How To Deal With Neighbors' Landscaping Affecting My Land

I recently bought a little 512m parcel on the mainland.

It was hard enough making a house to stay within the boundaries of my land.

A new neighbor has landscaped their land to new be much, much higher than mine.

The problem is that now my neighbors' landscaping has caused my land to make a steep slope up to meet the neighbors land. I just lost the back to 2m strip (like about 2m x 30m) to this sudden slope up caused by the neighbors' new landscaping.

Plus, they have this huge block on their land, which slightly comes over onto my land.

How can I prevent this from happening? I'd like to be able to use about every little bit of my land that I can.

you can try flattening your land, it might being that slope down to normal

or move up into the sky, where you do not have to worry about sloping land, or slight overlapping prims

(if the prim overlapping your land is a bother, you can report it via the abuse report )

or go to live help and see if someone can assist
but first you need to try to contact the owner of the prim to see if they will move it so it is not overlapping your land

Or try contacting the neighbor with your concerns and maybe they will be more then happy to take care of it.

you may have to raise your land up to their level to get the effect you want. it might be that their block is not on your land at all, but because the drop off lets it show.

Sounds like you left the terraforming open to whomever was around.
Check your land permissions in the about land tab, make sure you check the ablity for others to do landscape, raise and lwer land, build or run scripts.
It good thing to do too for safety reasons too.

Edit terrain is unchecked, as well as object entry. That's why I'm surprised that the terrain on my land could be altered, and the prim box slid onto my land.

The box is on my land; I know the land boundaries become tough to read when it's on an elevation drop, but I checked it carefully. Maybe I'm eyeing it incorrectly, but it looks just a little bit over the boundary line.

Seems that I can't do much but contact my neighbor, then abuse report if not resolved.

It's disappointing to find out, though, that things like unchecking the Edit Terrain box on my land, and prohibiting Object Creation, Object Entry, and Scripts didn't work as I intended.

Well, I thought I'd give this great benefit of my premium account- first 512m on mainland is tier-free- a try.

I know I can just go up in a skybox, and then the fact that my terrain gets screwed up at the borders is immaterial. What I wanted was land, though.

Isn't there a limit of how high I can terraform, though, on mainland?

The land came with my land on a somewhat lower level than my neighbor's land. But it wasn't as great, and the slope didn't push so far back into my land.

I did have my house about 1m away from the border. There was a noticealbe slope on that last meter, that continued up to a plateau abuot 5m or so higher, on my neighbor's parcel. The slope was rather evenly split over the boundaries.

Now the slope looks about ten meters high (though it's hard to tell, new objects on the neighbor's land, including that box- to make a platform much higher than the land). And instead of the slope being split over the borders of the land, it looks like the slope part is all on my land. Instead of that 1m space between my house and the land, I now have that slope of land covering up half my wall.

I have tried lowering the slope down on my part of the land, but it won't budge. (Or more accurately, I can't edit the terrain to the border of my land- every time I do, I can't touch that slope, but I get a deep ditch 1m in from the border.) I'm not terribly skilled with the land editing tools though, maybe that's the problem.

If I remember right you need to check edit terrain to disallow others to edit terrain...
Yet when sometimes things get goofy here when I was newer this was very, very confusing to me and when it didn't work right it was even more confusing.
Unchecking though allows others to do whatever you want with the land who don't own or are group members with that permission.
If you leave edit terrain unchecked the neighbor may be terraforming his land may unknowingly change your land too.
This has happen to me when I had my first land.
My neighbor had no clue he had changed my land too.
I use a scripted prim that can raise, lower or level land its called a leveler.
Contact me in world and remind me I will send you one its full permissions hopeful it will help.
If it doesn't work then it might be example a glitch within sl or something else.
Most land I think it 4 meter limit to raise and lower land.
It bit difficult sometimes to know where is what at first.
Also go to edit and select land owners your land should be light blue. You may be trying to lower land that you don't own.

Rez a box, size it to 10X10X .01 and use it to see if the box is on your land or not. Run it along the property line. If it cuts their box, then you will have no doubts.

I have a lovley free script I put into a box that will smooth the land. Move the box up and down, the land goes up and down with it. If you would like a copy - please feel free to IM me inworld and I will be happy to pass one along to you.

When I had a 512m², it was the typical 16m x 32m. I made a platform by starting off with an 8m x 8m prim. Then snap that into one corner. Then duplicate to make a 2 x 4 grid of the 8x8s. It all links together so you can move and delete easily. You can make it 10m tall to fill out your land exactly and see if anything's intersecting it.

--Hugsy

the neighbor is editing his own land. It affects the OP's land because it is attached. The neighbor is within his rights to screw your land up in this way. There are tiered messes like this all over the grid. However, if his object is over his border and encroaching on your land, you can AR the prim or prims in question.

that is how I always check to see if anything is overlapping my land (I never just eyeball it)


as for it affecting your land, even with the disallowing someone to edit your terrain, there will also be some changes if someone edits terrain that is adjacent to yours

sadly not much you can do except hope the owner of the land is willing to work with you on it

Thanks to everyone who posted and offered advice and help.



