During the testing of HiPiHi prior to its full release, every resident can own a single, 10,000 square meter piece of land for free. The company has indicated that this land will be taken back when the public testing ends, and while a formal land policy has not yet been released, the news is not bad.

Early indications are that those who claim a piece of land in the testing phase of HiPiHi will be given priority to purchase land when the testing phase is over.

To claim a piece of land, you need to explore and have some patience! Once you have chosen your land, you can neither give it up nor change it for another piece of land. The current 10,000 square meter plots of land cannot be split into smaller parcels, but they can be terraformed and textured, so you can make your piece of land unique. Like many other things in HiPiHi during the late beta stages of development, what you learn about the environment now will prove useful after the full release.

Be prepared to invest time in finding land that has not been claimed. Learn to use the World Map (see the Navigation in HiPiHi article) and explore!

Finding Land

Right-click on any piece of land and a menu with a number of options will appear. The option you want is Land Information:

Click on the Land Information item around the middle of the menu. This causes two things to happen:

1. The Land Information dialog opens
2. The 10,000 square meter parcel you clicked will change its surface color to a red hue which will shift from bright to dull and back to bright so long as the Land Information dialog is open.

Land Information

It is easy to see the parcel of land you have selected because it is colored differently from those around it, as this picture shows—the ground I selected has changed to a red hue:

The dialog that opens looks like this:

The dialog defaults to the land information tab, marked with a 1 in the illustration above. We will come back to the second tab (2 above) later—that tab is where you control permissions for the land you own.

I have highlighted with red boxes two pieces of information in the dialog: the Owner of the land, and the date and time of Possession. In the illustration above, Chun Ping claimed this piece of land on April 24 this year. These two items are the information you will look at as you seek a plot of land for yourself. There will be times when there are Chinese characters in the Owner field, but no date in the Possession field—those pieces of land may be reserved by HiPiHi, or they may be available to claim. Look for a button where I have drawn the green oval in the illustration (number 3 in the picture) and click it to claim the land. If the land can be claimed you will get a yes/no option box.

The Other Buttons

The pair of “Detailed Information” buttons open information dialogs about the owner of the land (top button) or the Community (Group is the SL equivalent term) that the land belongs to (lower of the two buttons).

The button I have marked 4 in the picture is a “Vote” button. I am not sure of what this does. I have not yet come across land with votes, although I am sure there must be some out there somewhere!

Land Permissions

The second tab on the Land Information dialog (2 in the illustration above) changes the dialog to look like this:

This is laid out like a spreadsheet. The vertical column down the left lists the various things you may want to allow others to do on your land. The next column (“1” in the picture) contains identical buttons which you click to open a dialog in which you can select individuals (“invite friends”) to whom you want to grant permissions. The final column (“2” in the picture) contains identical option boxes that you click to enable ( in other words, to allow the selected action to be performed by those people you selected in the previous column).

The permissions you can grant, from top to bottom of the left column, are:

1. Enter—Second Life tends towards lots of “locked down” plots whose owners would prefer no one except their approved friends or group members enter the plot. So far I have not seen this in HiPiHi and I rather hope it remains that way. At this time, this option is not activated and you cannot use it.
2. Edit Terrain—letting just anyone edit the terrain of your land is probably not a great idea, but allowing friends who are good at it to give your land some more character via terraforming or surface texturing can be nice.
3. Run Script—in SL allowing just anyone to run scripts on your land is a definite invitation to griefers. I’ve not come across griefing in HiPiHi but on general principle I would be hesitant about allowing all and sundry to run scripts. At this time, this option is not activated and you cannot use it.
4. Land Management—inviting a friend to manage your land makes little sense in HiPiHi now, but when HiPiHi has a system of commerce, managing rental properties and the like could easily require help.
   
5. Add Object—do you want to let others leave objects on your land?
6. Move Object—do you want to let others move objects around on your land?
7. Edit Object—do you want to let others edit objects on your land?
8. Delete Object—do you want to let others delete objects on your land?

I think that most of the land options are not very important to most users now (and 1 and 3 cannot even be used yet), but when HiPiHi reaches its “fully public” stage of development and a commerce system is put in place (including land sales and rentals), then most if not all of these options will be important to know and understand.

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