Terraforming Land help

Alright I finally got sick of the impeach Bush signs hovering around my property and agreed to do a switch wtih a club owner in that sim for a similiar plot in the next sim over.

Well It's a hill slope which means I need to level it out which seem to be taking an awful long time to do unless I want to do something tacky looking with my floors or build a skybox.

So is there a way to auto level a plot swiftly or am I stuck with the slow and steady method?

When you first enter the edit menu, by clicking Edit Land the entire plot will be highlighted with a yellow box. You can click the spot that says flatten land, and then there is a button under the (small,medium,large) box that says Apply to Selection. Click this and the land will start to flatten. Click it alot and the plot will be as flat as it will go in seconds. You can also drag the yellow box yourself over specific areas when the Select Land option is clicked on the menu. You then modify it by clicking back on what you want to do, in your case Flatten Land. Then, you click the Apply to Selection button a bunch of times again. It saves you a bunch of time.

While I'm at it, some tricks with dealing with uneven ground. Some hills will never flatten out completely, but you can work with them a bit. I tend to start out by using Revert Land first with the method above to see where the land naturally lies. You then know you have +-4meters to work from there. That is about 4 avatar heights of possible change. I then go to Smooth Land normally, to iron out the rinkles a little bit, if the plot looks too choppy for my taste. When you start, plan to build against the rising ground instead of on top of it.

You can select a boxed area of where it looks like it will flatten by clicking Select Land, then dragging the yellow box over an area. You can then click on Flatten Land again, and use the Apply to Selection button. This will flatten out only the land in that box. Now if you are lucky that flat box is big enough to put a flat floor on.

Alot of the time, you will have some dips and raises in the ground still. This is alright, the easiest way of dealing with it is to make thick floors. Your floors can be up to 10 meters thick, which can account for an entirely new floor level. On a steap cliff, I'll make a smaller flat area below to make a first floor, and then build thick blocks behind it to support a larger second floor on top of both the first floor and a flat area higher up. If you can't lower land far enough to make another floor, there is also the possibility of just making the floors thick all the way across the bottom of one floor, and having a porch and stairs in front of the house leading to the front door. The floor you walk on does not have to be flush with the ground.

If you must have a peice hanging off the edge, you can also use this opportunity to make pillars. I like to twist cubes or prisms up as far as they will twist, and stretch them out to 10 meters tall. I then take the vine texture and put it on a cube slightly bigger than the solid texture pillar. If you type the numbers into the positions, they will line up perfectly, it gives a nice effect.

All this is assuming you want realistic builds. Remember that Second Life does not use physics on everything. You can have your house floating 10 meters off the ground and it won't fall. If you are worried that none of this is possible with your prefab, you might try joining the Builders of Second Life group to IM the group and see if anyone would be interested in adding onto a prefab you have or building you a house in exchange for some $L. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people there that would be willing to build for the right price.

Thank you for the tips. I finally got everything as level as possible and now I might not sell my parcel afterall. Shame since that would have fed my AV collecting habits for about five minutes