Mainland Exploration Screenshots and Stories Thread

[lucagrabacr]

Thought about making this thread sometimes ago but just got to do it now  

So yesterday I was flying around a Jeogeot route with my helicopter, and found someone standing on the road down below, to my surprise they were actually 1 of my group's members! I found out from their tag (they probably found out about my group because I used to have 1 of the group's places on a route in Jeogeot).

So then I landed and gave them the group's props  they said they were travelling on a Yava pod, I asked them if they want to come with me on my heli and they did so we were exploring the roads for a bit until I had to go to eat.

Tell your mainland exploration stories!

Edited October 14, 2018 by lucagrabacr
typo

[Bree Giffen]

Haha lucagrabacr! No one explores the mainland! ?

[Alyona Su]

4 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

Haha lucagrabacr! No one explores the mainland! ?

Actually, I do. All the time. 2/3 of my Flickr is all from mainland places.

@lucagrabacr Yava Pod can be a fascinating ride! Why camp at some dead-quiet sim full of IMers all trying to booty-call each other while multi-tasking when you can see the site, some of which is actually quite pretty and interesting?

Too many people like to hold their nose and give Mainland the stink-eye because it's the thing to do. I, for one, love mainland. My mainland parcel is *less laggy* that half the rental places I've seen and gets just as much FPS as the "better" private sims. And I don't have to pay rent or tier and no one can ever kick me out or eject me (except the Big Linden Kahunas) LOL

Edited October 17, 2018 by Alyona Su

[Bree Giffen]

This thread made me log in my sim-explorer avatar. I haven't used her for months! She was in the mainland on a small road. There were little pods zipping down the road too. I wish I could remember what I was doing there. ?

[Callum Meriman]

14 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

No one explores the mainland! 

Exploring mainland is fun! There are parts where it's a mess, and there are little pockets where it's amazing!

[Garnet Psaltery]

The only time I see the mainland is when I'm on a pod ride.  They're fun, and free  

[Cindy Evanier]

5 minutes ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

The only time I see the mainland is when I'm on a pod ride.  They're fun, and free  

I love the pod rides!  

[Tamara Artis]

2 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

This thread made me log in my sim-explorer avatar. I haven't used her for months! She was in the mainland on a small road. There were little pods zipping down the road too. I wish I could remember what I was doing there. ?

You were probably exploring ?

Mainland is great because of its diversity, it is like visiting historical buildings in RL.

[ChinRey]

 

4 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

... and there are little pockets where it's amazing!

Here is one. It's Alienbear Gupte's jewelry store at Bratz, made from one of Lucian Overlord's early castle builder kits, back before he switched to sculpts. And it's a fairytale castle. Old classic Second Life, made almost exclusively with prims (no mesh and the only sculpts I could find were a few stairs) and exquisite texturing.

It's not only a beautiful build, it's also an impossible one.

Bratz might be the most hopeless sim on the grid. It's part of the North-East Islands, which is bad enough in itself, but it's also in the worst possible location there. Right at the end of the only Linden Road where even the Yava Pods fear to go, where that line of tacky Sims style tropical sims clashes into the arctic ice ones. And of course surrounded by low flying sky platforms and other eyesores. (That goes without saying, you don't buy land in an area like that if you care about the scenery.)

There's no way you can make anything good out of this, yet Alienbear Gupte did anyway.

This is how it looks from the Ice side:

It works in an arctic setting too, not just as an Alhambraish tropical fairytale castle!

I love these - there are two of them:

Looking at that tin soldier now, isn't that Oz?

Not sure about this but the road is a Linden Road, not much to do about it:

(Yes, that road does actually go on straight until it runs out of sim. At the other end of its four sims long, pancake flat, ruler straight, featureless route it simply ends unceremoniously at the foot of a cliff. I told you it was bad, didn't I?)

I don't know why Alienbear Gupte made something a crazy as this or how long she will bother paying the tier for a whole sim. I'm just glad she did it and grateful I had the chance to see it.

There are certainly better looking builds on mainland, lots of them. But I think Bratz is special because it's such a brilliant epitome of the old saying "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade".

 

 

 

Edited October 18, 2018 by ChinRey
Typos, typos and more typos

[Callum Meriman]

Wow Chinrey.

[Phorumities]

3 hours ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

The only time I see the mainland is when I'm on a pod ride.  They're fun, and free  

Pods are great, I hop on when they pass by my place.

[Phorumities]

14 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

 

Too many people like to hold their nose and give Mainland the stink-eye because it's the thing to do. I, for one, love mainland. My mainland parcel is *less laggy* that half the rental places I've seen and gets just as much FPS as the "better" private sims. And I don't have to pay rent or tier and no one can ever kick me out or eject me (except the Big Linden Kahunas) LOL

I love mainland. I was finally able to move to Zindra when the parcel beside the 560 I owned there came up for sale at the unheard of price of just under $5L per sq m. It's road front, with protected land for a monorail behind it.

There a furry club on the sim, but its all real people, no bots inflating the numbers

I can finally do what I want anywhere on the property without have to worry about me or anything I have rezzed being ARed.

[loverdag]

I did some exploration as well, slurls are in the descriptions:

- Album Mainland on Flickr -

But it was months ago, not sure how many the pictured places still exist today.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

But I think Bratz is special because it's such a brilliant epitome of the old saying "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade".

With all the repeated textures, it probably loads reasonably fast for most people.

