Overnight, sionLabs introduced the much awaited sionCorn. The starter pack and all the supplementary products are only available at the sionLab HQ vendors at Boardman, and teleporting into this storefront is difficult, as is the actual purchasing of anything from the vendors, as so many avatars are trying to do the same thing.
The corn is a living product – you start off with one corn cob, plant it, water it, fertilize it, and eventually if you’ve got the combination right, your parent cob produces new corn plants around it. The initial cob itself is only 2 prims, but each can produce shoots of corn plants – each plant can grow up to a maximum of 18 prims, which means that you must have quite a lot of spare primage available to consider farming this special corn.
Sion Zeius, the developer of sionChickens, has also produced another product in sionCorn which is reliant on the continual purchase of several supplementary accessories to keep it alive and growing. The initial starter kit comes with bucket and fertilizer, but if you wish to create a proper sionCorn farm, you will need to also buy a sprinkler system, more buckets and more fertilizer, a radi-o-Static device to delay growth, a cobserver to take corn cobs back into inventory, and you will have to visit special machines to convert your corn into food.
Corn can apparently come in several colours, and the product itself comes with a promise that sionChickens that feed from the food created from sionCorn may produce new races of chickens. I would suggest that as sionLabs has made hints towards an up and coming new version of sionChickens – Version 12, due in the future, that the new races may arrive at that point. SionCorn grows more corn, which you will be able to take to a food converter (machine points across Second Life are as yet unknown) to convert into food bowls. These can then be kept to feed your own sionChickens or can become another market of products to sell for sionChicken farmers. It is not yet known how much food bowls will be produced per corn cob produced, nor is there an average of how much corn may be produced from one starter cob. However the later is apparently dependent on how well you mix the ratios of watering and fertilizing your corn crop.
SionCorn must be grown on Linden land also. To help out those who have access only to skyboxes, a supplementary product called sionCorn Soil is available. SionCorn can also only be watered (either using an accessory bucket or for larger corn crops – a sprinkler) with Linden waters. Not prim water. So corn farmers must have access to normal Linden waters to be able to farm. Small crops can be watered via a bucket where Linden water and fertilizer is mixed. Larger crops can be set to automatic feeding via a sprinkler accessory – this, too, requires buckets of Linden water, and a bulk fertiliser purchase to work.
With the announcement and attention of sionChicken farmers for sionCorn, there is a promise that individual corn cobs will be purchaseable from Monday (3rd August) at a special for the next week. I personally have a few prims to play with, and have managed the masses at Boardman to purchase my first starter kit, and will look on the whole sionCorn growth as another interesting experiment, but conclude that I probably won’t be able to grow enough to keep my own small chicken group in feed.However, it’s an interesting supplementary market being opened up for those keen to produce items for a large market of keen sionChicken enthusiasts.
I have taken the liberty of posting up all the notecards I can find on sionCorn, and creating an FAQ section for this new product. Links and SLurls below -
Links and SLurls:
sionCorn FAQ Index on The Chicken Diaries – includes notecards on sionCorn
SLurl :Boardman Sion HQ
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