Second Life: Finding a Mushroom Garden

I might never have brought land if it wasn't for the illness pixies. Writing is generally a really bad idea when I'm ill. Coherence is for other people.

That puts into context how easy it is to buy land in Second Life. It just isn't easy to find out how easy it is. Now is a good time to find out, because many people are selling and not many are buying. It's time to get in quick while people are panicking about the recession.


Renting Private Land

Shortly after my post about shopping for skins, I started renting a piece of land. This didn't work out well. Renting costs more, I had to log in to put the rent in a rent meter, and the covenant* said I had to build a house. My heart wasn't in house building.


Buying Land on the Mainland

So there I was, ill and looking for something mindless to do. It's worth a mention here about paying for land. If you have a paid account (rather than the free one), you can have 512 sq meters of land as part of that without any extra charges. Yay! If I'd realised that earlier, I'd have brought land much sooner.

I started checking out land for sale in the Second Life search**. The wonders of real estate sales pitches hit me. It's a veritable wave of carefully worded comments. Some might even be true.

• 'Beautiful plot' - There are many terrain tyes on the mainland. If it's a nice one, such as green grass, the seller usually says 'green plot'. When they say it's beautiful but not why, take care. It probably means it's ugly grey stone. If you want to live in stoneworld, this might be the plot for you.
• 'Beautifully terraformed' - This means they used the terrain edit tool and hit 'flatten land' to make it flat. Don't pay any extra to have beautifully terraformed land... it's not difficult to do.
• 'Next to protected ocean' - Protected areas are ones belonging to the Lindens (the high overlords of Second Life). No one can build on them. It sounds nice, being next to a protected ocean. Wide ocean views and all that. What they don't tell you is you're on the continental shelf, under the water. Next to the protected ocean for sure, but not the sandy beach you might have imagined. Out of many protected ocean plots I visited, only one was on land next to the ocean.
• 'Next to road' (also called main road or Linden road) - Roads are also protected and people wander up and down them. A road is a great way to get visitors and you know your roadish neighbour won't build something ugly on the land. It's a road. It doesn't need furniture or a house.
  
  There are many plots genuinely next to the road. There are also those where road is a bit of a creative description. It means it's next to an empty space belonging to the Lindens, which may or may not be a road at some point in the future. It might also become a doughnut shop for all the seller knows.

So after finding myself underwater numerous times, or looking for the road-that-wasn't, I finally found a piece of land. Green grass, a PG area and next to a road. There's also a player community down the road (in Chilbo... *waves to any Chilbo people Googling themselves*). Even better, I found another plot next door (which one of my family brought). The great thing about your family as neighbours is you can scowl at them if they build an ugly concrete cube. Cutting down the number of sides that could be cubified helps... less sides to block out with screens if your neighbours have ugly houses.


Mushroom Gardens Ahoy!

I brought my land*** and the mushroom planting began. After buying my first bit, I also brought the part behind. You can see this on my top down diagram (as well as my family neighbour).



You'll notice some of the lines don't look like I put them there. You can tell Second Life to show land boundaries****, which is highly useful when you're buying/decorating.

Feel free to drop by. The Second Life bookmark is here (requires Second life running to use): Polenth's Mushroom

My exploits in decoration are another story, but for now, you're welcome to come and feed my ducks.



-

* This is the equivalent of signing an agreement in real life to say your grass will be a certain height and you'll always wash your windows on Tuesday. Second Life agreements tend to include things like the theme of the area. The mainland is covenant-free (all the bits I've visited have been anyway).

** You click the search button on the bottom of the screen, go to the 'land sales' tab and set up the search for mainland plots. This should have been obvious, but I didn't notice that tab while searching. Which makes me think I'm probably not the only one...

*** To buy, you bring up the land information (right click on the land for the menu, then select 'about land'). Click on the 'buy land' button. The asking price goes to the person selling it and you'll be told if you'll be paying any money to the Lindens (if you go over your 512 square meters, there will be a small monthly fee).

**** In the 'view' menu, select 'property lines'. It's that simple. Red lines mean someone owns it, orange means it's for sale and green means you own it. Those are the main ones. You can find some interesting plots just by flying around looking for orange boundaries. There are some for sale opposite me, at the time of writing this post.