DeFi Kingdoms Gardens and Gardening Quests — What we know so far
If this is your first time reading anything about DeFi Kingdoms, you might want to check out my previous article where I explain in-depth what this game is and why I’m involved.
But if you’re already up to speed or you’ve already read my last article then let’s get right into the subject at hand — the gardens and gardening quests.
First things first
If you have not yet played DeFi Kingdoms (DFK), here is a quick step-by-step to get you up and running. The first option is just to follow this guide which will cover the basics. Or…
- Set up Metamask and get it configured for the Harmony ONE blockchain.
2. Buy some ONE tokens from Binance, Kucoin, or wherever quality cryptos are sold.
3. Send those ONE tokens to your Metamask wallet, switch to the Harmony main network and visit https://game.defikingdoms.com/#/
The Gardens
The gardens on DFK are essentially a gamified collection of liquidity pools (LPs) and the basics of using the gardens are quite simple. First, visit the gardens and then look at the “seed box” which will show you how much interest is currently being paid to participants.
In the small red box you will see JEWEL-MIS, which is the name of this pair. What that means is you put up some amount of Jewel and a matching amount of MIS (you can get all these tokens in exchange for ONE at the trader in the marketplace). For example, let’s say Jewel is trading for $8 and MIS is trading for $0.80. If you put in 10 Jewel, that’s $80 worth of Jewel. You would need to match that with $80 worth of MIS so that would be 100 MIS.
The reward for doing this is some new Jewel tokens which will be delivered at a certain mix of locked and unlocked rewards. Right now that mix is 69% locked and 31% unlocked. The APR is quite high, 868% today.
The reason the game is willing to pay you this rate is because they want liquidity in their DEX for others to swap with. Without liquidity everything sort of gums up doesn’t work.
So let’s say you decide to enter this LP, what do you do?
First you’ll want to visit the trader in the marketplace and swap some tokens for an equal amount in USD of MIS and Jewel. Then, visit the druid to buy “seeds” for your garden.
Now once you click on the Druid select “buy seeds” and then choose Jewel and MIS as your two inputs.
Alright, this is the part where you will need to approve these contracts if it’s your first time using the pool. You will see the button says “Approve” instead of “Supply” if approval is needed.
Now you input the amount you want to deposit, which for our example in 100 MIS which is worth slightly more than 10 Jewel right now (the Dex will do the math for you). And then you hit supply.
What you’re putting in here are MIS and Jewel, and what you’re getting is a new token that will show up as “JEWEL-LP” or something similar in your Metamask. This is the token that proves you own a share of the pool, AKA your seed.
Sweet! Let’s head to the garden next and plant this bugger!
Back in the gardens, select the “Seed Box” and find that pair we just added, JEEWL-MIS. Locate the deposit button and select “max.” Confirm in your Metamask.
At this point, your LP tokens in your wallet will go to zero and you will be ready to start collecting rewards. Each day (or whenever you want) you can visit the “Harvest” chest in the gardens, wait for the “View Harvest” button to show up and you can start claiming your Jewel rewards.
Which seeds should I plant?
This is a slightly tricky question because you may have a better understanding or have more faith in some tokens than others. This matters because if the price of the two tokens in the pools diverge then arbitrageurs will swap on the Dex in order to bring the prices back in line. The only issue for you is that you can incur impermanent loss which could reduce what you pull out of the pool at a later date. More on impermanent loss (IL) can be found here.
The second factor to consider is that some pools pay a higher APR than others. Finally, if you want to avoid the risk of IL all together you can put your Jewel into a stablecoin LP such as UST, BUSD or 1USDC. So there’s some options for you to ponder.
How do I exit a pool?
If you want to withdraw your funds you should be aware that there are penalties for withdrawing in a short period of time, but after about a month they drop to a fraction of 1% following this schedule.
The mechanics of exiting the pool are to visit the Druid in the marketplace and select “manage” in the “Your Liquidity” section. Then simply split the liquidity out that you want. 100% will mean you withdraw all your holdings.
Gardening Quests and the Master Gardener
Now onto the fun stuff! If you have a hero you may have noticed that each hero has one of four possible professions. They might have mining, fishing, gardening, or foraging.
Shown above is the back side of a hero card with Fishing, which you will notice is in green text. Now technically all heroes can fish. But some heroes are just better at it than others. The same can be said for each profession.
