This article explains the tools in the Region/Estate window, accessed by selecting World > Region/Estate from the menus at the top of the Second Life window. While you're on land that you own, this window will probably be pretty important in your life.

There are many tabs in the Region/Estate window:

  • Region
  • Debug
  • Ground Textures
  • Terrain
  • Estate
  • Covenant

All of them apart from Estate deal with Region-specific options. The Estate tab also deals with options that affect the whole Estate, which may include many Regions.

Throughout the tabs you'll see small ? Buttons that provide further guidance.

Region Tab

Block Terraform: Determines whether the land can be edited. This will generally be left checked; you can use the Edit Terrain checkbox in the About Land window's Options tab to prevent others from terraforming the land (while still permitting you to do so).

Block Fly: Turns off flight across this Region, even for parcels that have flight enabled.

Allow Damage: When ticked this Region will be unsafe regardless of parcel settings. If unchecked, parcel owners can still set their parcel as unsafe.

Restrict Pushing: Limits the degree with which avatars can be pushed, therefore making it safer from griefers.

Allow Land Resell: Specifies whether Residents who purchase land on your Estate can resell it to others (or deed it to groups).

Allow Parcel Join/Divide: Specifies whether Residents who purchase land on your Estate can subdivide their parcels (or join them back together again).

Agent Limit: Specifies how many avatars (Residents) can be at your Estate at once. Any Residents beyond this limit that try to arrive will be informed that the Region is full. You can raise this value above its default of 40, but raising this can significantly (and may severely) reduce Estate performance. Alternatively, you can reduce this number to prevent incoming avatars from causing undue load on your Estate.

Object Bonus: This is not a way to increase the number of prims a Region supports. That is fixed. There may, however, be times when you want the default prims per meter for parcels to be higher than usual. This option needs to be used with caution because it can cause confusion; if raised, the sum of the parcel prim limits will exceed the Region limit of 15000.

A Region in Second Life (65536m in size) supports 15000 prims. This equates to roughly 4.3 meters of land for every prim supported; hence, a 512m parcel can support 117 prims.

If the Object Bonus were doubled to 2, that 512m parcel would support 234 prims. However, the overall prim limit of 15000 prims for the Region remains (that cannot be changed), so in order to allow that parcel to be double-primmed, it would be sensible to set aside an equivalently-sized parcel that has no prims on it to balance this out.

So when would this be useful? Imagine that you have a Region that's mainly wilderness, with just four parcels of 4096m cut into it for rental. Because so much of your Estate has nothing but trees on it, you would be able to increase the object bonus to allow those four parcels a much higher prim count than usual.

Maturity: Choose whether your Region is PG or Mature rated.

Teleport Home One User: Allows you to be selective if a specific Resident has worn out their welcome. This button will allow you to send them back to their home location.

Teleport Home All Users: Allows you to send everyone back to their home location, for example if you need to close the Estate for a while.

Send Message to Region: Allows you to send a notification message to everyone in that Region as a blue pop up dialog in the corner of their Second Life window.

Manage Telehub: See Telehubs and Direct Teleport.

Debug Tab

Disable Scripts: Turns off all scripts in the Region.

Disable Collisions: Stops objects from causing collisions on the Region. Where you have a rogue physical object causing problems, this can allow you to reach the object and remove it.

Disable Physics: Turns off physics on the Region. This has the side affect of stopping avatars from moving around.

The Return Scripted Objects tools: Sometimes you may need remove scripted items belonging to a specific person. Select that person using the Choose Avatar button before then choosing to return all of their scripted objects or only those on other people's land.

Get Top Colliders and Get Top Scripts: Both options produce a list of the physics or scripted objects and a measure of their load on the Region. You can then see which items are causing the most load and, if necessary, return them or set a beacon to go investigate.

Restart Region and Cancel Restart: Allow you to force the Region to save and restart. Any Residents still in the Region after the two-minute countdown will be disconnected. While the countdown is ongoing, the Cancel Restart button can abort the restart.

Ground Textures Tab

These controls are used to change the ground textures for different elevations on your Estate. They can be a little confusing at first.

The important thing to remember when first working with the Ground Textures tools is that the top section and bottom section are separate, even though they appear to line up vertically; the controls at the bottom are not acting on the set of textures directly above.