That's really what I expected, based on how the change occurred, and my attempts to fix the land within my boundaries.

This feature really helps, in my mind, to make mainland ownership more trouble than it's worth to me. My neighbors can render part of my land useless for me, and there's not much I can do about it (except plead with them). It wouldn't be that bad if I had a larger parcel of land, but such small incursions have a huge effect on a little parcel like a 512m one (cut up 16 x 32).

I may just keep the land for now and use it for a skybox. A skybox isn't really what I wanted- I wanted to build on land. But my purchase price for this piece of land is sunk, and there's no tier for keeping it (it's in my "free" 512m that comes with a premium account).

Though this also makes me re-evaluate why I have a premium account, and consider going back to a basic account.



There were several clever ideas in the thread about determining whether the neighbor's object was over the boundary.

However, this is one case where it's easily eyeballed (I re-checked it after reading some of the posts here, and I'm sure now). Since the neighbor's object intersects with the ground, the tiny little boundary line that runs along the ground is enough to determine whether the object is over. The object clearly intersects with the boundary line. I'd post a screenshot, but I can't to this forum.

The screwing up my land with the neighbor's adjusted terrain interferes with my land use more than the little object incursion over the boundary. If I can't do anything about the terrain, I don't think there's a point to worrying about the object incursion.

(The object has a depth of 0.8m- which I know because the dimensions of the object are in the object's description- and I'm guessing about one-third of that depth is on my land. Then it's like 32m high- making it the first megaprim I think I've ever actually seen- though half of the height is above ground, and half below, and then a width of something like 10m if I remember correctly.)

If I decide to just give up building on ground and just use my land for a skybox, though, I'm thinking there is no real reason to care that the object is a little over down there. I have one more question about that, that I'm putting in a different thread.

After contacting your neighbor and asking him to adjust the prim's placing, why do you not set a mega fro yourself and use it as a flat platform to then build on? I had a similar situation in my first land- huge slopes - it is how I flattened it for m yuse. Good luck.

Since it's a megaprim, it's likely that it fits the neighbour's land exactly (either 16m wide or 32m wide), and he hasn't positioned it correctly. Asking him to position it should sort that part out.

You will have to raise your land to the same height (or higher) than your neighbours to get rid of the slope at the boundary.

Torley Linden has made a set ot video tutorials about land, and one of them covers teraforming - I recommend you view it to get some ideas about what you can do. I smoothed my land over at the boundaries and planted trees to blend it all in. Maybe your neighbour doesn't yet know what you can do with the edit land functions, so you could show him/her the way.

I had considered building a platform like that (it's what several of my neighbors do, including the one who is encroaching- the encroaching prim is part of such a platform.)

It's not an appealing option to me, because with only 117 prims to use to begin with, I'd rather not spend them creating new land to build on. That's what the existing land is supposedly there to do.

I don't know anything about using megaprims. Perhaps if I take some time to investigate that, it will pay off for me in the long run.

Another option. Select the strip of your land that he messed up, and repeatedly flatten/lower until your side is level again. This will force the slope between your parcels to shift to his side of the line.

When you terraform at the edge of a parcel, you can definitely affect the land for at least 1 to 2 M into the next parcel. This is because the terrain grid only has a 1 M horizontal resolution. Unfortunately, your neighbor *can't* just raise it on his side, unless he keeps the top of his 'plateau' a full 4 M back from the property line. If he selects any 4M x 4M square right at the line, part of your land *will* get dragged up (or down) with it.

Terain is like a rubber sheet, with posts in a 1 M horizontal grid that can raise or lower the sheet. Raise one post by a meter, and you create a 1 M slope down to the next post. Raise a post far enough, and it also has an effect on the next post away from the selected area, dragging that in a similar direction. When you select land, you can only select it in increments of 4M on each side. The other tools also have a 4M x 4M operating area at the small setting, but can be moved to positions not directly on the main 4M grid.

Simple example: Select a 4M square in the middle of your land. Raise it 1M. The top of this bump is a 4M x 4M square, and it slopes outward to a 6M x 6M base. Raise it 4 M, and likely the base of the hill will be 8 M x 8M, with one ring of control points halfway down the slopes of the sides.

That sounds like a great idea Ceera. I just looked at the plot I'm renting and it is lower than my neighbor's land. Actually two sets of neighbors have higher land but the unusable sloped area is on their parcel not mine. I don't really notice as I have a skybox but it's the principle that counts!

On megas- as long as you don't use the truly gigantonormous it will be fine. There are many free ones available- IM me in world - I will be happy to help you out, if I can.

Just as an update for anyone interested, I logged on today and my neighbor happened to be there on her land. I mentioned the slight encroachment, she apologized and said she didn't realize it and would fix it.

I still don't like the fact that I can't prevent it, because I don't expect every neighbor that I would ever have to be so easy to speak with. But this happens to be a case in which I'm lucky and have a nice neighbor.