Structure Building Guidelines

When you are part of building something new like a metaverse, best practices aren’t known at the beginning.  They are made up as we go along.  Things that might seem obvious now, weren’t at the beginning and some players didn’t get the memo. Click here to learn about the different type of standard structures in Upland. If you are starting out by building your first structure, you might not want to build the largest one possible. This YouTube video elaborates on why you shouldn’t over extend yourself regarding spark.

Can you spot the house with the front door facing away from the street in the picture below?  When buildings were first introduced in Upland, naturally people started building.  Sometimes people weren’t always thinking about the small details.  It’s obvious now that your front door should be facing the street.  The purpose of this page is to clarify some of the best practices – dos and don’ts of building and positioning your homes in the Metaverse.  As a comparison, you can see in the second picture the Midtown Terrace neighborhood in San Francisco.  The players in that neighborhood worked together, developed a plan and a standard that worked for them to ensure that all the structures built are placed in a uniform fashion.  The results clearly show that an organized community is located in that neighborhood.

Once you have determined the property you want to build on, the following is a checklist to help guide you and help determine how to position your structure on your property:

1. Are you building in a neighborhood that has an established community? It is possible they have suggested guidelines as to how to position your building and/or building color schemes.  See the Upland Guide Community Directory to see some of the organized communities or nodes that exist in Upland.  One example is the Portage Park neighborhood in Chicago – check out their building guidelines.
2. Are there other buildings neighboring you or on the same street?  Consider replicating the home placement and color scheme to start creating uniformity.
3. Consider building the same type of structure next  to your neighbor.  Both of the small townhouses (slanted and flat roof) in the picture below require the same amount of spark hours to build.  For the visual appeal, it might make sense to build the same structure as your neighbor.  Note that it might not always be possible, the small townhouse with the flat roof has a smaller footprint and can fit on narrower properties.
4. The same can be said for positioning of the home – consider placing and aligning the home similar to that of your neighbor. (avoid what you see below)

5. Do you have other properties on the same street or in a row that you intend on building upon? Think about how you will position and choose the coloring.  Be thoughtful prior to begin your first build.
6. Verify the actual address of your property and ensure that the front door of your house faces the proper street. The property below is positioned with a maximum front lawn with the front door facing Meadow Rd. The issue is that the address of the property is actually Eastern Way. This means that the structure is actually backwards! Watch this video where I go describe in more detail this entails.

5. Decide how much of a front lawn you want.  Below are two homes that are not aligned to each other.  My home (blue house) is positioned at the back of the property.  This was strategically done to allow for future home decor to be placed on the front lawn of the property.  There will be metaventure businesses that will support this in the future.  The red home is positioned without any lawn.  Aesthetically speaking it does make sense to have the entrance as close to the street as possible.  Hopefully home decor can be a wide range of things.  Maybe my neighbor would like to build a swimming pool – and that would make sense to have in the backyard.

6. Is there a racetrack (or do you plan on having one) go past your house? Position your building in a way can provide you with maximum exposure for players to see it as the cars race by. Learn more about car racing here.

If the above list did not help you to determine how to position your home, we recommend following the guidelines below.