If you want even more news about fabulous freebies and bargains in Second Life than what I write about in this blog, may I recommend the Second Life group I maintain, called the RyanSchultz.com Steals, Deals & Freebies group? The group costs only L$50 to join; more information here.
It’s May again, which means that all month long, the Second Life Syndicate will be running their annual Scoop ‘n’ Score hunt, which offers many fabulous free prizes—if you can find them! The objects you are looking for are swirly little anthropomorphic poop figures, as shown in the picture below. You might think these objects would stick out, but the dark, dirty sewer maze in which they are hidden makes this hunt among the more difficult ones! Read on for some tips and tricks to make your hunt (or, for that matter, any Second Life hunt!) a little bit easier.
As I said, if you are using the shared or default environment, the sewer tunnels are dark, which makes the hunting much more difficult! Here’s an example of what you’re facing:
So the first thing I would advise you to do is to turn on the lights! In the Firestorm viewer, just click on the Quick Preferences button in the bottom right-hand corner (the one with the Firestorm phoenix logo on it), and select either Nam’s Optimal Skin 1 or CalWL from the Sky menu. This drug den now looks like this:
The second problem is the fog, which tends to obscures certain areas in the maze of sewer tunnels. Now, you will want to do the following:
- Right-click on a piece of the fog/smoke, and select More from the pie menu;
- From the next pie menu that appears, click on More again;
- From the next menu, choose Derender, then Temporary.
- Repeat as needed (I had to do it four times to remove the mesh fog from this den!
Now, you can finally see clearly enough to find the poop with the prize!
Here’s another pro hunter’s tip. Sometimes you will encounter a very complicated scene, such as this jumble of boxes, barrels, and other junk:
Instead of using your camera controls to peer around every corner, turn on your X-Ray vision! In the Firestorm viewer, press Ctrl-Shift-R on your keyboard. This turns off textures and puts you into wireframe mode, which looks like this:
In wireframe mode, you will be able to “look through” objects to find any distinctive swirly poop shapes hiding behind them! When you’re done, just hit Ctrl-Shift -R to toggle wireframe mode off again.
Now, let’s take a look at some of those Scoop ‘n’ Score hunt prizes! In addition to the gloves I mentioned earlier, Una has a few other gifts waiting for the intrepid sewer hunter, like this cosplay jumper outfit (as I said before, the pooper scooper is available for free from a poster near the hunt entrance). This all-in-one outfit comes in a size to fit Maitreya Lara, and everything is included except the gloves and the boots.
Another fun, Barbie-like outfit consists of three separate Scoop ‘n’ Score hunt prizes:
- Cubic Cherry has 14 different colours of this Gear Up helmet hidden throughout the sewer maze; this is the pink one.
- The D.B. Cosplay dress is a gift from Una (Maitreya Lara size only), and like the previous outfit, it is all-in-one (including the scarf and the belt with the pouch).
- The D.B. cosplay boots are also a gift from Una (again, one size only, for Maitreya Lara, but you should be able to alpha out your feet so they fit other brands of mesh bodies).
Another lovely gift from Una is this dirndl-style peasant dress in pink and green (again, for Maitreya Lara only):
Now for some completely different looks! This glorious gothic ballgown in red and black is another prize from the Scoop ‘n’ Score hunt. It is called LaViuda, and it is a gift from Sweet Kajira. I paired it with the blue-striped parasol, a gift from Grasshopper Street. which comes in two versions (left or right hand pose), is resizable, and even tintable! (I tinted the parasol with a good bit of grey to match this gothic horror look.)
Zoom in on the face, and you can see two more hunt gifts from Tristan Flinders (TF): the facial scar is from a package called Linea, and comes in BoM, Omega, LeLutka Evo and EvoX, and Genus versions. The damaged eyeball comes from another TF gift called Ami, which also includes different scars, black eyes, eye textures, and mesh eyeballs (in Omega, LeLutka Evo and EvoX, and Genus versions).
Another gift is this Belle black ballgown, which comes with a HUD to change the colours of the gemstones. I paired it with a second Scoop ‘n’ Score hunt prize, the Demonslayer long black fingerless gloves from Normandy. I love this look, but unfortunately, there’s zero information about the creator of the gown in the package, so I have no idea who made it! Oh, well.
There’s also a lot of home and garden decor to be found as well! One of four gifts from Petrichor is this limited-edition Summer Moon mirror:
From WLS comes this imposing, scary-looking Clown Entrance (the land impact/LI is 23; I had to remove a large tree from my Linden Home backyard to rezz this sucker!).
There are many furniture gifts from ChiMia (thirty of them!), like this Mary Jane hall tree with its built-in seating and storage:
Here’s a gallery of some of the other hunt prizes from ChiMia, a real mixture of furniture styles ranging from gothic to rustic to mid-century retro! Please click on each thumbnail to see these pictures in full size and to get the item name:
Happy hunting!
P.S. To save myself much time and hassle as I drag my small army of alts through the same hunt event over and over and over again, I usually draw up a notecard with hunt prize descriptions (including what sizes the apparel gifts come in), hunt object names, and locations, to help me navigate. (I mean, why bother hunting for a dress or gown when it doesn’t come in a size for the body your avatar uses?)
If you are simply tearing your hair out, or if you just hate doing hunts, then please join the RyanSchultz.com Steals, Deals & Freebies group in Second Life, where I have shared a succession of notecards with brief descriptions of as many hunt prizes as I could find, along with their locations in the maze.
The group join fee is L$50, which I feel is a reasonable price to ask for somebody who has essentially done your hunting for you 😉 and if you consider this cheating, well then, please don’t get the notecards! Some people enjoy doing the hunts themselves, without any assistance—but some don’t.
Please note: I have posted successive, numbered update versions to the notecard as I continue to find new items, and I have noticed that some of the location SLURLs won’t open as the notecards get longer with each update, so you might have to do an object name or owner search under Area Search, or simply go back to a previous version of the hunt notecard. Sorry! Second Life just seems to crap out when notecards have too much text or too many SLURLs in them. I’ve had this happen before when I used to create notecards to guide my small army of alts through Shop and Hop events. It’s irritating, but there are usually workarounds.
I also post regularly to the group about other fabulous freebies I find at various shopping events across the grid, or if a Second Life store I visit has a great selection of free items on their gift wall. Your L$50 will be well spent, I do assure you! And charging a fee means that I get to call myself a professional freebie fashionista! 😜