Today is December 16th, 2021 and as of today the foraging and fishing quests are live, but the mining and gardening quests are not. The way fishing and foraging work, is you simply click on the quest giver and then select some heroes to send out and quest. After a while they will come back a bit wiser (with more XP) and hopefully some cool items in tow!
Here you can see some items gathered from questing. These were all gained from fishing and foraging. Some of them have functionality already, and others will get more interesting in future game updates (so you might want to hang onto them for now at least).
The stone with writing on it for example is used to level up your heroes and the blue egg is used to flex on other DFK nerds (and it might even hatch into something one day).
But the focus of this article is what we know about the gardening profession quests and how they interact with the garden, which should be launching tomorrow! So what will the gardening quests do for you? Let’s look at the documentation.
Essentially what gardening heroes do is juice the returns of your liquidity pools, which I think is awesome! What I take from the description here is that you first need a hero that has some stamina, which is sort of like energy for doing quests (stamina regens every eight hours IRL). Gardening heroes are more efficient with their stamina when gardening and this is boosted by their wisdom, vitality and how high their gardening profession has been leveled up.
I believe that you will be able to allocate one hero to each LP that you have funds allocated in. So if you’re in three gardens then you could put one gardener to tend to each “plant” per se. But I could be wrong on this, and perhaps only one gardening hero can attend to the entire garden at once.
It sounds like you can also have your hero tend to someone else’s garden but I’m not sure what this means. Maybe you literally send them to someone else’s kingdom? Or maybe that means I can tend the JEWEL-MIS garden even if I don’t have money in the LP? Either way, it seems like we’ll be finding out very soon.
Heroes that are good at gardening
So then, if some heroes are better at gardening, which ones are they? Luckily some community members made this chart below which can help us out.
The best natural gardener is a Sage, followed closely by a Paladin and then a Summoner. However, those three classes are all advanced classes and in general they are more expensive to purchase. The best basic hero is a Priest which is actually tied for best basic gardener with a Wizard.
How to purchase a good gardening hero
So if you are looking to buy a hero to do some gardening, you could go to the Tavern and see what’s up for sale. Here’s how I search for a hero with a particular profession (thank you Satsdart).
We want a gardening hero so let’s visit the tavern, hit “reset” to clear any existing filters, and then on the second tab select “gardening.” Then on the first tab select Sage, Paladin, Summoner, Priest and Wizard. These classes will have natural bonuses to gardening. Now hit apply and let’s look at the results!
Ok, now we have our initial list to pick from. But how can we tell which of these is the best deal for the price? The next step is to enter each hero using their ID into Kingdom Watch.
The first hero there has the number 70358, Leondra Plainguard. Let’s do a query on this hero and see how good she is at gardening.
Now this is interesting because you will notice that this particular hero is both the best at gardening on a relative and absolute score basis. The % of Max tells you that this hero is 79.7% maxed out. You can find heroes that are better, but for the price this doesn’t seem like a bad deal.
The thing to watch out for is if a hero you look up has a highest score and a highest relative in two different categories. That would be a negative (like a warrior that has fishing, he will never be the best fisherman). You should check out a few and see where you are comfortable on the price/quality curve.
Other things to consider
Heroes have a bunch of utility now and they will have even more later on. If you are only purchasing a hero to do gardening quests, then the method above should be just fine. But if you want to battle, summon, sell the hero later on, then it does get more complicated. For example, if you really want to get into the theory crafting you’d be thinking about:
- What the heroes dominant and recessive genes are
- How many summons they have left
- What their quality is (common, uncommon, rare, legendary, mythic)
- Which other classes they would summon with
- If they are advanced or basic
- How much XP they have already
- Where their stat bonuses are
And the list just keeps going. But alas, I will reserve my commentary for another article in the interest of time.
Conclusion
Gardening quests are launching probably tomorrow and that means you will be able to increase your rewards from the gardens. This directly relates to the flow of crypto in your wallet on a daily basis so it’s worth paying attention to.
We don’t know how much the boost will be, but we do know that better gardeners (and possibly having more gardeners) will be better.
If you do not yet have a gardener, check out my recent post on Twitter because I’m giving away two of them in the next 24-hours!
Cheers,
Hans
