LAND: General

Description

Decentraland’s map, also known as Genesis City, consists of 16m2 plots called LAND where people can deploy scenes. These plots are owned by individuals and businesses worldwide. With a limited availability of just 90,601 plots, they can be purchased/rented as an NFT through the Decentraland Marketplace or alternative platforms like OpenSea (only buying).

If two LANDs are next to each other on the map, they can be joint as an ESTATE. This means that a scene/experience can now take more space.

Discoverability

The interesting thing about LAND is the way people discover what you are doing. First, you are surrounded by other neighbors (since it’s an open world), which means, that if you are close to popular scenes, some of their audiences may walk to your LAND if you catch their attention. The same thing happens in reverse, generating a constant flow of people.

Second, but not less important, by owning or renting a land, you get access to two important tools: the Genesis City page and the Events page. Let’s see why they matter.

Whenever a player presses the X button in-game, they will see the following panel:

The ‘Genesis City’ tab (1) shows where are the people currently. It orders the different scenes based on the number of players they are currently on each one. In other words, if you are able to get some initial people in your scene (by using social media, for example), your scene will start ranking, and others will discover you through this panel.

The ‘Events’ tab (2) shows the events that land owners (or tenants) have submitted to the platform. By owning a land, you will be able to use this tool.

The same information is available at events.decentraland.org, where not only you have access to the form to submit your event, but it also allows users to add events to their calendars as well to show their interest of attending an event.

Limits

By owning a LAND, you will be able to create a scene that is 16m x 16m. If two plots are joint (forming an ESTATE), the experience can be bigger. This is not only reflected on the number of plots you can take, but also on the max. height you can build up and the files your scene is hosting. Here are the current limits:

n represents the number of parcels that a scene occupies.

• Triangles: n x 10000 Total amount of triangles for all the models in the scene.
• Entities: n x 200 Amount of entities in the scene.
• Bodies: n x 300 Amount of meshes in the scene.
• Materials: log2(n+1) x 20 Amount of materials in the scene. It includes materials imported as part of models.
• Textures: log2(n+1) x 10 Amount of textures in the scene. It includes textures imported as part of models.
• Height: log2(n+1) x 20 Height in meters. Important: Only entities that are currently being rendered in the scene are counted for these limits. If your scene switches between 3D models, what matters is the rendered models at any point in time, not the total sum. Player avatars and any items brought by a player from outside the scene don’t count for calculating these limits either.
• File size: 15 MB per parcel - 300 MB max Total size of the files uploaded to the content server. Includes 3D models and audio. Doesn’t include files that aren’t uploaded, such as node.js packages.
• File count: 200 files per parcel Total count of the files uploaded. Includes 3D models and audio. Doesn’t include files that aren’t uploaded, such as node.js packages.
• Max file size 50 MB per file No individual file of any type in the scene can exceed 50 MB, no matter how many parcels the scene has.

In regards to what you can publish or not, you can see that on the Terms of Service. But in general: don’t do anything illegal and use common sense if you don’t want to get into problems with your LAND. Currently, there are no cases where the DAO has taken any action against a certain type of content.

However, if you are going to submit adult content, is recommended to put some warning before entering and not displaying any sensitive content to the outside.

Pricing

The main problem of owning a LAND is the price these have. While the price per land varies depending on the market conditions, location and other factors, in general, they are usually above $1k. And this only for one plot, which, for most cases, it’s not enough (I do recommend four for an optimal experience).

This is when renting comes out as the ideal solution for those who cannot afford to acquire LAND. These days, renting is very easy since the Decentraland Marketplace offers an official method to do such thing.