Herald Terraforming

E-mail to arth.karas@gmail.com from the clear blue sky:

Arth,

I’m looking into buying a private island for my company and trying to see how much it costs to get a custom terraforming. I saw Neko has RAW files for 1000L but I think I need more land than the biggest has. Any information would be helpful.

Thanks, h

Greetings, h!

Thank you for writing to me. I'm not sure how you know of me, but I'll be happy to answer.

For custom terraforming rates, I googled "Second Life custom terraform" and found several vendors, technique patterns, prices and bids. xstreet lists several who are selling custom work search for terraforming from $32 USD to $106 USD. I do no know any of the work personally. MY SL Project was active for many months, and I saw similar bids for that work there.

You did not ask about the following, but consider these:

You can make your own RAW files. One tool is a freebie rawfile editor for Mac. More generally, Second Life itself is the simplest RAW file editor I know.

When you order your sim, the generic "flat 30m" on the order page fills the sim and works well if you plan no dramatic heights. A 100m flat might still be avaialable free from the Linden Labs concierge without a RAW file. It is the most versatile template, allowing dramatic island depressions to 0 (well below the standard water depth of 20 m) and heights of 200m without any special skill or outside technologies for terraforming.

To fulfill my SL Mentor duties, I direct you to the terrafroming tutorials here, here, and here, and the Second Life Knowledge Base articles #4060 and #4115

Personally, it takes me about 3 hours (I'd ask about $50 USD) to take design parameters and do a complex terraform by hand in SL. Simple ones take and cost much less time and money. (One simple full sim form took me 8 minutes from arrival to completion.) I normally teach the land manager or owner how to use the terraform tools with SL voice while doing so. Installing integrated water works, trails, walks, and such are separate projects, but I make placeholders for those projects while I am terraforming so that other builders and users can see the build progress and can coordinate efforts.

The sim owner can and should save any successful terraforms to his computer regularly via the land edit menu. Then the owner can easily revert the sim by uploading the saved file when accidents happen.

Yours,

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