The Skidmore Project: Collecting

Mark Skidmore breathes his first on Second Life's Destination Island.

Alright. We've logged onto secondlife.com, snatched an avatar and ended up at a place called Destination Island. Your avi's initial foray into SL has changed a bit recently. Displaced is the mandatory tutorial walkthrough. It now resides on Welcome Island and is accessible by looking for it through the in-game search portal. With most people poofing in and running straight through, I can only assume the trek was too arduous for most players That these were most likely existing players creating alts explains in part why the population of Second Life is so high, too.

So where to now? Grab a portal and see where it takes you. There are several options available. Or you can find the button on your viewer for the Destination Guide and check for places that are "newcomer friendly". This will also give you the option of teleporting directly to these areas. Some also offer extensive tutorials on how to use the viewer as well.

But the basis of this blog is creating your avatar. Let's get one thing straight right off the bat. This is going to take a while. Some of these freebie locations are huge so expect to wander around a lot checking boxes. Even more time will be needed to open these boxes with some outfit options requiring fitting to the individual avatar.

There are two main options for locating places in SL. Both are relatively simple to use. Destination Guide organizes places by type of use. Select a category, read up on the place and choose to teleport if you like it. The other is the search portal. This should appear on your viewer as a button with a looking glass on it. When you open that it will present you with a handful of ready options. The field at the top allows you to enter your own criteria. Search for a specific location, person, item or whatever. In Mark's case, he entered "freebies" and the first stop was Freebie Galaxy.

For the entire discovery process, check my profile feed at https://my.secondlife.com/markskidmore. This is SL's handy Twitter clone.

An item of SL etiquette should be added here. When you teleport, or TP, into a place, step immediately out of the landing zone. Leaving your avi there can block the next person trying to enter the area. It's very annoying finding yourself trapped above two or three avs in the sleep pose while you try to land.

So welcome to Freebie Galaxy. The ad in search promises 15 floors of "sexy hot fashion". Maybe it did - in 2008. If you want to have the best looking avatar in SL, this is a place to readily avoid. Clunky sculpted clothing items with poor textures are the norm. Not everything is complete garbage, though. Finding the good stuff is a hit and miss process. If you want to sample what SL has to offer and not spend the rent this is a good place to go. There are also a number of other similarly equipped locations, many offering the exact same items which no one in their right mind would pay L$ for.

To see what a particular box or seller window has to offer, simply attempt to buy it. Some will have a buy option available with a left click of the mouse. Others may require a right click. Look for the "buy" or "pay" options. A dialogue box then opens displaying the contents. Like what you see? Finish the transaction by hitting the "buy" button. Otherwise just hit "cancel" and move on.

Once an item is purchased, it moves to your inventory. Look for the viewer button with the suitcase icon to open this. Most boxed items will be found in the objects folder. Others may create a folder which will be found below the trash can icon. Confused yet? Some of these folders will contain a box that must still be opened while others will have the item ready to use. It all depends on the script used by the person creating the sell object (or lack thereof). 

So what do you do if the object needs to be opened? Double click on the recently purchased item. If it appears as a bag in the avi's hand, you should be able to click the bag and access the product. Otherwise, the Item will have to be dragged from the inventory onto the ground nearby, right-click the object and choose "open" then transfer the contents to inventory that way. Look at the top of the viewer screen where it displays your location. If there is an icon there depicting the box in the red circle, you cannot rez it here. Some stores offer areas for opening packages. If none is present you need to get back in search and find a sandbox if you don't have another place to go to.

In my early days, I relied heavily on the sandbox area at Yadni's Junkyard for this. It's a good location with fitting stands provided. Most people are decent but watch for idiots that like testing their newest push weapons, cagers and scripts on the unsuspecting avi. Another popular location for this is Hobo Sandbox. It's a little laggier but the greifing is monitored and owner Baggs Yue is often on site.

Two more high-end freebie shops include Fab Free Station and the Free Dove. Instead of older stock that can't be sold, these locations offer incentive freebies from current vendors. The idea here is to introduce you to the store so these are much higher quality. No av should be started without visiting these locations, IMO.

Other than freebie shops, there are many good ways to outfit your avi. Group gifts are another popular choice. Nearly every content creation outlet has a group associated with it. Most will simply spam you with info on their latest goods in an attempt to separate you from your hard-earned L$. Many more offer group gifts as a sign-on or continuing membership bonus. You have to be a member of the associated group and be "wearing" the appropriate tag to get these. Two examples Mark visited were Vero Modero and Shiki. The locations of these can be accessed from his profile feed.

Hunts are also extremely popular. Taking place for a specified duration these are generally themed and produced by groups or sponsored by stores. A website provides clues to what you are looking for and where. When found, the hunt item contains the gift from that particular location and the TP to the next one in the series. Generally these are quality items meant to entice you into purchasing from participating stores. Believe me, it very often does. The biggest ones include Womenstuff and Menstuff. These now cost 50L$ to join the group, however. More complete info on active SL hunts can be found at http://slhunts.wordpress.com/ and is a better source in that regard than I will ever be :-)

Also, check the SL online shopping service at https://marketplace.secondlife.com for further deals. You must use caution here though. Make sure what you buy is a freebie and not a demo for items which you must buy outright to get full use of.

Three days of searching and two of opening and fitting transformed the male city noob avatar into the dude at right. Shape: Raphael from Belissima Shapes (marketplace). Skin: Jordan M3 CH (freebie package from Fitch Woodrunner). Hair: MADesigns Robert IV (available at Fab Free Station). Shirt: Shiki group gift. All locations available through https://my.secondlife.com/markskidmore