Thoughts on Terraforming

I have messed up land with terraforming in the past, maybe its a right of passage. But, it is part the basis for my current feelings on terraforming.

Terraforming should be done gently. Try to work with the mountains, dont just destroy them to suit your needs. You may decide to move on and the mountians are very difficult, if not impossible to re-terraform.

Dont terraform land you dont plan on using. Buying land, terraforming it, then releasing it is a bit frustrating for the neighbors.

This is where it is personal. I have land on a peninsula I have been very happy with, my neighbor shares my view on this set up. Three times now I have had to rebuild the it into a peninsula because someone thought my land would be better as an island. Public land was bought, terraformed into water, then released. I guess I have to own this land to prevent this from happening again. Oh well.

I may give up the land altogether, who knows. I just dont get why public land needs to be terraformed when there is no intention of it being used in the first place.

The forums have been pretty nasty the last week or so, I am not intending to add to that mess. I'm just trying to point out that your terraforming effects everyone, please be gentle out there.

you don't actually have to level those hills or fill in those holes, just float your floor above them and provide scirting blocks underneath with an attractive stone texture. it looks nice and the land is still somewhat naturalized if you pack up and leave.

yes you paid for it and can bulldoze if you like. it distresses me though to see huge expanses of flat land instead of rolling hills and valleys. but that's just me.

I have to admit I am one of those people that buys land, terraforms it then releases it. Ever since Mocha came online I have been rebuilding mountainsides and filling rectangular pits and restoring river systems. I have always thought of it as a kinda public service.

Jericho, I thought the same thing, when I tried it once. "Once" being the key word, because I ended up pissing of several people. Oops. I'm not likely to try that again.

I have taken to filling in unsightly pits. Uhm, pits in the ground I mean.

Eggy teaches a very good terraforming class if anyone is interested. Terraforming, in my opinion, is an art form in and of itself. It's hard to get thngs back to the way they were before you bull dozed, but it is possible. If you don't feel confident enough, either build around it, or ask someone who knows how to terraform to do it for you.

I actually bought into the center of lusk, because of a linden-owned mountain ridge there that i like, and that *WON'T* be terraformed away any time soon. Over the last few months i've actually been slowly expanding my reach across the center of lusk to preserve more of the back side of that mountain ridge, and several rather attractive ponds in the immediate vicinity i didn't want to see going away.

Its worth the couple of hundred extra taxes (which my rating bonus covers anyway) for me to preserve that part of the landscape really as its in my opinion one of the best looking remaining spots anywhere near the middle of the SL world.



What really bothers me is by in large people only terraform *DOWN*...flattening out mountians or digging giant pits... this sorta 'erodes' the whole SL landscape down into a pretty generic flat with occasionaly glaringly fake square lakes kinda mess... Here's for more linden maintained geography like in the center of lusk to keep the world from totally flatening out ;P

There does seem to be a trend towards destroying high ground, and raising land out of water. Federal is actually a nice mixture of high ground and waterfront property. I bought some land I was not using also to preserve it from being terraformed into nothingness after watching part of a cliff be destroyed. A former neighbor who had a house on the edge of that cliff decided to gouge out a giant hole so a store could be put underground, with rather unpleasant results to the land around it. When they ultimately left Federal, there was a huge crater left where the store had been. Thankfully, someone came along and actually built a beautiful cliffside home in the crater. Hopefully no further destruction of the land will occur. When I built my hotel, I built it to suit the land underneath it, instead of the other way around - it sits on a hill, but part of the lobby is sunken, which hides the fact that there is actually land protruding under part of it. I hope more builds start to take advantage of the land they are on instead of just producing flat, generic land.

yeah thats what i tried to do by in large in lusk (part of the land was already flattened, but i kind of built the tree-house structure geometrically over it in a terraced manner to hide that)... but for instance my top observatory i've been workin on actually looks like its held on by a support beam built into the side of the mountain which is a pretty cool effect only doable with that kind of varied terrain

go to Tehama. There's a giant pit someone made then didn't build anything and banned everyone from the land. Been that way for several weeks.

If y'all check out Mauve, it has a hilly range running through it (it's too small to call it a mountain range). I own a patch of property up in the NW corner, between the Linden-owned stream and the Linden-owned hill range.

Like eltee, I built a platform partway up the hillside, perched on a couple of support pilings. The 'roof' is actually a series of masts and 'sails' planted above the platform, with anchor cables attached to the main mast and the bottom edges of the sails.

The only spot of terraforming that I did on this was a judicious bit of hillside lowering to give me more room on the platform without having to make the roof a ridiculous size.

It's a good thing it doesn't rain much in SL

I did the same in Tan really.. although the land I got already had a huge leveled chunk out of it. I tried to do a little to disguise the cutout since I'm not quite good enough at terraforming to make it more natural.

Oh, and come by sometime, it does rain at my place. ;)

yeah, i live in Slate now, and i did terraform just a tiny bit, mostly just so i could have SOME level spots in my house. But i was planning on re-making the hill there IF i ever decide to leave, before i resell it to the Slate Neighborhood association. The land around my house is still a hill, so i didn't really mess anything up. If anyone needs help on terraforming well, just IM me and i can help you out.

Last time I was on-line, a huge mountain was growing in Blue. Dozens of sorcerors apprentice type shovels were buzy digging away.

That was me
I raised my 1/4th of Blue as much as humanly possible before releasing it. People keep complaining about the land being too flat, so here you go, have a huge mountain to play with.
Chris made the cool animated shovel thingies. I gotta hand it to you, a land editing script is absolutely trivial to make and thus worth about zero L$ for all but the most uninformed player, but Chris did it in style
I've made my share of land editing scripts in the past, though I would never had thought of doing an army of animated shovels with particle effects.
Looks like something out of Fantasia

Well, someone bought it all...and immediately flat-topped your mountain.

I would've like to had a crack at a small parcel on the slope, but I'm not loaded with Lindenbucks, so I lose.

Guess I'll have to look for somewhere else to live, half my view is a 90 degree plane that has a smeared terrain texture on it.

Perhaps I should live underwater, I just don't know anymore.

*sigh*

That's a good idea Maxx
I wouldnt worry about the slope, that'll probably be fixed soon. It's not even supposed to be possible to do that, I have no idea what happened.

Nothing against your mountain, Eggy - I really think it is cool, but I didn't expect the southern slope to get totally cut vertical like that near the sim border.

Oh well, guess I know now, unless the current owner does something about it.

Which leads me to lament about not getting a mountain-top spot to begin with....waaaaaaa....it was like $32,000 L$

*sniff*

32k for land? That would get you one heck of a lot of it.
I didnt expect it to go vertical either since raising land usually limits us to a 45 degree slope but the new owners are probably going to remove most of the mountain soon.

In retrospect it was something like 32k for the entire plot of the mountain. At least when I discovered it had been bought in its entirety.

Thanks for IM-ing me in-world, I appreciated that. You should've joined us sledding down the hill!! Great fun.

Good luck on your casino managing experience.

Shh dont tell people how much money I got from releasing the land or they'll come asking me to lend them some

i resent that remark eggy. i would never ask you to lend me money. i'd demand that you give it to me outright with no strings attached. so there.

well not there. everybody here seems to like it here a lot better than they did there. i was never there so i don't really know. i am glad to be here though.