Enter another world
Planet M’s Tula in Second Life is one of those places that stands out from the crowd. From the moment you arrive, there is a clear sense that you are somewhere very different from the norm. If you enjoy quirky landscapes, Second Life animals, or simply visiting places created in an imaginative and playful style, Planet M’s Tula may well appeal.
Sound, Light, and Atmosphere
Before exploring, I would strongly recommend enabling the shared environment and turning on the region sound. I do not usually play music streams when visiting a place, but here it feels essential. What you hear is not music, but a carefully layered soundscape, bird calls drifting through the air, the croak of frogs near water, and subtle ambient noises that gently draw you into the valley. Combined with the lighting, it creates an immersive atmosphere that feels completely matched to the landscape
Arrival and Exploration
The landing point places you on a small island in the middle of a flock of flamingos. Ahead of you is a free explorer bubble, which you can add, large enough to sit comfortably inside. Transparent, with a soft reddish tint, it allows you to float and fly around the region using the arrow keys and page up and down controls on your keyboard. It is both playful and practical, and makes drifting between levels feel entirely natural.
A World Imagined into Being
The official Second Life Destination Guide describes Planet M’s Tula as “a surreal red-earth valley shaped by organic forms, roaming animals, and a ceramic studio at its heart”. While the landscape is certainly strange, alien even, Myrdin Sommer, the designer of Planet M’s Tula, has achieved the remarkable feat of making it feel like a complete world imagined into being, with its own internal logic
The valley unfolds in warm red and reddish-brown earth tones, sculpted into organic forms that curve and rise as if grown rather than built. Tall, finger-like structures reach upward, while other forms broaden at the top, creating flat-topped shapes like giant fungi or isolated plateaus. On these elevated platforms you can see a wide range of animals. Some plateaus contain shallow basins, which may hold ponds or, in some cases, trees. Nothing here appears accidental, yet very little follows the rules of a natural landscape as we understand it on our own planet.
Life on the Plateaus
Life is everywhere, though never quite where you expect it. Trees cling to elevated platforms, animals wander calmly across spaces that could never sustain them, and a river threads its way through the valley below, bringing movement and sound to the stillness of the stone. Seeing large animals standing on unreachable ledges is surprising at first, but quickly becomes a quiet pleasure, with each new plateau inviting curiosity about what creature might appear next.
Clay, Craft, and Daily Life
The buildings are well worth closer investigation. Made from the same clay-like substrate as the rest of the planet, they form curious rooms with rounded corners and interiors that feel lived in rather than staged. There is a kiln, its open door revealing pots inside while a fire burns beneath, fed by stacked wood. Through the next doorway you arrive at the pottery workshop, with clay pots and other objects stacked on shelves. It was here that I found Myrdin Sommer seated at the table, apparently working on a pot, her avatar accompanied by animals in a way that felt both whimsical and entirely at home. On a windowsill nearby, a dodo sits quietly, incubating an egg.
Above, reached by a ladder, is an art studio, where abstract paintings are stacked around the room, some finished, others still in progress. Outside, a wind turbine turns quietly, suggesting not decoration but function. Wind exists here, power is needed, and craft matters.
Accepting Tula’s Logic
These details shift the experience of Tula. This is not simply a strange landscape to pass through, but a world that works on its own terms, operating according to its own logic. Planet M’s Tula in Second Life invites you to suspend disbelief and accept its rules. It is quirky, imaginative, and rich with photographic possibilities, a place that rewards curiosity and quiet exploration.
Useful Links
Teleport to Planet M’s – Tula
Planet M – Flickr group
If you’d like to see more places like this, follow my blog, Exploring Second Life, where I share both the grand builds and the smaller “quick stops” that make the grid so rewarding.
Join us in the Second Life Destinations Facebook Group, where bloggers share new finds.
Photographers: post your snapshots in the Second Life Destinations Flickr Group.