A colony is the group you belong to in SL Colonies Roleplay — a family, a faction, a bloodline, a house. The colony sign plants it on your land: it shows your crest, your leader and how many have joined, and lets a passer-by ask to be let in. Behind it, the Colony page on the website runs everything else: jobs, goals, shared stores, a treasury, members, titles and honours.
You get one free with a region server. Spares are in Essentials.
Why a colony and not a group
Land groups already exist, so the question is fair. A colony is different in three ways that matter:
- It needs no rez rights. You can bring people into a colony without handing them build permissions on your land.
- You belong to exactly one. Nobody is in two colonies at once, and nobody leads two. That is the whole point — a bloodline you can quietly also belong to is not a bloodline.
- It shows. Every member wears the colony in their meter title, above their head, wherever they go.
Set an object’s security to Colony and only your colonists can use it, without a group tag and without a role. It also puts that object on your colony page, which is where most of what follows comes from.
Getting started
Sign in at slcoloniesroleplay.com and open the Colony tab on your profile. If you are not in a colony, you can found one there: give it a name and you are its leader and first member. If you are already in someone else’s colony, leave it first — you can only be in one.
Rez your sign on your land and it shows your colony to everyone who passes.
Not leading one? Colonies to join lists every colony with someone active in the last 30 days. Where the leader’s sign is out and its land is a public realm, there is a link to go and visit it.
The colony page
The page has six tabs: Chat, Work, Stores, Trade, Members and Settings. Settings is for the leader and managers only.
Chat
A private room for your colony, on the website and on our Discord. The leader or a manager opens it once the colony has at least two members; members who have linked Discord to their account get the Discord channel too, and nobody outside your colony can see it. What you write on one side shows on the other. Treat it as you would any message stored on a game server.
Work
Everything your members have set to Colony security shows up here: benches, fields, trees and other gathering spots, and animal spawners. You see what is crafting, what is growing and what is ready to gather.
The leader and managers turn that into jobs:
- Flag a recipe on an idle bench. The list shows recipes somebody in the colony knows, and who knows them — never the ingredients. Add a note if you like.
- Flag a field or a gathering spot when it needs plowing, or is ready to harvest or cut.
- Hand the job to a member, or leave it with nobody yet. Whoever it was given to marks it done.
Goals
Give the colony something to gather towards — 500 apples for the feast — and everyone sees how close it is. A goal is counted from what is in the colony’s shared stores. Up to five at a time, set by the leader or a manager. A goal that is met stays met until you remove it.
Stores
Every storage chest set to Colony security, yours and your members’, in one place. Anyone in the colony can look inside and search across them all.
The leader and managers can also:
- Move goods between storages — all, half, or a number you type — once the colony has at least two shared storages.
- Read the record of what has gone into and out of the stores.
- Decide where goods go. Crafting, gathering and farming normally land in the member’s own inventory. Send any of them, or just one kind of station or field, straight into a shared storage instead, so nobody has to carry a harvest back across the sim.
Trade
The treasury is where the colony’s coins collect: its share of members’ courier deliveries, the fee on its market hubs, and the takings of colony shops. It is one of the leader’s own storages, set to Private, with only the leader and managers on its access list — not Colony, because a treasury every member could open would not stay a treasury for long. Only the leader chooses it.
Market fees. Once you have a treasury, on a market hub owned by one of your members you can set a fee from 0 to 10% on what players buy there. It never raises the price: at 10% buyers pay the normal price and the colony’s cut comes out of what the market already takes; set it lower and your hub is cheaper by the difference.
Vendors. A member who hands their shop to the colony lets the leader and managers set its prices and listings, fill its till, and send its takings to the treasury.
Members
Two ways in:
- Invite a player by their Second Life username. The invitation lasts 14 days and can be withdrawn.
- Touch the sign. Anyone can left-click your sign to ask to join. The leader is messaged in-world, the request waits on the colony page, and the leader or a manager accepts or declines.
From the member list you can give each member their own title: their meter reads <title> of <your colony> instead of colonist of <your colony>. If a change does not show straight away, detach your meter and put it back on.
Managers can do almost everything the leader can — run jobs, goals and stores, invite, set titles and fees, look after colony shops, and edit the settings. Only the leader appoints managers, removes members, chooses the treasury and can dissolve the colony.
Standing shows who keeps turning up. It counts the weeks, out of the last 12, in which someone did something for the colony: left goods in the shared stores, crafted at a Colony bench, finished a job they were given, worked a Colony field, or gathered from Colony land. Weeks, not amounts, so steady help counts for as much as one big haul. The levels are Known (1 week), Trusted (3), Stalwart (6) and Pillar of the colony (9).
Settings
- Colony details — the name, the description, and a crest: paste a texture UUID (right-click the texture in your inventory, Copy asset UUID).
- Rename the world — every profession and every species, renamed for your lands. A cook can be a chef, an angel a demon. That is what your colonists’ meters show, and it changes nothing for anyone outside your colony.
- Honours — your own awards, up to 12. Each is earned one of four ways: a number of weeks active (1 to 12), an amount of one item left in the shared stores, a number of jobs finished, or granted by hand. Members earn the measured ones on their own. An honour can carry a title and a reward from your stores; the leader or a manager presses to give those, and the reward lands in the member’s inventory.
- Dissolve this colony — leader only, and final. Every member is told in-world and stops being a colonist; your renamed professions and species, jobs, goals, honours and anyone waiting to join go with it. Your land, stations and storage are untouched — they were always yours, not the colony’s. You retype the colony’s name to confirm, so it cannot happen by accident.
The Scrying Stone
The Scrying Stone on the colony page lets you work your colony’s stations from the website. It is for Citizens and World Builders and has its own guide.
More than one on a parcel
You can rez several signs, but a colony is led by one account, so a second colony on the same land needs a second account to lead it. That is deliberate — it is what stops one person quietly holding every faction on a sim.
Which is where this gets interesting: several colonies on one region can ally, feud, hold tournaments and go to war, and the sign is where each of them plants its flag.
The product page is here: Colony Sign in Second Life — SL Colonies Roleplay