Flutterbugs has launched! Flutterbugs are little forest sprites, there are no males and females, each flutterbug can fill both roles. They eat tasty turnips, which can either be bought or farmed. They also find interesting things which can be clicked on and toolbox points are rewarded. We had a special 30 minute fishing competition to celebrate the launch.. Lots of balloons (which I got for the shroomie launch) were set out to decorate the store!

It will be a year on the 24th of feburary since shroomies launched. It doesn’t feel like a year. Since then, I’ve made ducks and squirrels (now “retired”), turtles, bunnies, spiders frogs and now working on flutterbugs. I now have over 450 flowers available in my garden game. I’ve got more than 150 items catchable via my fishing game and dragonflies have a new mesh. I think that’s a pretty good effort.

Shroomies 4.0 has been released - this is a major update introducing a skin colour trait! There are (currently) 8 skin colours (Original, Tan, Dark, Bubblegum, Strawberry, Mint, Midnight and Pale). All shroomies updated from 3.5 (or earlier) will have “Original” skin. New 4.0 starter kits will give random skin colours. Specials may give a random skin colour, or it may be predetermined depending on the special. Shroomie’s offspring’s skin colours will always be the same as one of their parents.

These are the non-hidden starter traits at launch for the bunnies, spiders and frogs. More traits will be added as time goes on. The bunnies have 5 starter traits and 4 hidden traits. From left to right, they are: Fluffy Plain, Fluffy Spots, Fluffy Stripes, Fluffy Dark and Fluffy Brown. The spiders have 5 starter traits and 4 hidden traits. From left to right, they are: Red Back, Huntsman, Yellow Weaver, Blue Opal and White Spot.

It’s a new year, and a new logo for the site. I’ve been away for a bit, mostly burn out - while I kept my stuff going in my absense, I needed a break from creating. The OpenSim grid is gone, it was too expensive to run. New stuff this year: breedable bunnies, spiders and soon: frogs. Bunnies.. bunnies require food, it’s not too expensive, and there is also the option of growing your own with a carrot farm.

I decided to cancel my Alternate Metaverse region mentioned in the last post and have a go at setting up my own grid with hypergrid enabled. It’s coming along great, I have 3 regions on it: a welcome region, a farm region and a home region. Hosting is US$20 a month for a 4GB Vultr instance, I’m running in grid mode so I can attach more regions later if I want.

I’ve been having a lot of fun in on an OpenSim grid called Alternate Metaverse I have an island region with 40,000 prim limit (So far I’ve managed to use about 1800…) it costs US$10 a month. I’ve tried OpenSim many times in the past, mostly running my own simulator and connecting to OS Grid or in standalone mode, but always got frustrated or bored. This time though, I’ve learned about VivoSim which I’m having a lot of fun with.

Feeling rather jaded about second life today. Since mesh became a thing, it’s raised the bar for skill level needed to make competitive products, if you don’t have the skill to use a 3d modeller, you find someone who does and pay them to make models for you. There’s lots of “market places” for 3d models, turbosquid, cgtrader and sketchfab to name a few. They all have licenses for the usage of models distributed on their site.

So last post I did some thoughts on what makes breedables valuable. I concentrated on the “hard to obtain” part, but there is also another factor that comes into play and that is - desirability. A lot has been changing in the PlantPets world the last few weeks in effort to make seeds “more valuable” - with mixed reactions. A new tool is available that calculates “suggested prices” based on how rare a plant is, plus some math - but it doesn’t (and probably can’t) take into account if people like that plant.

Sitting and staring at my computer.. thinking about things. Do breedables need to be expensive to be taken seriously? Some say they make the prices high to help the secondary market - but given plantpet commons go fo L$12, and Bruce sells them for L$700+, I don’t buy it. Breedables need to be desirable, and hard to obtain to be valuable. Making them expensive does make them harder to obtain, as we are limited by our real life financial situation.