Every once in a while I create a brand new account just because I like to see what I can accomplish starting from nothing. I have several accounts because of this -- my original accounts Jalia Oz (paid account), Miko Minogue (old enough to get an allowance still), and Mint Rainbow (generally my main), and later freebie accounts Rei Sin, Miss Snookums, Rainbow Mint, and Apricot Sugarplum. There was one other created after they stopped doing the second name thing (where everyone's second name was "Resident" or somesuch) but I've forgotten the name on that account. Anyway, I don't do a lot with them after I create them, usually, but they're all hanging around.
Today I created ShinobuEden, a name taken from one of my old City of Heroes characters.
Second Life doesn't have a very good starting tutorial -- in fact, it has no starting tutorial. You get a choice of a bunch of average-looking avatars (you can change your look to virtually anything later on though) and then you get dumped into a little rotunda with no instructions on how to move about or find new places or anything. There are portals to places like "Social", "RPG", "Popular" etc that don't give you a single clue where they go or even how to use them (you click on them to teleport). I chose "Editor's Picks" and I wound up in some sort of battle zone sim with a voice warning me over and over to put away my weapons. If I were a true newbie I'd be lost at this point.
But first, let's start with a few basics. I'm no expert and I'm certainly not going to try and cover everything, but I can address a few things:
Arrow keys will move you back and forth. Sorry to anyone who likes to move about by mouse view, I don't think that works in SL
Page Up and Page Down are for jumping/flying and crouching/going down.
Alt + Left Mouse Key This is the big one for me. This allows you to move the camera about and focus on virtually anything in the game. When you hold the alt key down your cursor becomes a magnifying glass, and when you click on an object (and hold the mouse key down) that object becomes the pivot point for the camera. You can swing around that object, swing up or down, scroll in or out. I can't tell you how useful knowing this information was to me when I first learned it!
Viewer Just so you know, I am not using the official Linden Viewer (the program that you log into Second Life with). What I use is Phoenix Firestorm. I like it better than the official one. Second Life is an open-source kind of world, and this includes letting people create their own viewers (and actually, if you search on "OpenSim", you can find a few alternate worlds based on the Second Life model). Anyway there are a number of viewers and Phoenix Firestorm is one of the best and most popular.
Search The Linden Search sucks, but anyway, it's what you have to work with. In the Firestorm viewer it's one of the buttons at the bottom represented by a magnifying glass.
So the first thing I did was search on "Mother Goose Skins". This did not actually work like it should, but I found the group Mother Goose's which is tied to the store I was looking for. Clicking on more info, I could see that the person who runs the group is milok hermit (she founded the group) and clicking on her name in the list of members brought up her profile. Clicking on her picks in her profile gave me a link to the store.
Yeah, not a very direct way to find a place, but it gives you some clues on how to discover things. ^_^ For example, creators almost always have a link to their store in their profile under picks.
I use this to teleport to the Mother Goose's store. Why do I do this? Because Mother Goose does very nice skins, and they have a lot of freebie boards in the center of the store. With no money I can find a good skin to wear -- something better than my starting avatar skin. The freebie boards have random letters and numbers under them that change every so often; if you see the first letter of your name (S in my case) you can click on it and get a free gift skin. (Also a ? is clickable by anyone). (See photo above.)
I should warn you that I'm doing all of this on a female avatar, of course. Shopping in SL is 75% or 80% geared towards females, so it can be harder to find good stuff for a male avatar. But there are a few skins here for males too.
Clicking on the freebie boards is addicting. It's easy to wind up with more skins than you'll ever actually use. Note that the Mother Goose's freebie skins are often slightly altered from the originals -- there's maybe stars or hearts or some other sort of tattoo on the cheek, or a bandaid, or tears or a pimple or something. Milok naturally would like you to buy her skins rather than just get them for free. Some of these little blemishes are pretty negligible, some are downright weird or bizarre.
There are also a lot of 1 Linden skins here. Right now I don't have any money at all though, so even 1 Linden is too much.
Another important note: the skin (like many things you'll buy or pick up for free) comes in a box. This gets deposited under objects in your inventory, so let's discuss the inventory folders for a minute.
First of all, you should have a button at the bottom that opens your inventory. In Phoenix Firestorm it looks a bit like a closet or wardrobe I guess. There are two main folders in your inventory, one is "inventory" and the other is "library". When I opened mine the first time it was opened to the Library section, which was a bit confusing even for me, a long-time SL veteran. So it's important to know the difference.
Inventory is stuff that you actually own. Anything you buy will appear here, usually either in a folder in the main inventory folder, or an object under objects. Textures, gestures, animations and the like may appear in their own folders, you'll figure it all out eventually. You'll want to work hard at keeping your inventory organized, because you can collect an amazing amount of stuff in the game in a short time.
Library is a bunch of things that exist for everyone to access and use. You can't delete or move things about in the library, all you can do is copy stuff from the library to your own inventory to use. All of the default avatars are here, for example, if you ever want to use them. Also a lot of basic textures and things are here.
My new Mother Goose skins are all in my inventory under objects. I can't wear them yet; they're in a box, and if I wear it I'll be wearing a box which looks pretty stupid and marks you instantly as a newbie. ^_^ But go ahead and try it if you want.
