Terraforming mainland for the NOT uninformed

I own a good sized chunk of granite mountainous/hilly mainland in an old sim. My grade goes from a max of about 56m at the top of the sim near the linden road. to 6m at the furthest edge bordering the protected water. Sea level is 20m. There's a good sized section that extends from about X80 to X128 or so where it's easy to be level. The beyond that, the really hilly area starts and the grade changes quickly as X values increase.

I know that's probably not really easy to follow.

I've been terraforming this land for years, going in all sorts of directions. I've used client tools, automatic gadgets, the land leveler script and that newer script that lets you adjust the size of the prim and its function. My point here is, I'm not a noob looking for flat green.

I LIKE my mainland. It's not crowded and laggy, and I don't have griefer problems to speak of. (Certainly not as bad as when I rented on estate property.)

Now I have a project where I need to even out a roughly 100 x 100 piece of the mountain area. I've got a little leeway as to what area I can use.

My question is, what terraforming tricks or tools do you use to to make the most of your +/- 4m? I'm not looking to make a table top, in fact, I want to dig some tunnels underneath. I'm just looking to start a dialog of terraforming tricks. Any suggestions?

You can have a lot of fun with a hilly lot, well, I did on mine anyways and there's a lot of dramatic potential to your building projects. What worked for me was to have rooms and outdoor spaces intermixed and flowing into each other linked by stairs so it was one largish complex. Some of the stairs would be very wide, while others running over long stretches would be interrupted with balconies and landings to make the space more visually interesting. Also, I created some nice walkways but sinking a flat prim into the ground and gradually exposing parts of it with the terrain tool to create stepping stones.

Well, I usually select the area I want to make flat, then lower it all the way down, then raise it all the way up so I can see what I'm dealing with.

Then I usually set the height somewhere in the middle and hit the "flatten" button several times until it won't go any flatter.

If it's not right, I'll raise or lower it a bit and flatten it again.

When its at the best height and flatness I want, I then hit the "smooth" button once. Maybe twice. This gets rid of any ugly looking rough edges and makes the area look more natural.

I'm a big fan of smooth. I like the sloping curves you can get out of it. Then again, I tend to build in the sky anyways.

When I bought my first mainland plot, I totally forgot that we only had 8m of play in the terraforming. The land had a pretty severe hill in it. So I ended up lowering it all as much as I could, then flattened it back up, and smoothed the mess out, then I sunk a fairly thick foundation block.. which allowed me to build what I wanted on a flat surface.

You might also keep in mind that nowadays, we have sculpties and quite a wide selection of megaprims. So if you can't teraform the shape to suit your design, you can always apply the ground/grass/rock textures to large sculpty prims.. and with a little luck, you can build the land of your dreams.

Feel lucky if you can even MAKE flat land... My mountainside lot goes from 40m by the road to 160m halfway up a shear cliff lol. Getting real good a terraced builds though

Yeah - mountains just don't want to terraform enough. 8 meters is not much to play around with when you have a really steep grade as I do now.

I'm further handicapped by insisting on trying to blend in with the surrounding plots by not leaving a sudden terrace. This is often futile.

But I too like my parcel. The view is great.