Newbie Land Buying questions.

Hello. Second day on SL and I'm already hooked. I upgraded to premium and added about L$8000 to my account. I have spent two days reading tutorials and I think I'm ready to buy/rent some land but I have tons of questions.

-Is it worthwhile buying land that is advertised as "New continent" ? There are alot that aren't even drawn out on the map.

-how high up can I build on my land?

-What is (2B)?

-what is class 5?

-what is Ninja or Pirate Land?

-Is it a better idea to rent a space for a week or two until I find a great spot? I don't really want to spend two weeks searching for a new home. I feel homeless in this game right now and I really need to settle down.

edit: one more thing. Is there any way to search for the estate rentals by price? They all seem to put the price to $1 and I cannot search by price with the search tool.

Anyone newbie land buyer tips would be very much apreciated

Since you upgraded to premium, you should probably focus your purchasing power on mainland. Buying island land as a premium member, for your home, is pointless otherwise. That is, unless you want to put a business on mainland. Where you buy mainland doesn't matter much, but there are a host of newer sims on the southern continent and the new eastern continent that are technically faster than the older ones. You can build as high as about 768m, generally speaking. 750 is a good rule of thumb as to where to stop.

You don't NEED to have a home while you're looking for land, although renting isn't a bad idea. You should be mindful that if you are only looking for 512m2, that the 117 prims per parcel doesn't go very far. If you have a house that is more than about 30 prims, decorating could be tough, depending on what you want.

And yes, you can filter your searching for mainland or estate land by price. You need to use the land sales search and check the boxes for price and size, and the filter on the left for the type of land to isolate mainland or estate.

I will put in a plug for my own stuff, merely as an option. I have a new sim that I'm developing. There are rentals as well as some lots for sale. It will be predominantly residential and so far it's pretty nice, and you have some nice neighbors in there already. The sim is Vyacheslav. It's not complete, and is a work in progress. More walkways and trees are coming, as are more rental units. Feel free to take a look and IM me if you have any questions. I get offline IMs and will respond. Thanks.

Welcome to Second Life, Phrankie. Let me take your questions one by one:

-Is it worthwhile buying land that is advertised as "New continent" ? There are alot that aren't even drawn out on the map.

New continent is land that has been released recently. The advantages to it are that it's new, still fairly open, and all the sims on it are Class 5 servers (the meaning of that last one I'll deal with when I hit that question). The biggest drawback is you really can't tell how the sim you settle in will develop. You may luck out and all the rest of the parcels in the sim will be bought by people who build peaceful residences, or you may end up with a laggy, sim-filling club or casino next door. If you buy land on one of the more established sims on one of the older continents you can get more of a feel for what the neighborhood is like ... although things can change rapidly in SL so that's no guarantee it'll stay that way.

-how high up can I build on my land?

I believe the building ceiling is 765 meters.

-What is (2B)?

Not sure. 2B or not 2B ...?

-what is class 5?

There are three types of servers that the sims run on. The newest and fastest are the Class 5s. The older sims tend to be Class 4s and Class 3s. The higher the number, the faster the server. According to Linden Lab, there's not a whole lot of performance difference between Class 4s and Class 5s. The 5s are just a little better at handling scripts and the like. You may notice a performance difference, you may not.

-what is Ninja or Pirate Land?

Ummm ... depends on who you talk to. There's a current issue with a few players using landbots to buy land. Some people, including at least one Linden, claim they give land dealers an unfair advantage. Ninja land and Pirate land is land that has been purchased for resale by landbots. A lot of people, myself included, advocate boycotting land sold by landbot users, but that's a decision you'll have to make for yourself. There are a lot of threads in the forum about landbots as they're a hot topic at the moment.

-Is it a better idea to rent a space for a week or two until I find a great spot? I don't really want to spend two weeks searching for a new home. I feel homeless in this game right now and I really need to settle down.

Again, this is your choice. I wouldn't recommend grabbing the first parcel of land that catches your eye, but I don't think you need to take a week or two to find something. Some people would recommend abandoning the idea of buying land altogether and just renting, others would tell you to avoid renting and buy your own land. (I'll ignore the whole "there's no such thing as real land buying in SL" issue). Get a number of opinions from a variety of people and then decide for yourself. One thing I would recommend, however, is that you take a good look at land listings using the land search tool and familiarize yourself with the going price of land at the moment so you don't end up grossly overpaying if you do decide to go the buying route.

Renting is great... except for one major problem. You can never be sure that the land owner won't just pick up and leave one day... and they don't give back your stuff and don't give you a refund. That kind of thing happens all the time. Happened to me when I was renting a small shop. I shouldn't have paid that month in advance, as I only had the shop for half the month and lost all the stuff I had setup on it. Never heard from the land owner again.

Thank you for taking the time to write such detailed answers. You guys have made me like SL even more!!

