In the time it took between me buying the Pumpkin Pack and publishing my last blog post that featured it,a couple of extra activities have been added.
Pumpkin Flower Tea
I mentioned in my last post that the pumpkin growing beds also let you grow pumpkin flowers, now you can make those into tea using the rustic teapot.
When you grow pumpkin flowers and take them into your Pouch, you’ll receive three portions: HnF_pumpkin_flower: Ava Bloodrose you received 3 of item: HnF_pumpkin_flower
The recipe for Pumpkin Flower Tea is as follows;
HnF_rustic_teapot: HnF_pumpkin_flower_tea requires the following ingredients: HnF_hot_water: 1 HnF_pumpkin_flower: 1 HnF_honey: 1 It will take 5.00 minutes to make
Jack O Lantern
It wouldn’t be Spooky Season without Pumpkin carving, would it? So now you can make your own Herb & Fable Jack O Lantern.
HnF_craft_table: HnF_jack-o-lantern requires the following ingredients: HnF_pumpkin: 1 It will take 30.0 minutes to make
Obviously you need a knife and a table on which to carve your pumpkin. The Crafting Table is free as part of the Lavendell Quest and the Knife comes with the First Wand pack from the store.
In the spirit of the spooky season, Herb & Fable have released a Pumpkin Pie set along with the various ingredients in the store allowing you to make more when you run out.
The pie pack gives you enough ingredients to make three pies, which is a multi-step process.
So what to do with this lot? Let’s check out the recipe cards, you can add them from your inventory and they display on screen.
To make Pumkin Pie you will need:
1 x HnF_pumpkin_pie_mix 1 x HnF_pastry_case 1 x HnF_icing_sugar
First you need to heat your pumpkin in the Saucepan which takes half an hour. Since the pan is copyable, I’ve put three out to heat at once, they’re also Modifiable so I resized them too.
To cook the pumkin you will need:
1 x HnF_pumpkin 3 x water
While the pumpkin is cooking you can start on making the pie mix.
To make Pumkin Pie Mix you will need:
1 x HnF_cooked_pumpkin 1 x HnF_pumpkin_pie_spice 2 x HnF_eggs 1 x HnF_milk 1 x HnF_sugar 1 x HnF_sea_salt 1 x HnF_butter
So before we can make pie mix, it looks like we need to make some pumpkin spice using the mortar & pestle to grind up some of the ingredients.
To make Pumkin Pie Spice you will need:
1 x HnF_ground_ginger 1 x HnF_grated_nutmeg 1 x HnF_cinnamon 1 x HnF_allspice 1 x HnF_black_pepper
After you’ve done all that, you should then have cooked pumpkin and pumpkin spice to use as ingredients for the next steps.
Once you have both your cooked pumpkin and spice, you’ll need to mix them together in your mixing bowl.
When that’s done, you’ll have pumpkin pie mix,that can go in the oven with the pie case as per the pie recipe. When they’re baked you’ll have some pies that look lovely and which will restore yourHHerb & Fable health stats when used.
As with cooking in the real world, a lot of mess has been made of empty containers and leftover produce, so your workspace may look something like the picture below. You can see that the items now have red hovertext over them, meaning you can either recycle the containers or compost the food waste.
But now of course you probably want to make some more? No problem! You can grow your own pumpkins with the Pumpkin Beds and seeds, with the other ingredients also available in the Herb & Fable store.
GrowingGrown
If you look here though, it’s not just actual pumpkins that you can make, but pumpkin seeds and pumpkin flowers as well.
Update: The viewer was promoted to the default official viewer on 16th of October.
During the Zoom call last Thursday (25th September) something was mentioned that seems to have slipped under the radar, everyone focussed on the new “Premium Plus no stipend” news.
What didn’t make so much news was the mention of a new official Second Life viewer for Mac, written to run on the “M” series of chips, or “Apple Silicon” as it’s known.
This viewer has been mostly created by third-party open-source developers who did most of the work coding a viewer to utilise the technical capabilities of these chips. Philip Rosedale admitted during the call that there’s no way the Lab could have dedicated enough time or resources to do this work and they are very grateful to the community.
Linden Lab then used this code as a base for a new Official Viewer which is integrated into Viewer 7.2.2.17774206511 Beta and according to Brett Linden “will soon be advanced to the default Mac Viewer”.
What got my attention was Philip Rosedale’s excitement as he commented that the difference they have seen in FPS (Frames per Second) is “between 20% and 200% improvements”, even on his old M1 generation MacBook.
