Gardening gene. — — “gene”. do you mean “gene” as in including recessive genes? or Gardening Profession skill level?
I mean gene. The green text on the Profession name on your hero card. Skill level does not impact drop rates of those items. — Hubert
Where can we find the balance of the quest pool in order to plug in reward pool?
That info should be released with the release of the quest. — Hubert
What made you decide to take this approach to burning stamina instead of the approach used in fishing/foraging?
I like variety and this made more sense to me in context of what the hero is actually doing. — Hubert
Is there a concern with Gardening/Mining heroes leveling up slower than their Fishing/Foraging counterparts?
XP gain formulas were looked at to try to ensure that a similar amount of XP is earned with this quest despite the additional time it takes. However, there were limitations to what we could do here so we’ll need to rebalance XP gains with future higher level Gardening quests to keep the levels about equivalent. — Hubert
Will this mechanism of gains per tick be JEWEL coming from the quest rewards, or from locked jewel? I believe you mentioned before there will be 3 tiers depending upon how much locked jewel you have, with miners running around the clock. Of those tiers, you mentioned 5J as being the first tier (iirc). is that correct? for mining btw
I’m going to not answer any further mining questions today, but I’ll answer this. For mining it would be from your locked JEWEL, and the reward structure doesn’t scale with the amount of locked JEWELs that you have as long as you meet the threshold amount. — Hubert
Does this mean its better to be heavy in one garden pool than spread over multiple?
That is a little tricky to answer. In theory, if you have the same value spread across multiple pools vs that same amount in just one, you should get the same amount of JEWEL rewards. However, this is a little trickier than that because the allocations applied to each pool are different and the amount you could control in that pool compared to what is already in there is also different. I think optimization will be a challenging thing since the pools are ever changing with player behavior. — Hubert
Will the jewel be locked that you garden?
No. — Hubert
How did you go about balancing jewel per stamina compared to other quests? Seems hard to do. Especially for whales in LP
This is very challenging to accomplish because you are right, people with a large amount of LP control will be able to receive greater rewards. My philosophy on this is to just make sure each quest has something for everyone, and to try to make things as balanced as I can while still achieving the goal that I want the quest to meet. — Hubert
If you put a gardener against an LP pool that you have provided liquidity to, will Jewel be the only rewards? Or will it be Jewel + potential items as well?
The items are always available. — Hubert
Great explanation on the mechanics on gardening. So once your stam is depleted the hero sits there without regaining stam until you compete? Then they start regenerating again
I answered a similar question to this before, but this is a slightly different angle. Currently, stamina will not begin to recover until you complete the quest. However, I will talk to Fox to see if we can change this. No promises though. — Hubert
1. What is the minimum amount of LP staked so we can get jewel rewards when gardening?
2. Could you tell us more about XP gains when gardening? Currently fishing is doing better in terms of XP gains in comparison with foraging — what can we expect for gardening?
1. Whatever amount is necessary to ensure that the formula doesn’t go below the number of decimals included for the JEWEL token (18 decimals).
2. I thought we had fixed XP gains for foraging… Hmm.. I will have to look at that again. Anyway, Gardening will be similar gains to what you can get with the others at first, but it doesn’t grow as much as Foraging and Fishing can with skill and stats. We’ll have to address that each time we release a higher level quest to ensure the gap doesn’t get too big between them. — Hubert
How does the launch bonus affect XP rewards vs. Jewel rewards vs. item rewards? Are they different?
The launch bonus only affects JEWEL rewards. Alright guys. It has been fun. I wasn’t expecting such a mountain of stamps from all of you. I look forward to seeing you all start Gardening once it is out! Happy Holidays — Hubert
are the higher lvl quests going to require only hero lvl or will some quests be reserverd for legendary or mythic heros? thanks!
hero skill levels mostly, though there will be other requirements too, such as hero achievements (required to ‘unlock’ a quest before a hero can do it) — Frisky Fox
by “skill level” do you mean profession level? if that’s the case could you see the potential where a quests would require skill level from multiple professions?
yes i can see that being possible down the line. though there will also be other professions in the future as well relating to crafting — Frisky Fox
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