How can you lose your stuff? It should be returned to you automatically.

Land owners do have the ability to delete or auto-return objects.

I created everything with ownership set to the landowners group (otherwise it would keep auto-returning to me)... so when he cleared it out, he must have just deleted it instead of returning it. Anyway, didn't lose too much... i was more upset about losing half my rent payment.

You can't create things with ownership set to your landowner's group. You can identify a created object as associated with that group, but the ownership is still yours unless you actually deed it to the group. So when it was deleted, it should have returned to your Lost & Found.

But note that what you are discussing here is renting mall space, not renting land, and the two are very different. You are talking about paying for the right to use a little corner of someone's land to put things. The original poster was asking about renting land. This is very different. The person who rents land has all the abilities of a normal landowner, and doesn't have to set objects to any group.

If a land owner deletes the object it is gone, set to a group or not.us On the other hand, if the land owner return or auto returns the object it goes into you lost and found.us

Not true.

If a land owner deletes an item of yours, in theory, copyalbe items will get deleted, no copy items will get returned. In my experience, ANY item a land owner deletes will return to the owners lost and found. This is the case of indivdually owned items. Group owned items (all there should ever really be are media changers) CAN simple be deleted in some circumstances.

Land prices do seem to have gone up in the past week, when i bought my land i got 512 for 5k and the lot next door for 5k for a total of 1024 for 10k

i did a search last nite and i cant find any land that cheap, but last week there was a ton of it. now 512's seem to be about 6k and 1024 about 11.5k


When i bought the land on the new continent there was really no one else on it, now 1 week later im surround mostly houses but a few clubs and a few casinos

lucky for me these ppl dont drive much traffic, the entire sim averages about 4 to 6 users most of the time i am on


Mytips : dont play with land editing, its hard to get the land flat again and 512 is really small, i quickly bought the lot next door when i saw how tiny the lot got with my building on it




GoodLuck!

as a newbie renting might be a good option to start with and get familiar with land size and prims allowance and stuff.
You may as well purchase a plot, but i would rather ask around, to friends who owns/owned land so they can give you good tips.
Mainland or private estate:
well mainland is way expencive lately, and kinda messy for my tastes. of course you'll be able to do whatever u want with no rules but TOS and CS, as well as all other neighbors can, that brings to ugly places full of flying lrotating agging boxes or "for sale", or 3 clubs on the same region, and you could soon get pretty bored to live in such a place, or have to live in the sky (that's even kinda messy as well, so don't think you won't see ugly stuff even there).
Private estates can guarantee nice plots awesome andscape, and low lag at better prices. Of course you should know where you are going, so ask other residents who bought/rent land on that estate, be sure the estate owner is a trustful person and read well the covenant n the estate.
There are some really good private estates owners/managers where it definitely worths getting land, rather than mainland.
Personally i have owned land both on mainland and on private estate. I started on mainland (when luckily prices where reasonable you could find nice places). I sold that plot to get a bigger one on a private estate (cause it was cheaper and was residential, was a really paradise). I then sold my plot there (making some money as the land prices got way higher).

Depending on what you are looking land for, it might worth one hoice or the other, as a newby renting for some time is definitely my suggestion, whether on mainland or private estates. When you'll be ready for a bigger step you'll know

Don't trust all the landlords who makes thing look better than the are just to make their business. There are a lot of people ready to spill naive newbies money. Ask friends and get what you look for / need at the best price you can

I am sure I read the answer to this question a while back but now I can't find it.

If I buy a 1024 m2 parcel of land and give 512 of it to a group that I am the owner of. Is my tier still $0Lindens? I am trying to find a way to get 1024 without paying the tier price basically. thx

If the item was deeded to group and no transfer, then I believe it becomes deleted. You are completely right in the above statement. Some people completely missing items, or thinking they are, need to carefully one by one go through any item in their lost and found after a return because items within a certain range WILL get returned to them as one object instead of multiple. They will also take on the name of just ONE of the objects returned in the cluster.

A couple of days ago I went to delete something that was on my main sim and the owner of the items asked if I had done a return instead of delete? (He hates it when his inventory gets messy lol). I had hit delete but because it was not copiable he recieved a notice and the items went as 1 object into his lost and found.

On a note about renters...not all landlords disappear one day and take all the money with them. Some of us actually hand out refunds and communicate with our renters. You need to just be very careful of who you rent from, see how long they have been renting and ask some of their other tenants how good of a landlord they have been in regards to communication and assistance etc. It is risky, but renting can still provide a good experience in SL. Hate to see all get a bad name because of the few that are scamming people

There is no free tier in Second Life.

In order for land to be deeded to a group, that group has to have donated to it (by someone in the group), a matching amount of land allowance (tier).

If you could really do that, why wouldn't every piece of land in Second Life be owned by a group? YAY Free tier!