With the recent changes to soil and mine usage with Chapter 2, the value of the Surplus mechanic, and the incentive to share land with others for more cooperative gameplay, has plummeted. While this does not pose any innate risk to the game economy, it promotes a gameplay style for NFT Landowners which is counterproductive to the purpose of sharable access for lands. As such, there is currently little to no incentive for lands to be Public. In this feature request, I propose an new mechanic for NFT Lands which would provide value to Landowners, incentivizing communal gameplay, without re-adding perverse incentives or too strongly increasing the strength of Landowners, especially inactive ones.

This idea is centered on adding an Energy Tax system to cover the industries not affected by the Surplus system, which includes the following Industries:

This does not include the current industries covered by the Surplus mechanic. I find that the current surplus mechanic is "good enough" to not warrant extreme changes, especially with the single-use implementation of Chapter 2.

The core idea of the Energy Tax system is as follows:

An Energy cost spent on crafts within a given NFT land is stored in an "Energy Bank", up to a maximum capacity. This "Energy Bank" allows for NFT Landowners to subsidize the Energy they use within that given land, drawing from that pool.

With the "Energy Bank" system, Landowners are incentivized to continuously update and upgrade their Land's industries, remodeling it to capture as much activity as possible, as well as actively use their land. The "Energy Bank" only subsidizes energy use on the Land which stores the energy, favoring active Landowners. The "Energy Bank" should optimally only subsidize a % of the Landowner's energy usage on the land, as completely removing Energy Costs would promote awkward gameplay if their Energy Bar fills completely.

This new mechanic can be implemented in two possible ways:

For the given %, because of the frequency of energy use, this would likely be only .1-1%.

Each implementation has its Pros and Cons, but they both accomplish the same overall effect and either is favorable.

While I have neither provided exact implementation details nor more specific design reasoning for the sake of brevity, I would be happy to expand further on this concept.

Thank You.