At the top, there are texture squares numbered 1 (Low) to 4 (High). This is because Estates have four levels of ground texture, from 1 at the lower elevations to 4 at the highest.

Textures are blended to form the terrain on your Estate. You can only use textures that are in 24-bit TGA format at a size of 512x512 pixels. For compatibility reasons, these textures should not be used anywhere else in Second Life (glitches may be visible on your client if you see an object and terrain using the same texture).

Note: There are many terrain textures available in the Library section of your Inventory.

So, once you've decided on the textures you want at the four land heights, and have dropped each into the texture slots provided, you now need to decide over what range of heights you want those textures to blend. This is done in the lower half of the texture screen, in the Texture Elevation Ranges settings.

There are four pairs of numbers with a Low and a High for each of the four corners of your Estate. This is because each corner can have the textures blending over a different range, with the Estate as a whole blended together toward the middle evenly from each corner. If the north of your Estate were much higher than the south, it would make sense therefore to set NE and NW with a higher High setting than the SE and SW ones.

The Low number sets the highest point that the 1 (Low) texture will reach. Anything below that setting will be textured with texture 1 (Low).

The High number sets the lowest point that the 4 (High) texture will reach. Anything above that setting will be textured with texture 4 (High).

Textures 2 and 3 are then transitioned evenly between the 1 (Low) and 4 (High) points. Because of this blending between textures, the wider the range, the more gradual the transitions become, whereas the narrower the range, the more clear and defined the changes will be.

You must click the Apply button for your changes to be applied.

Note: Make sure your Texture Elevation Ranges are appropriate; setting the Low range to 60 won't work if your terrain never goes any higher than 30m. Make sure you clicked the Apply button to confirm your changes!

If all else fails, log out of Second Life, then log back in to see if the terrain changes.

Terrain Tab

Water Height: Lets you set the height at which water is shown. Keep in mind that the sea you can see outside of your Estate is at 20m, so if you set your water level differently you will see a gap when you swing the camera outside of the Estate and look back towards it. All mainland water is at 20m also.

Terrain Raise/Lower Limits: Sets the distance above or below the baked terrain level that you can terraform to in this Region.

Bake Terrain: This sets the current terrain as the default, such that the Revert Land tool will revert to this state when used.

Use Estate Sun: Selecting this checkbox means the Region will use the Estate-wide settings for its day/night phases.

Fixed Sun: This sets the sun to a fixed position in the sky with the Phase slider.

Phase slider: Coupled with the Fixed Sun checkbox, this lets you set a specific phase for the sun this Region alone.

Estate Tab

Estate: The Estate name is listed here. This may be very different to than Estate/Region name itself: This is normal.

Estate Managers list: Any Residents you assign as Estate Managers for you in this list will be able to access most of the same Region/Estate tools that you can. They will not be able to deed land or access the About Land window, as these are parcel-level controls. They will be trusted by Linden Lab for rollback requests, so be certain to chose Residents you trust.

Allowed Residents list: If Public Access is not checked, this list specifies which people are permitted to see and enter the Estate. If Public Access is checked, this list is used to specify Residents who have permission to post events on your Estate.

Allowed Groups list: Members of the specific groups listed have access to the Estate.

Banned Residents list: Residents added to this list will not be able to access your Estate.

Use Global Time: This control keeps the Estate in synch with global time.

Fixed Sun: This sets the sun to a fixed position in the sky with the Phase slider.

Phase slider: Coupled with the Fixed Sun checkbox, this lets you set a specific phase for the sun the Estate.

Public Access: When checked, this setting allows access to the Estate without being specifically on the Allowed Residents list.

Allow Direct Teleport: Allows people to teleport directly to the Estate by clicking on it on the map. If you set a landing point on the parcel, that will determine where exactly they will end up. You can also disable this (the default behaviour) and use the traditional telehub method.

Deny Access on Payment Status: Allows you to restrict access based on whether Linden Lab has payment info on file and/or has used it.

Send Message to Estate: Allows you to send a notification message to everyone in the Estate as a blue pop up dialog in the corner of their Second Life window.

Kick User from Estate: Allows you to be selective if a specific Resident has worn out their welcome. This button will allow you to send them back to their home location.