However, I was at the WebRTC voice stress-test last night and it was Phillip that kept disconnecting. To be fair though, there were well over 100 avatars present, which would strain most systems. He was reporting 30fps in that crowded space though, which he sounded very happy about and is pretty impressive.
So I thought I’d try it for myself and asked a friend very nicely if they’d lend me their MacBook for a couple of days. It was a MacBook Air 15, 2023 M2 with 8GB RAM, I was pleasantly surprised.
I did some very unscientific tests noting the FPS at a few places with the current Release viewer then cleared the cache and updated to the current Beta. I then went back to each place to note any differences.
Current Release Viewer
Location
FPS on arrival
Lowest FPS
Approximateaverage once all Rezzed
Avatars Present
FaMeshed
61
28
27
50
Warehouse 21
43
11.4
27 (but laggy and crashed)
51
Muddy’s
45
21
20’s
45
Totally 80’s
45
34
30’s
(didn’t count)
Beta Viewer
Location
FPS on arrival
Lowest FPS
Approximateaverage once all Rezzed
Avatars Present
FaMeshed
34
24.6
mid 30’s
44
Warehouse 21
43
15
27 (stable not laggy)
44
Muddy’s
44
24
35
62
Totally 80’s
40
26
40’s to 52
39
I left the graphics settings at the installed defaults which were in the Low range, but increased the Draw Distance to 240m. The Beta viewer was noticably smoother and seemed to lag less where the previous viewer had, but maybe just a complex avatar had left between my visits. If you have a Mac though, I’d definitely download the Beta, you’ll notice a marked improvement.
Information from the release notes:
Known Issues:
Apple Silicon does not support convex decomposition for physics meshes
We are looking to have a new convex decomposition solution for generating physics meshes in a subsequent release for all platforms
Apple Silicon does not support pathfinding tools
Navigation buttons in the in-viewer browser are no longer present for marketplace and search
We will be restoring these in a future update
Subtle rendering differences might be noticed on certain configurations and EEP environments
We are working to improve these.
You can find more details and download it from the Release Notes page.
Being a Windows user, this really won’t affect me, but I know there’s a lot of Mac users out there and I feel this should have got a bit more of a fanfare for their sake. Maybe that’ll come when it’s promoted to being the default.
The header image is a screenshot from the WebRTC test session.
Herb & Fable in Second Life is out of Beta and into Live Phase One, starting with a new Quest: The Dandelion Trail.
Like the Beta Quest before it, the Dandelion Trail has you hunting all over the Centauria region for ingredients to make recipes. In this case you’re hunting for dandelions to make dandelion tea. You can also make dandelion cookies, which if you do all the steps yourself, can take some time! Youll require these ingredients:
HnF_dandelion_biscuits requires the following ingredients: HnF_cookie_mix: 1 HnF_dandelion_flowers: 15 HnF_lemon_juice: 1 HnF_lemon_zest: 1
You can see some of the various ingredients at the differents stages of the process in the picture above (which took a lot of time and corn to have enough to display them all!)
The lengthy part is making cornflour, which requires you to:
Grow Corn Cobs
Soak the cobs to get kernels
Grind the kernels up into mush
Dry the mushed kernels
Grind the dried, mushed kernels into flour
Alternatively you can buy some cornflour at the Herb & Fable store, like you would in the real world, but the process was educational and you gain an extra badge. When you’ve got your cornflour you’ll be able to make cookie dough mix. There are several other ingredients you’ll need though:
HnF_cookie_mix requires the following ingredients: HnF_sugar: 1 HnF_butter: 1 HnF_eggs: 1 HnF_wheat_flour: 1 HnF_cornflour: 1 HnF_whipped_egg_white: 1 HnF_sea_salt: 1
So your shopping list consists of:
Herb & Fable – Bowl (to soak the corn)
Herb & Fable – Whisk (to whip eggs into egg white)
Sugar
Butter
Lemons (to make into juice)
Lemon Zest
Eggs (to whip)
Sea salt
If you don’t have them already, you will also need Wheat, Dandelion and Maize beds plus seeds for growing your other ingredients.
Possibly that sounds a little overwhelming if you’re just starting out, but start with the tea and go from there. There’s a great coomunity of other players that can help you along the way in the Inworld Group and the Discord server.
So here’s my take on the news that’s appeared on several blogs already; Linden Lab announce a new subscription plan . “Premium Plus – no stipend” quite simply a subscription with exactly the same benefits as Premium Plus, just without the signup bonus and monthly payment of 650L$, at a cheaper price. You can expect this to become available mid October.
Table showing different Second Life subscription plans, with Premium Plus highlighted that has a check box labelled “Save $105.12 US without Stipend & Bonus”.
