Writer|Photographer: Teresa Firelight
Secrets to Effective Low LI Interior Decorating
or
How to Decorate Your Home Using Very Little LI
Last week I showed you pictures of the Bradbury house that I fully decorated for only 75 Land Impact (LI). Well, more precisely, I decorated the interior for 75 LI so that I would have a bunch of LI to make a very lavish yard.
This week I am going to give you some hints (or secrets) to make a nice interior on a very low LI budget. (I won't have many pictures this time, but I will have a lot of helpful information.)
The secret to decorating your home beautifully with very low LI starts way before you rez the first Prim. You need to be equipped with some nice lower LI furniture and plants, and it helps to have a few extremely low LI pieces as well. I will discuss these shortly.
When you are shopping those L$50, L$60, and L$99 sales, look at the LI. When the sofa is 18 LI, the Coffee table is 4 LI and the two matching chairs are 6 LI each, that is 34 LI just for a bare-bones part of the living room. Add 3 or 4 of those beautiful 5 to 6 LI plants, and you are over 50 LI (1/7th of your total allowance) just in that tiny area alone. The best secret to not using high LI items is not to have them in your inventory. So next time you are looking at weekend dirt-cheap sale items, ask yourself where you plan to use them and if you have the LI allowance for it.
Don’t get me wrong, it is OK to have higher LI in your favorite rooms. For example, I love my LAQ modular kitchen and use it frequently, costing 70-ish LI for that room alone. But if I am targeting a low LI interior, then I use another kitchen with a much lower LI cost.
Here are some Low LI decorating Secrets:
1. Secret #1 is to start collecting some lower LI Furniture. LAQ’s Bed is beautiful and it is only 6 LI. The matching nightstands, lavishly decorated, are only 4 LI each. That gives you a very low-cost basis for a nice bedroom… add some shelves or pictures, a rug, maybe a dresser or wardrobe… all of which are usually also lowish LI.
Along the same lines get some low LI curtains. Fanatik has a set for only 2 LI. In fact, I love FANATIK’s curtains cuz they open/close and even come with some shadow maps so you can create your own curtain textures (if you are into that sort of thing).
Bazaar has some nice low LI chairs, bookshelves, entry tables, etc – and theirs are relatively cheap. But you have to be careful and check the LI before you buy because they also have some not-so-low LI items. One of my favorite things from Bazzar is their Paris Armchair… looks nice, has some color and texture options and poses, and is modifiable… all for only 2 LI. Likewise, Bazzar’s Arizona bedroom shelves beautifully fill most of a wall (bedroom or living room) and are only 3 LI.
And for kitchens, there are several places with low LI kitchens. For example, Kazza has a ByTheSea Kitchen unit (including stove and sink) and matching wall shelves for only 14 LI. In fact, I used it in my 75 LI Bradbury.
I could go on and on about lovely low LI furnishings and places that sell them, but I think you get the idea.
Let me also give a warning about low LI objects. Some creators sacrifice LOD (visibility when you are not right next to the object) to get low LI. In general, I avoid poor LOD objects like the plague. That is because when you move a couple of meters away from it, it either deforms or disappears. Before you buy something, back away from it a bit and make sure it holds its shape.
2. There are tricks to keep a place from looking barren. Use Low LI mesh shelves, wall-mounted bookcases, 3D art, photo sets, etc to fill in walls. Likewise, interior wallpapers can make a sparsely decorated wall look great and not sparse at all. There are 1 and 2 LI potted plants that you can stick in corners or near entrances. And beautiful large rugs can fill out a room in amazing ways.
But be careful with the rugs, because some of the small mesh ones can get pretty high LI when you expand them to fill in a bedroom or living room area. I had one rug that started at 3 LI and was beautiful. I stretched it a little for my room, and suddenly it was 6 LI.
In general, I don't like sculpties, but I find that sculptie rugs often look as nice as the mesh ones and are only 1 LI no matter how big you make them. One of my favorite rugs is the “Sculpt Carpet FairChang pack” gift from Nekka (a marketplace store) for only $1L. It comes with several textures but is also copy/mod so you can re-texture it to fit any room.
3. Collect some Extremely low LI items for your house. These are usually not cheap, but they can make a huge difference in LI cost. For Example, Dekute Dekore has 1 LI living room sets (sofa, 2 armchairs, and a coffee table as a single 1 LI piece of furniture). These tend to be largish, and won't fit is some of the Linden Homes with smaller rooms, like the Trads. This same-store has 1 LI Kitchen Table with 4 or 6 attached chairs (including poses and even rezzes some food on demand). They have 1 LI bed with nightstands on each side. They have a 1 LI piano, and several 1 and 2 LI pieces of individual furniture.
What Next has a large selection of low LI wall products... shelves, bookcases, multi-item picture frames, and knick-knacks that are only 1 or 2 LI each. In fact, there are a lot of other excellent creators who offer very low LI wall items… way too many to mention them all.
4. Editing Tricks To Reduce LI.
I am not sure how LL’s Land Impact calculations work. Sometimes adding/or removing a script from an object has zero impact. Other times, it can increase/decrease LI. For example, I had one LI TLC Egret (bird). I wanted to put it in a rezzer, so I added a rezzer script to it.. and the LI suddenly went up to two. A lot of creators (Kazza for example) deliver their products in rezzers. Sometimes removing the unnecessary scripts will reduce the LI of the object. Other times it won't make any difference.
My recommendation is to duplicate the object (drag-copy or rez new instance – either one is fine). Then delete the scripts and see if the LI goes down. If removing the scripts in the test object's LI goes down, then do it for real. If it doesn't make any difference and you might want to the script in the future, leave it in.
BTW, scripts can increase a region’s LAG. So if you have the color you want to use in your house, you might want to remove the texturing script. In fact, if you are not using animations or giver scripts, it is a good practice to remove scripts from all copy items. If you need the scripts in the future, you can always rez a new instance of it.
Another thing that can help or hurt is Linking objects. A lot of creators make ½ LI items. Rezzed separately, they are 1 LI each. Link them together and it only costs 1 LI for both of them. Sometimes items are maybe ¾ or 80% of an LI on their own. Linking two together doesn't make any difference, but when you like maybe 7 or 8 mesh items, LI goes down by 1 or 2.
HOWEVER, some creators make mesh objects at 1.4 LI. Rezzed alone, it only counts as 1 LI. But rez two of them and link them, and the 2 stand-alone objects go to 3 LI. It doesn't always save you LI to link... sometimes it costs you more. For example, What Next’s “Spring Bloom Tulip” is 1 LI when rezzed individually, but the cost of linking multiple ones together is higher than the cost of leaving them unlinked.
You can make a copy of the set you want to link and link that copy. If the LI goes down, link the original. If it goes up, leave it unlinked.
There is more that could be said about low LI furnishings, but this article is already rather long. I hope that you find it helpful and are about to “get more bang for the buck” out of your limited Linden Home LI allowance.
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