We’ve had scattered reports of people having issues hand-watering and wanted to address them.
I will give a few key points and then I will provide a more technical explanation, for those who understand things best with a full explanation.
Key Points
- You MUST be within 20m of the pot to water.
- You MUST click the Water button within 30 seconds of opening the menu.
Explanation
When we designed the hand watering feature, we had in mind people who would have a small number of plants and would walk around watering them, as a kind of roleplay activity. Most games don’t have a free food option, but it was important to us that people be able to keep some plants alive just to enjoy the plants.
We did not expect people to use area search to click on plants from far away, open hundreds of plants’ dialog boxes, then click Water in all of them.
You MUST be within 20m of the pot to water.
The first limitation is that to hand water a plant, you MUST be within 20m of the pot. There are times when the pots will let you water from further away, but pots are not guaranteed to work further than SL’s 20m chat range.
Similarly, watering across a sim boundary is not guaranteed to work.
You MUST click the Water button within 30 seconds of opening the menu.
Any responsibly scripted item removes listening from an object after a period of time. Some scripts include a timeout message and some do not, mostly dependent on how the messages would interfere with the player’s life and comfort. With the large number of plants many people have, having timeout messages on all of the menus would have been overwhelming.
That said, we MUST have the menus time out. From the point that you click on the plant to get the menu, you have 30 seconds to click on an action button. If you take longer than that, the pot will not be listening any longer.
What does that mean for hand-waterers? It’s OK to do hand-watering in batches, but keep batches to the amount of menus you can reliably open and close in about 15 seconds. Closing the menus can take longer than opening them because Water is sometimes in a different place in the menu.
Whether that’s interacting with 10 pots at a time or some other number (clicking speed varies!) the button MUST be clicked within 30 seconds of the menu opening.
If you are hand watering in batches, you also MUST visually verify that the pot is watered, both in the local chat message that you watered the pot AND in the hovertext above the pot.
Remember, we have a free HUD that can toggle hovertext quickly on and off.
I hope this information is helpful so hand-waterers have a better idea of best practices to keep their plants healthy.
