Okay, so... Summit Pines!
I promised a full update about this one, and before I talk about what I'm doing with Summit Pines now, I think it's important to talk about how this whole project evolved in the first place......because it actually started with realizing that I had an epic neighbor! :)One who happened to align pretty closely with me on a lot of Second Life things and had an AMAZING building style. Introducing Skyler Pancake! :)
I didn't actually know Skyler was my neighbor at first; I knew her through some mutual friends, and Skyler was also part of that wonderful collection of people who "knew all of the things" surrounding the elephant-in-the-room drama from years ago. (That's a different story)
More importantly for this story, Skyler is a die-hard Mainlander and her building skills make it really easy to see why. She has a fantastic eye for creating environments that feel natural. Her landscaping doesn't just look like someone put some trees on a parcel; the rocks, grass, paths... all the little details all feel like they belong together.
That's something I really appreciate because I have a particular philosophy when it comes to owning a lot of Mainland: I don't want my neighbors to regret that I showed up. That's not always possible, but when I move into an area where I know I'm going to purchase a significant amount of land, I usually look around for my favorite builder nearby and try to match what they're already doing. I'll buy the same trees, the same rocks, the same platforms....whatever I need to help keep the surrounding "natural world" looking reasonably consistent.
Why? Because Mainland gives us an enormous amount of freedom, and that's one of the things I love most about it. But I've also lived next to people who use every square inch of that freedom right up against the property line and with the most horrific full bright flat primmed property lines that I've ever seen too. So when I'm building near someone else's home, I try not to push my builds into their space. If I'm going to change their view simply by existing next door, I at least want to make an effort to make that new view nice.
Lucky for me, in this particular part of Heterocera, I had a pretty fantastic example to follow. The area I'd decided to move into was part of that giant mountain range around Lota. Funny enough, I'd purchased, and later abandoned, land in that same general area several times throughout my Second Life journey....but this time I had a plan!
I wanted to create unique Mainland rentals that could compete, in their own way, with Linden Homes. They'd have epic mountain views, interesting houses, and loads of shared public space available at the group level. Surprisingly, while I was working on one side of the mountain, Skyler was doing something remarkably similar on the other and for awhile, it felt like we were slowly building toward each other.
Then Linden Lab announced that Linden Homes were getting a Land Impact increase.
Well…….crap.
That was fantastic news if you had a Linden Home. It was considerably less fantastic if you were two people trying to figure out how to make little Mainland rental communities attractive enough to compete with them...so I changed my plan.
Instead of using my ground-level land for rentals, I decided to turn all of it into public space. I'd put some very inexpensive rental skyboxes above it, and the land itself could simply be somewhere people were allowed to explore. It also meant something else that I really liked: Skyler's ground-level rentals would have a better view. Instead of looking across the mountain at another collection of rental houses, her residents would look out over landscaped mainland, and maybe, if the public space gave people interesting things to see and do, it could bring a little traffic into the area for everyone.
That idea went through...many iterations. LOL Not on Skyler's side, on my side. I rebuilt ALOT. LOL Eventually, I settled on building a sky lift up the mountain and a road that crossed over through Euclidia, with the long-term goal of connecting out toward the SLRR and beyond. When I achieved that goal, I realized that my road kind of sucked....so I reached out to my friend Cranston Yordstorm, because Cranston has a knack for looking at something I've built and figuring out how to make it considerably better. Especially with things that 'travel' like planes and cars.
Together we worked on improving the road and adding more little public things to discover along the way. He's added trains and roller coasters, a raft ride, and a volcano now. The rental skyboxes eventually disappeared; I only ever had four renters and rentals increasingly weren't the part of the project I was excited about anyway.
But strangely enough... I kept buying land.
I continued spreading the same landscaping style down into the valley, gradually preserving more and more of the view from the mountaintop. My long-term goal became working my way toward the water in the middle of Heterocera. Meanwhile, Skyler was expanding in the opposite direction, down the other side of the mountain and toward the Heterocera coast past Mi.
Neither of us owned the entire landscape, obviously; that's Mainland. But all of these pieces started visually connecting into something that felt much larger than any individual parcel. I never sat down and calculated the exact amount, but at our largest points I wouldn't be surprised if the two projects combined represented somewhere around eight regions' worth of tier spread across the area.
And the surrounding land started changing, too. Some substantial land sales happened nearby and abandoned parcels became increasingly rare. It's been really fun to watch and experiment with.
It has also been ...expensive.
I think that's the part that everyone talks about when it comes to owning mainland. Owning Mainland is one thing but stewarding a lot of Mainland over a long period of time is another.
Tier adds up, and unfortunately because it's expensive, it's hard to aquire a LOT of it to do some fancy with. Once Linden Homes received their Land Impact increase, the economics behind our original rental ideas became even more difficult.
I completely understand why Skyler eventually needed to reduce her tier and if I'm honest, it's something I think about constantly with my own land. It's also part of the reason I've spent so much time building Everlife. I want Second Life to help pay for Second Life in my life. I'm hoping that, over time, Everlife can help make the cost of maintaining some of these public spaces a little easier for me to justify...... but that's another blog post because this one isn't really about tier.
It's about Skyler and this really wonderful place she built: Summit Pines.
It was originally created for her ponygirl community, but what she built was so much more than a collection of parcels or rental houses. There are trails, caves, and beautiful paths winding through the mountain. It feels like a place.
So when I knew things were going to change, I ran through Summit Pines with my camera and I'm really glad I did.
That's the strange thing about Mainland.
Someone can spend years transforming a collection of parcels into something beautiful.....and then one day it changes. Sometimes it's slowly and sometimes it's overnight. That's just part of living on the Mainland.
So...What Happens to Summit Pines Now? That's where my little announcement from last week comes in. I've increased my tier by about 35,000 square meters and acquired part of Summit Pines and my goal isn't to erase what was there and start over.
Quite the opposite, actually. I love this build. I'm hoping we can make the changes necessary to connect it with the surrounding project, remove the lift where it is no longer needed, finish the road on the other side of the mountain, and (most importantly) preserve as many of Skyler's trails, caves, and little discoveries as possible. It won't remain frozen in time, and that's okay. But I am hoping the next version still feels like Summit Pines.
There will eventually be a video showing the finished product and where everything goes from here, but for now, though, I wanted to preserve the original.
Enjoy this little video ride of the OG Summit Pines; a beautiful corner of Mainland built by Skyler Pancake for her ponygirl community, and a person and place I'm incredibly grateful I got to call my neighbor. Thank you, Skyler, for building something worth preserving.
And stay tuned.... the mountain isn't finished yet.
