Land questions from a potential buyer

I hear people talk about land in different ways so i want to know if i got this correct.

A SIM is the same as a 65 square meter land ?
or
IS a SIM a whole server and a 65k is just a parcel on that server?

If you purchase an island are you purchasing its own server to run it to or is it shared?

If it's a shared server how many SIMs or 65km plots per server?

Does a linked prim = 1 prim or the total of all the prims in it when counting against land limits ?

Why is a 65k in mainland only 195 but an island is 295?

Do you get some kind of remote desktop into a server?

If you create an estate and SELL land out from it how is it you have persmission to delete there stuff like i see some covenants say ?

A linked prim does not count as one prim but it is one object.

Mainland sims are class 4 whereas most new estates are class 5 (I believe)

a sim is a region. a region is 65536 sq meters. however a region can be divided into smaller parcels.

When you purchase an island, you're paying for control over the sim. The sim can be sharing with up to 3 other sims at one time, on one piece of hardware (quad core, one region per core). The sims you share with can change at any time.

Linked prims are counted individually. 20 single prims is the same as one object with 20 linked prims. 20 prims is 20 prims, no matter how you term it.

Private Islands are more expensive because A) LL says you are getting more value (i.e. more control) over the region. B) LL wants to discourage island sales, they would prefer everyone lived on the mainland. C) They make more money that way.

Nope, no remote desktop. there is a screen in the viewer to access sim controls however.

You can't SELL Private Estate land. It's rental only. However the dialogs are throwbacks to Mainland sales, and still use the term sell. It's confusing and misleading.

Oh Oh Me! Me! I can answer the last question. You don't actually sell the land on an estate. You take a down payment and then actually rent the property out to the person.

I remember reading there is 4 Sims per server.

"CX"

Sim is 65536m2 - it's a region with its own set of estate parameters & name. I believe there are 4 sims per server (1 region per cpu or core?), and 4x as many if they are void sims. When you purchase a sim, you are purchasing just that region, and will share a server with 3 other sims/regions.

I'm not sure of the official reason for the difference in price between mainland and private island sims, but I would imagine it's to do with how a mainland region price increase would affect tier (private islands also used to be 195/mnth) - if LL increased mainland region tier to 295, they would also have to increase all the tier levels. On private islands you of course don't have that problem, as you can't own part of a sim/region.

If you 'sell' land in your estate, the rules are totally up to you, and LL will not interfere in your running of them (as long as you pay the tier, and stay within TOS), but of course there are certain things one would hope you wouldn't do that are dictated by your morals.


Both private islands and mainland sims run on both class 4 & 5; it just depends when the sim was set up - the class 5's being more recent.

Just a couple of clarifications on this excellent post:

-- An island actually is that - there are no other sims bordering it unless you buy them and make an archipelago or continent yourself. Thus, you can build/use right out to the edge without fearing someone else's awful sim beyond your border, unlike mainland.

-- There are landlords who claim to "sell" private island land. In reality, this is a usage fee paid upfront - the sim owner pays tier to the Lindens, and those who rent or "buy" on an island pay rent to the sim owner. The tenants of some such landlords have the right to "resell" their land when they leave.
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Very close.. All sim servers are (now that class-3 hardware is gone) twin dual-core. It adds up the same but it's two dual-core CPUs, not one quad-core.

can someone explain void SIMs more? Is this something thats cheaper than a normal SIM ? How do you know if you are getting a void or real SIM?

void sim = opensim?

No they're LL sims on the grid, but I think they run 16x per server. You can only purchase them as a set of four, and they have to be attached to an ordinary sim you already own. You will be able to tell the difference by checking the number of prims the sim supports; I believe a void sim only allows 1875 prims (15k for a normal sim) - they're intended to create 'buffers' between normal estate sims, though some people do use them in a similar way to normal sims.

A void sim is a sim with 65536m² of land but has only 1875 prims.

You can't buy 1 void alone from linden labs. They are sold by 4 at the same price as one normal sim. You have then in total 7500 prims and 262 144m² of land.

On one serer can be 4 standard sims or a combination of standard and void sims.
3 standard and 4 void or 2 standard and 8 void, ...

A little bit of clean-up: Some Mainland regions are running on Class 5 hardware (most of the new continents, and scattered spots elsewhere), and some Estate islands are still on Class 4s. Some older islands are still "grandfathered" at US$195/mo (I think); the price increase to US$295 was roughly coincidental with the switch-over to Class 5 hardware, but that's not exact nor guaranteed.

As Darien said, the assignment of sims to hunks of hardware ("servers" can change at any time, and even move between hosting locations; it's only very rarely productive to think about the server hardware at all.

Extending what Nika said about "islands"--there's a performance benefit to being an isolated island because agents in neighboring sims "see" some of the content in each other's regions--not just visually, but also chat, sensors, spatial audio, etc., have to be able to span those sim borders. If there's nothing there, there's nothing to have to share.

Oh, and the naming confusion: a "void sim" is another name for "OpenSpace sim"; "opensim" is... something else.

For what it's worth some of the newer mainland sims are class 5 as well.

ALL new sims are class 5.

Depends where the sim is. Many of the sims in the southernmost continent of Jeogeot are Class 5 sims. Nautilus, Corsica, and the unnamed eastern continent (Satori, as per the vote of a few people in here) are all Class 5.

oops! That's correct.

So is there a way to know if a mainland sim (say you're looking to buy land in sim "Alpha" is really a class 4 or class 5? I ask out of curiosity only

You can't see it in the sl software. You have to contact the lindens for it.