How do you prepare your sims?

[gensaku]

I mean, you buy or rent the land. What about the buildings, is it better to buy from the marketplace or have a builder to build one to you?

Also, when you make those really big sims similar to a city, do you do it for yourself or you usually work in groups?

Last, do you only spend your money or is there a way you can actually make profit from your sim (except for sex sims). For example, a family sim, a school sim, is it enough to have your money back or not?

Sorry for so many questions, I never really tried to make anything in here and I'm just learning how things work.

[Buttacwup Float]

Me personally, I buy everything from far more talented creators and the landscape and decorate. I don't have custom things made as that is too expensive and I much prefer mesh to prim builds.

iMHO, you don't make money from regions unless you are renting the land out. Even sex Sims are unlikely to make money (perhaps less likely to). Regions are expensive at $200-$300 per month for a full region. It is difficult to make that back. And don't forget the upfront cost if you don't want to rent a region from someone else.

Most RP Sims are a labor of love. Someone building something for themselves that they want to share with friends or the community. I imagine there might be some that do but my guess is the vast majority do not.

Building something you love, do it because it's fun. It is hugely rewarding to see your vision come to life. Do it for that, not for money.

[ChinRey]

19 hours ago, gensaku said:

I mean, you buy or rent the land. What about the buildings, is it better to buy from the marketplace or have a builder to build one to you?

I'm a builder myself so I make everything I need. But if you're not you have to buy of course. Hiring a good builder to do the work is the best option of course but rather expensive so you're probably better off buying ready made content. Do not buy on the Marketplace though, buy inworld. The reason is that you really need to look at the houses. MP pictures do not really give a good impression how the build actually looks.

Be especially aware of LoD (how the build looks at a little bit of distance) and physics. For LoD, the absolute minimum for a house to be even tolerable is that the outer walls and roof remain solid at any viewing distance and at any graphics setting. That is ignoring the occasional render failures of course - no way to avoid them. Good quality means a bit more than that: no too annoying breakdowns of anything inside nor outside the house at any reasonable viewing distance with the standard SL viewer set to mid graphics quality.

For physics, check that you can walk on all the floors without sinking into them or hovering noticeably above them, that you can't walk through any walls, or drop down right through the roof and that it is possible to rez on the floors.

 

19 hours ago, gensaku said:

Last, do you only spend your money or is there a way you can actually make profit from your sim (except for sex sims). For example, a family sim, a school sim, is it enough to have your money back or not?

In theory you can make a few dollars from a sim but in reality, no.

Here's an example:

Say you have a full sim with 22,500 prims. You need 2,500 of those prims yourself for the basic build so you have 20,000 prims for your tenants. Unless you have something really, really special, you can't charge more than 1 Linden a week for each prim, that's about 1.6 US cents a month. So if you can manage to fill up the sim completely with tenants, you can make about 327 dollars a month. Tier for a private full sim is 295 dollars a month, for a mainland sim or a grandfathered private sim it's 195 or something like that. So in theory you can make a few dollars renting a sim.

But then there's the initial cost, purchase price for a mainland sim, startup fee for a private one. And 2500 prims for the basic build may not be enough. A good sim designer could make a great looking place with even less but most would probably need more and the more prims you use for your own buld, the less you have to rent out.

The biggest problem however is the vacancies. How are you going to attract tenants in a market where there are far more places for rent than people itnerested in renting? SPend a few hours a day on marketing and you may manage to fill up ten percent of the rentals within a year. Keep doing it for three or four years and if you're good and if you're lucky you may eventually manage to break even.

Edited May 8, 2017 by ChinRey
Fixed an incorrect number and a tpo or two

[gensaku]

Thank you both for your help, I'll keep that in mind when buying buildings.

I guess I'll have to wait some months more before thinking about building my sim. I have enough to build half sim with - not so much expensive - itens. But I'll not have enough for the rent. That's the reason of my question, if I could at least raise enough money to pay my rent, I'd start now. Well, I guess it'll take a little more effort.