Last week, I blogged about making my #SecondLife simpler, more organized, and spending more time in creative pursuits and less time on mindless virtual farming, tending, planting, harvesting, cooking…and so on.

Over the last couple of weekends, and late into the night all this week, I went a little crazy with the “reorganizing” part and tore apart my virtual kitchen, which had been up in a skybox. I also reorganized my other Digital Farming System fields, animals, and tons of single-prim scripted sorting boxes. For some reason, I have this need to play with scripts that sort and then rezz the ingredients I grow or make, which makes “cooking” more fun or convenient. It turns out that linking all my sorting boxes together and using the “convex hull” setting results in a savings in LI, the land impact metric, of about 1/4 to 1/3 of the prims in the linkset.

I also revamped my ground level stores to use slightly less primmy, much more compact vendors that sit flat on the walls, and freed up some ground level space by deleting two entire shop buildings. I still have to do that with my “farmstore” building, which is in a separate parcel down the road. That parcel is where the fields, a little house, and a drastically reworked design will go – it’s a somewhat narrow parcel with the typical zig-zaggy edges, but it’ll work with the way it’s going to be landscaped.

I went from something like this up in a big skybox, with virtual tools and storage boxes scattered around the “rezz pad” tools for crafting DFS foods and products:

To this – an outdoor kitchen on the ground, after removing 2 of my mostly empty shop buildings in Tweddle and substituting several less primmy buildings for different aspects of My Second Life (or lives, if you add in my alts).

This image is from flic.kr/p/2oewFvx

And earlier Friday there were further developments in my so-called “make my #SecondLife simpler and reduce my time spent on virtual farming” campaign.

Yes, I had found that I had enough group land tier available to add more than 1100m2 of land to my holdings in Tweddle on the mainland. My silent business partner Dhughan Froobert handled the thrilling negotiations, which consisted of opening several “is abandoned land adjoining my parcel available to purchase” support tickets and waiting several days for a Linden to set some funny little fragments of parcels for sale to Dhughan at $L1 per square meter.

Nothing happened for a few days, and then that morning I happened to be near one of the little fragments and noticed that it had been set for sale to Dhughan. I yanked him inworld to purchase all the bits for our land group, and after a short delay while he had to cut one little 16m2 piece off of one parcel, we had enough tier for it all at no additional cost. Then Dhughan joined all the contiguous parcels to each other, so now we hold 3 biggish parcels that are separated from each other, but we enjoy the benefit of the 10% group discount, and the extra objects that entails, because they’re all in the same sim. Group land ownership is tricky but works well if you have trusted members with payment on file, who donate their land tier… in my case (and this is common) I run several paid accounts, because who can you trust more than yourself? Each account kind of has their own vibe, though two of them don’t get much play. Eh, it works.

Anyway, the next phase will be landscaping the “farmstore” parcel and arranging the fields in some way that is both practical, and aesthetically pleasing, and then plopping the virtual livestock down. I wondered about putting the animals off on the most distant parcel, which is on the south side of the sim far from the roadside. But that would be riskier than having them in one place with the fields, plants, trees, and whatnot. I’d rather do all the tending and animal care in one place. And with all the extra objects now available to me, I will NOT be carpeting half Tweddle with fields and feedlots. I’m going to put down some nice decor in my buildings for a change; and in my workspace I’ll be able to rez out texture organizers as needed so that I can work on new products.

Dhughan will have his parcel, and the DFS tools and fields that are in his name that are non-transfer, so he’ll be responsible for growing feed crops. He’ll have a cow, a bull, water, a stove, some seed, and a little hut. He’ll be fine. He’ll be able to harvest his stuff and through it into a sorter… because I love me some sorting scripts.

The other night I took my new kitchen out for a spin, so to speak – I use “rez pads” to cook the DFS recipes, which are done using a 9-digit grid on the DFS HUD. The rez pad is a 9-slot object that can hold ingredients and rez them safely so that they don’t skive off to the edge of a sim and get lost. And I’ve adapted my freebie rez pad so that I have the ingredient textures on the individual buttons – it works like a charm. The sorter boxes (the big bank of textured boxes on the left side) can rez their contents on a kind of target prim for making something easy that doesn’t to be arranged on the 9-slot grid. All the appliances are easy to reach and make for efficient cooking, and I’m planning on “cooking down” all the non-essential ingredients that I’ve collected over the past 3 years.

The plan is to get rid of the non-essential stuff; the ingredients that I currently consider “essential” are normal pantry items, fruits and vegetables. Eventually, even those will be reduced.

One of the sort of frustrating things with DFS cooking and farming is that there are a few items that act like “limiters” or have a kind of braking action on what you want to make. For example, salt is required in a lot of the recipes with the most “EP” ratings, but it can only be acquired a few ways. You can’t make it unless you fish in the DFS Fishing places, and it’s very rare that you get it that way unless you’re very skilled. You can buy it in the secondary market – people with the patience and skill and luck to fish for salt sell it, and other people with more money than sense buy weird looking plants that let you “grow” it, but you only get 20 “salt mills,” at about every 6 days if you care for the plant properly.

Et voila, the “DFS Manny Chomper Salt Plant.”

WARNING: The Manny Chomper is a people eater. *Avoid being eaten.* Feel free to feed him your neighbors, misbehaving children, and all your ex-girl/boyfriends. He loves the meat and will crush their bones into salt.

My Second Life will be less salty once this is gone, but it’ll also be less crazy monstery.