Usually the only way to open a box is too find a place that allows you to rez objects -- a sandbox for example, you can search on sandboxes and find one to visit -- and then drag the object from your inventory onto the ground. You sometimes have to be careful when doing this, as some objects can be very small and easily lost, and if you're not dragging them onto actual ground but a floor of some sort they might rez below the floor. But for boxed items from a store you shouldn't have those kind of problems.
Once the box appears n the ground, right click on it and select "open". Sometimes there's a script already set up to open if you simply left click on it; you'll notice this if you move the cursor over it and the cursor changes. The second step, once open, is to select the button "copy to inventory". It may ask you if you're sure (if any of the things in the box are no-copy, you'll be moving the only copy you're allowed to have from the box to inventory so it wants to make sure you know what you're doing). When you've done this, you can delete the box (right click, under more options I believe) or "take" the box which will put it back in your inventory. I like to just delete them, my inventory gets cluttered too quickly as is. But make sure you copied everything over first -- the stuff copied over should appear as a folder in your main inventory folder
Stuff that you delete goes to your garbage can in your inventory, so you can recover it if you delete something by accident.
Okay, now I've found a sandbox and opened my skins and placed them in a "skins" folder that I created and put in my Body Parts folder. What I also want/need is new hair, possibly new eyes and a new shape, and new clothes. All for free if I can manage it. There are a lot of "freebie" places in SL, but sometimes the stuff you find there is a bit junky. There are also stores that offer special freebies like Mother Goose's, but it's hard for a newbie to know where they are or what to look for. So here are a couple of big tips:
Use the online Marketplace:
Second Life Marketplace
You can sort by price and see what you're getting, and usually visit the store in-game if you want to check it out.
Read this blog:
Fabulously Free Blog
They show you a lot of the best of what you can find for free or very little money.
Read this blog:
Second Life Hunts
"Hunts" in SL are a kind of mini-game. Each store that participates has an object hidden somewhere that contains their gift for the hunt (the object will normally be the same for every store in a given hunt). Usually these are free, sometimes 1 Linden, but it's a great way to get some free stuff and find new stores in SL. There are TONS of hunts going on these days, so it can be a little overwhelming -- pick the ones that are likely to offer things you really want, and don't be afraid to throw out anything that you don't want or need, because even doing a few hunts will fill up your inventory with stuff fast.
A hunt is where your ability to move the camera around really comes in handy. Don't be afraid to look around and behind and under things and on top of things -- some of the participants can be very creative and sneaky. After all, it's supposed to be a challenge! Also, be aware that sometimes objects (small objects especially) won't rez until you're physically near them, so moving the camera up to that second floor while you're standing on the first floor may cause you to miss what you're looking for.
For my first hunt destination I pick the Purple Moon "2nd Chance" hunt, for several reasons: 1) Everything is in one store 2) These are items from past hunts that were never for sale that people still wanted, so I'd expect good-quality items, and 3) I liked what I saw in the pictures. This is a hunt running to Dec 31st 2012, I have just a few days left to do it.
I'm looking for a little green number 2 in this hunt.
And here's the first one!
I spent about an hour looking for these... there were 17 total, and they weren't hard to find but I was still unable to find #10. I spent a lot of extra time looking for it, but didn't find it until I relogged. Sometimes that helps too -- I think it wasn't rezzing for me at all, so I was never going to find it otherwise. These kind of stores tend to become major lag fests with all the different textures to load -- I wasn't able to teleport out without logging either.
The important part is that I got some nice outfits and jewelry and things, all for free! You can't complain about that!
Also someone decided to help me since I was clearly a newbie (wearing a newbie avatar). They gave me several different free hairs and a copy of their shape, which was unfortunately set to a butt size of 100%. I wore it because she told me to, but I sized the butt down significantly later. Perhaps unsuprisingly, she advised me to visit a shop called Ho Wear, which she said had a really cute free skin as part of a hunt. Well, free is free after all! I went there next.
As it turns out, despite the name Ho Wear has some nice clothing that doesn't involve hot pants or micro mini skirts (although there was certainly a lot of that as well, make no mistake). They also have an amazing amount of freebies for Christmas -- 21 boxes distributed around the store and neighboring stores. The place is huge. It amazes me how many massive stores I've never heard of before. I assume most of them are making good money, because it costs money to run sims like these.
I find all of the Ho presents (which do indeed include several nice skins, as well as some shapes and a lot of clothing). Now I'm doing pretty well! The last thing I really want to complete my avatar is an AO (Animation Overider, so that I don't walk and stand like a newbie dork) but getting a good free one may be difficult to impossible. I'll have to search for that later.
In the meantime, I want to try and get some money, and one way to do that -- at least a few lindens, for a brand new avatar -- is to find a money tree. I do a search and visit several before finding two that actually have a couple of dollars in them. So now my new avatar has 7 Linden to her name, and can buy a 1 Linden item if she wants. My recommendation for newbies is to landmark several money trees so you can visit them quickly each day.
Still a work in progress, but I no longer look like a newbie!
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