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, loverdag said:

I did some exploration as well, slurls are in the descriptions:

- Album Mainland on Flickr -

But it was months ago, not sure how many the pictured places still exist today.

Arcadia Asylum's slum city at Calleta still exists at least although I hear from old-timers it's just a shadow of what it used to be. From what I've been told, the current owner fled SL long ago but he is still determined to preserve that once iconic build.

There seems to be something special about Calleta. Many of the parcels in the sim have changed owners several times since it was the center of the Hobo community. But the new owners always seem to respect and appreciate the theme and make sure their builds fit. Let's hope it lasts.

Edited October 18, 2018 by ChinRey

[Talligurl]

My mainland story is this, A friend and I TPed to a spot, and after exploring it I noticed on the map that we were seven sims away from my SL home, so I said let's walk, and he was game, So we walked across seven sims found some cool stuff, it was fun, but I never walked that far in SL again. I should sometime probably, if I can find someone crazy enough to do it with me.

[ChinRey]

37 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

With all the repeated textures, it probably loads reasonably fast for most people.

Very fast, unless you want to wait for all the vendor images to load. The fact that it's nearly all prims helps a lot too of course. THe sim si low lag even if you crank up your draw distance - which you have to do if you want to see it all, that bulding is huge.

[ChinRey]

Cuge Lacnala's Dickens inspired Christmas Village

[ChinRey]

Time to bump this thread. This isn't strictly speaking Mainland, But it's from one of the private estates attached to Blake Sea so it should be close enough. You can swim or sail or fly from Mainland to there.

Loverdag gave us a picture of Arcadia/Aley's first classic build. Here are some random snapshots of the remains of her last.

Aley's Blake Diego/Fanic's Deep build used to cover 13 whole sims, pirate themed above water, mermaid themed under the surface. Most is gone now, some replaced by well meaning "upgrades", some simply removed - I suppose the prims where needed elsewhere.

There's a long story behind this build. Aley never sold anything in Second Life, everything she made, she gave away freely and full perm. But people kept giving her Lindens and she spent them renting an island at Blake Diego for a lovely pirate town. She soon ran out of space and prims though and started the build onto the seabed under the public waterways. It didn't take long for the estate owner, Nber Medici, to notice of course. Normally you'd expect that wold have been the end of it but Nber is a generous soul and she truly loves Second Life so whe told Aley to go on and offered her all the supprt she could. I suppose it shows that all is well that ends well.

At least it would if it had ended there. She was pushing both herself and SL beyond the limits with this build and that caused a number of problems down the line. One of them turned out to be disastrous, and

Aley never did mesh and the only sculpt tool she was familiar with, was Prim Generator. To keep the prim count down, she tried to put as much as possible into each sculpt and the result was some relly dodgy LoD and also, of course, some not ideal physics. That's usually not a problem under water, but some parts of the Pirate Town suffers a lot from this.

Far more serious though: Aley was always a colaborator, sharing freely with other builders and she did sometimes incoroprate textures and sculpt maps by other creators in her builds, believeing there was no need to reinvent the wheel. That's fair enough, "everybody" do that. But you don't give away items made that way full perm, you just don't. Aley never understood this. And you don't leave you texture organizer in a public sandbox open for anybody to help themselves to all the textures you have bought either. When all that s**t hit the fan, Aley was taking a long well-earned break from SL so she wasn't even here to answer the awkward questions. When she finally tried to log on again, she found her account closed and it was too late to do anything about it. She logged on with an old alt once just to say goodbye to her closest friends and she did turn up on the OS grid a few times although she never built there. But that's it. From what I've heard, she logged off from RL too last year. If that is true, she probably won't make yet another comeback.

Edited October 23, 2018 by ChinRey

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

This isn't strictly speaking Mainland, But it's from one of the private estates attached to Blake Sea so it should be close enough. You can swim or sail or fly from ainland to there.

Is this common, to have private estates that are navigable from Mainland? (It is news to me.)

[Coby Foden]

Here's something 'not so nice' for a change.

I saw this 1024 square meter parcel for sale. As far as you can see there is only that abandoned barren bumpy gray granite texture land. Sigh...
Well, it has access to the road. Maybe somebody would like it? 
There are lots of parcels in the grid for sale in most crazy and unexpected places.

Anyway, good luck in trying to sell the parcel.

[Coby Foden]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Is this common, to have private estates that are navigable from Mainland? (It is news to me.)

For example Blake Sea is connected to lots of private estates in many directions.

[ChinRey]

7 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Is this common, to have private estates that are navigable from Mainland? (It is news to me.)

It's not common. Linden Lab has a special program for such attached estates (I can't remember the name of it) with some special conditions: There is a maximum and a minimum number of sims you can have and you also have to include passages with public access across them.

As Coby said, most of them are around Blake Sea. That used to be a very popular area and LL had no problem selling off those (they even sold more such estates there than they had room for, which caused a bit of resentment).

As far as I know, FairChang is the only such estate elsewhere. It used to be an independent continent but was relocated and attached to Satori recently.

[loverdag]

Those orange autumn trees .... is it permanent (old) decor or something new seasonal?

[Alyona Su]

On 10/24/2018 at 4:41 AM, loverdag said:

Those orange autumn trees .... is it permanent (old) decor or something new seasonal?

I'm pretty sure they are seasonal. Is that on Atoll continent? That's where my place was and the old cobblestone road and the sim-crossing signs (that name the sim you're heading into) just give it all a wonderfully a classic atmosphere. You picture itself shows how pretty mainland can look!