Seed Objects

Now that you've found some unclaimed land, you might think you're ready to start building. Unfortunately, there is one other thing you need.

In order to start building, there has to be at least one object at the site already. This is called a "starter object" or a "seed."

The easiest way to get a seed on your open area is to build next to an existing building. Just find a place with some open land next to it, and you'll be all set. If you choose this route, it is polite to send a telegram to the owner of the existing build and ask if they're done expanding in that direction. (Note: only citizens can send telegrams.)

Alternatively, there are lots of roads in Alphaworld that lead absolutely nowhere and go on for hundreds of miles. A chunk of road will do fine as a seed, so just run along one of these roads until you find a section of open land next to it, then you're all set. Here's a good example of a road to nowhere:

At one point, some trees were scattered randomly across the face of Alphaworld. If you find such a tree out in the middle of nowhere, it will do fine for a starter object. (Note: these trees do not appear on the Alphaworld Mapper. Areas that have just one object in them are shown as blank, because rendering them would significantly increase the amount of time required to update the map.)

There are two other ways to get starter objects to areas of unclaimed land. 1) find a regular object, copy it, and then move the object to the destination by hand. This method is extremely slow, not to mention imprecise. (This is how I got started, by the way. I dragged a walk12.rwx for 2000 coords so that I wouldn't have to deal with neighbors.)

The other method involves using a "bot" to create a starter object for you. Bots are some pretty advanced stuff, and worthy of a whole separate tutorial. I don't plan to write such a tutorial, since I don't use bots much myself. If you happen to know a citizen who uses bots, you might politely ask him or her to place a starter object for you.

Once you've found a building site with both open land and a seed object you can copy, it's time to claim the area as your own.