First Adventures

Note: Like I said last time, I'm writing this a bit after having experienced it.  Also, the below represents about two and a half weeks of my SL life (Second Life life?).

I fumbled about Social Island until I went through a portal to Portal Park.  From there, I just picked the closest portal that led to Linden Realms.

Linden Realms is a fun adventure which primarily involves running around (double-click to run, or hit Ctrl-R to set yourself to always run), following the instructions given in your HUD.  It’s a basic beginner’s quest.  The goal is to collect up four pieces of an amulet – just watch the videos in the village you first walk into for the back story and general instructions.

Your main challenge are rock monsters, which look perfectly innocent and friendly until all of a sudden you’re being chased at by an angry rock that’s on fire (and then being eaten).  I can’t count the number of times I walked through a bush and was ambushed by one of these.  There are several rez spots for your character, so you only get bumped around a short distance when this happens.  Or when you fall into a mud pit.  Or get caught in a bear trap.  Or just walk into water.

I initially didn’t know that you could collect Linden dollars (L$) doing it.  It’s 50 dollars for completing the quest and for every time you complete the quest afterwards.  Plus, there are gems in the Realms that you collect for one of the mini-quests and if you continue to pick them up, both during the quest and for one week after completing it, you can turn them in for more dollars – if I recall correctly, it’s L$1 per 50 red stones, 25 yellow stones, 10 orange stones, 1 green stone or 1 blue stone.  As you can imagine, there’s mostly red stones lying around.  All you have to do to collect them is either walk through the gem or click on it if you’re near enough.

On occasions, there will be large-ish areas with a lot of stones and no rock monsters!  If you run across one of these, it’s worth spending some time there to gather up the gems.  There’s no guarantee that the next time you pass by that area there won’t be rock monsters, and it’s rather difficult to collect up gems while being eaten every thirty seconds.

In about two and a half weeks, I gathered up about a few hundred L$.  (Translates to a little over a US dollar.)  I had also gotten experience in the different ways to move around, finally picked an outfit I liked – though I’m still working on the shoes (I’d like boots, but I’m still having difficulty navigating my inventory of free outfits) – and had learned the basics of SL menu options.  Chatting, teleporting, the menu bar, things like that.  I was also ready to move on to trying something new.