The reed plant is the gatherable that asks nothing of you: no tool, no durability, no profession. It is meant to stand near water, and what you take from it feeds every basket and bag in the game.
Gathering it
Left click the plant. Wait for the notice in chat, the way you would with any gatherable, and do not click something else before it arrives or you will cancel the gather.
- No tool is needed. Most gatherables check your hands first. Reeds do not, so nothing loses durability and a colonist with an empty inventory can still work.
- The gather in the video returned seven reed at once, which is a generous haul for a single click.
- The plant vanishes when you take it and comes back after about five minutes. That is at the fast end of the scale — some ore veins take days.
Gather as much as you need. There is no daily cap on a reed plant the way there is on a water tower or a sand pit.
What it feeds
Reed goes to the basketweaving station, and that is where most of the containers in SL Colonies come from — baskets and bags in a range of sizes.
The one worth knowing about is the large bag. It is the tool a player needs to empty a sand pit, which holds up to 240 sand once it has filled over 24 hours. That sand goes to the smelter for glass bottles, and the bottles go to the bottling station for the brewing chain. So a bed of reeds sitting quietly by the water is, several steps later, the reason anyone on your region can bottle anything.
Reed is also the easy way into crafting experience. Experience comes from gathering a material and then crafting with it, and reeds are the cheapest possible half of that pair.
Where to put them
Close to water. That is what the plant is designed for — riverbanks, the shallow edge of a lake, the pilings under a dock. They look wrong in the middle of a field and right anywhere damp.
The owner menu
Hold down a left click on the plant, standing close to it, and the owner menu opens.
Spawn points
This is the useful one. Set spawn points anywhere within the same region, at any rotation — upside down, on its side, whatever suits the ground. Every time the plant respawns it picks one of your points at random, so the reeds move along the shoreline instead of reappearing on the same square metre.
- Set point adds the position you are standing at.
- Remove point takes one back out.
- Picking the object up clears every point at once. If you want to start again, that is the quickest way.
If you set no points at all, the plant simply comes back exactly where it was.
Security
Four levels: public, colony, group, owner. A reed bed near the landing point is usually best left public, since it costs a visitor nothing and gives them something to do in their first ten minutes. A private stand behind a colony’s workshop is a reasonable thing to lock down.
Hover text, name and reset
- Hover text can be switched on or off, and its colour set to whatever reads against your build.
- Rename changes the item’s displayed name, so a themed region can call it whatever it likes.
- Reset is the first thing to try if the plant stops responding.
Modifiability
Fully modifiable. Stretch it, shrink it, and reshape it to suit your shoreline.
The usual rule applies: leave the scripts in the prims we gave you. They only run inside a prim created by us, so moving them into an object of your own disables them.
The product page is here: https://slcolonies.com/treasure/reed-plant