Land Mechanics

How does land work in Frogland?

Location, Location, Location

Acquiring a lilyPAD is an inherently competitive activity in the same way people will place bids on one house IRL — a bidding war. Some may find a specific location desirable and be aware that others may want it for the same reasons, and may be willing to trade or pay more for a location due to proximity to — whatever: a social hub, or to a Citadel, or to a center of commerce. Or, fuck the glamour, what you may want is a location in a desirable ecology — you might be a tree person or a desert person. Or, the truth is that you will live anywhere, as long as your friends are nearby.

Some of us may look at Land as an in-game economic opportunity, and will assess a plot based purely on its concentration of high-demand resources, or scarce resources, or both. Some land is hot because of where it is, and some is hot because of what it contains.

Land Resources

Each type of land has resources that can be extracted. Further, those resources will be renewed intermittently, and can also change over time depending on environmental conditions. Seasons, natural processes, cosmic events, and even metaphysical factors can change the land’s resources. Think of these variances as the same realities that early civilizations had to contend with when planning their lives. But instead of life or death, the fluctuations influence risk and possible reward.

Land resources will be extractable in the form of tokens that players can collect, exchange, and use in the world either as tradable assets, collectibles, or as components to craft new and special items only obtainable by combining specific resource tokens.

The Planning Commission has multiple offices, one for each of the seven biomes in Frogland. All lilyPADs in Frogland fall under the purview of one of these biomes. Recall that “LilyPAD” is an equivalent term for “A Plot of Land”. These biomes include forest, mountain, desert, urban and other types. Some resources will be more likely to appear in certain biomes – similarly certain biomes are more likely to have an abundance of a certain resource than others, or a lack thereof.

For example, wood is more likely to appear and be abundant on a lilyPAD in the forest biome rather than in the desert. However, water on the coastline may be salty and unusable for crops or crafting. So “plenty of water” can still be largely unuseful without a Frog to build a desalination improvement facility on that lilyPAD, and thus needs to interact with the Planning Commission for a work permit.