Targeted particularly at creators or store owners that want the other benefits like free uploads, but don’t need the stipend payments because their business provides a Linden dollar income. The Lab believe it will also suit enthusiastic residents that want the benefits like the extra groups, but prefer to buy Lindens as they need them. Apparently the majority of current Premium Plus members buy extra Lindens anyway, so reducing the monthly/annual subscription outlay might be appealing.
Brad said in a Zoom call on Thursday “It’s the best option for SL”(people taking a no-stipend subscription). This is because paying Residents stipends puts extra lindens into circulation in the virtual economy, which is a pool that’s already flooded, which affects the exchange rate negatively.
After the Zoom call, I took the above image and posted it into the Fantasy Faire Backstage Discord server with a brief explanation to see what the merchants thought. Here’s some of the responses;
“They vastly overestimate how much I actually make lol. I spend more on stuff to make stuff with than I earn back lol I like the stipend but i could see it (non stipend plan) being handy for some”
“yeah i’ll keep my stipened some weeks it’s all i have coming in […] but certainly a good deal if you are only going to cash out”
“The stipend is the reason i have premium plus…they gonna give us one thats just free uploads with a stipend? lol i dont need the group space, or the land bonus, just the uploads and the stipend…actually i could do without stipend if theres just free uploads”
“As someone who is neither a creator nor a DJ, I always have more outgo than income in SL. My stipend goes right to the tipjars of the couple of events I attend each week, and the rest out of pocket. I wish there was a level between Premium and Premium Plus Minus Stipend. Maybe something with 110 groups and 450 L$ stipend but leave all the upload fees at Premium level since I don’t mind paying 10 L$ for the occasional texture a couple times a month.”
In contrast a larger brand creator I shared the news with said:
“Wow”
They seemed keen on the idea, despite having just renewed their annual Premium Plus subscription. However since there was talk of being able to switch plans quickly, that might not be an issue.
What I take from this is that the no-stipend plan is much more suited for large-scale businesses. Smaller businesses still appreciate it, but also raised above are the things people don’t need but are paying for. Some don’t need the land bonus (they possibly have a full region for their store), others don’t need masses of groups. I think this should be the first step in creating a custom subscription system, allowing you tick boxes for the benefits you want or don’t want and have the price adjusted accordingly.
Here I’ve a couple more items from Enchanted Realms, if you’ve not gone and had a browse there yet, you better hurry. Enchanted Realms closes on Saturday 27th September at 11pm SLT.
EEP Lighting: Herb & Fable Strawberry Moon – Available by completing the Strawberry moon ritual from Herb & Fable – all elements are either available now or soon in-store.
I’m reblogging this recent post by Daniel Voyager,with my own thoughts thrown in. I got excited when I saw Daniel’s post, since in my opinion Lumiya was the best mobile viewer of its time. I may actually go as far to say of any time for that matter. Linden Lab are doing their best building their own viewer from the ground up, but it’s focussed mainly on new residents as an entry path, not for seasoned residents that might want to quickly log in to do some task or other.
This is a reverse engineering project to resurrect a much loved piece of software. If you have the skills and are interested in helping out, you can check out the GitHub Repo for more details. Click below for Daniel’s original post.
(Header image from internet search, no credit claimed)
While checking the Second Life Reddit posts over the weekend I came across this post named Restoring Lumiya Viewer to the public posted by Kaleaon who is the last member of Alina Lyvette staff. Kaleaon has not been in contact with Alina for nearly a decade. The plan is to open up the Lumiya Viewer […]
Enchanted Realms is an event which welcomes all types of Fantasy in Second Life. I grabbed this toga that caught my attention and I picked up a few other goodies I’ll be sharing with you soon.
Outfit Credits:
Toga and Hood: [Good Fairy] – Three Graces {Maxi Toga} – Event Booth
There’s a new season of a certain Addams Family spin-off released, so unsurprisingly Second Life creators are hopping onto it, but obviously a different “day” as the name of their product.
I’ve been wandering the Enchantment: Nevermore event, you’d have thought it was Halloween already.
I put together an outfit featuring some stuff from the event, mainly around the “Friday” limited edition outfit from Jangka (who previously released a “Tuesday” one too).
Credits:
Outfit: [JANGKA] FRIDAY Outfit BLACK
Boots: //RKS// Medoros Boots – Fatpack
Pantyhose: +ARANA+ Cross Pantyhose BOM – 80%
Skull: MirageDoll.Helga Scull
Eye applier: Misteria – Tarot Eyes
Lips: +ARANA+ Black Rapsody Lipstick HQ 2K- Lelutka EvoX
