Woohoo!  You’ve bought yourself some land, or rented a nice parcel with full control on a private sim!  These are the minimal settings I’d recommend you tweak so you get the best experience on your new living or working quarters.

In Firestorm, you can just click the little “Land” button in the top navigation bar to pull up the land settings window while you are standing on your land.  Else you can right click on the land and select “About Land” to do the same thing.

Firstly, just the ascetics bits.  You want people to see a nice name and description for the place, not something like “Parcel #59, 1024sqm, 512 prims” or something that the landlord has set to advertise the parcel.  So change your parcel’s name and description in the General tab.

I recommend that you set your land to group owned too.  This will allow you much finer control on what you and friends can do on your land, and what others can’t.  Even for a privately owned parcels like Aeon and I have here, it’s worth the L$100 group setup fee to do it.  To do this, click on the “Set” button next to “Group”, select the group you want to own the land, and hit the “Deed” button.  There is a full article about group owned land in the knowledge base that you should read before you do this.  And of course having said that, I now probably have to write a post about group roles and permissions 🙂

Next up, and most important, is what people can do on your land.  In the “Options” tab, you should untick “Build” and “Object Entry” for everyone.  If you don’t do this, you’re just leaving yourself at the mercy of griefers.  And unless you’re a combat sim, I’d also suggest you tick “Safe (no damage)” and “No Pushing” too.  Also, that “Use with caution!” line next to “Edit Terrain”?  It’s not a joke.  Make sure it’s unticked unless you are oh, let’s see, a sandbox who wants to teach people about terrain editing? 🙂

Do you want privacy?  In residential areas, mostly you do.  So make sure “Avatars on other parcels can see and chat with avatars on this parcel” is unchecked.

And lastly, everyone needs to get along with their neighbors.  The most irritating thing you can do in my opinion to upset your neighbors is let sounds, be they from gestures, radio, media like TVs playing youtube videos, or voice, bleed into surrounding parcels.

Tick “Restrict gesture and object sounds to this parcel”.  And if you enable voice, “Restrict Voice to this parcel”.  Please, please, please do this, your neighbors will thank you!

This post sprang from a friend of ours who devastatingly had her land reclaimed, was lucky enough to get it back before the landlord returned her objects, and wanted my help to set up again.