Photo Diary of my recent 1-day vacation in Decentraland, the Largest and Loniest virtual mall in the metaverse

I decided to take some time off shitposting and go on vacation in Decentraland. Here are the spots I’ve visited, including The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Overall, the user-created locations are very creative and pretty. But the game engine is just super-buggy. I hit an average of 2-5 bugs every 10 minutes. It was a dizzying and often-frustrating experience.

Decentraland downloads locations as you visit them, so nothing is preloaded. Half of the time if I stay in a location longer than 5 minutes, some parts of that location will randomly despawn, and I’ll be interacting with invisible objects. It’s super annoying especially if I’m in a middle of a quest. There was one quest I had to restart 5 times because the objects kept despawning.

Decentraland is also full of beautiful, empty buildings. Other than the starting location, you can walk around for 20 minutes without seeing a single person. I didn’t expect the Metaverse to be such a lonely experience.

Hinata Tower – One of the prettiest towers in the game. The inside of the tower are several giant transparent staircases, allowing you to climb to the top.

SOHO Plaza – One of the many community parks in the game. It exhibits many DeFi game NFTs

Dragon Plaza – This was once a Decentraland music venue

Asian Plaza – Another giant park in the game, this one featuring various traditional Asian buildings. Like most locations, it’s completely empty.

Dollhouse – One of the few locations with people. The moment you enter, your avatar starts dancing to EDM.

Festive Road – A large road near the Genesis Plaza with beautiful arches. It would be awesome if this place existed in real life.

KB Homes – There are some actual businesses that opened up shop here. You can explore their 3 model homes.

KB Homes – The model homes allow you to tweak the configuration of each home

NFT World City – They built a whole mini with a hundred store and office spaces for rental from $100-500/mo. These are absolutely ridiculous prices considered that I only noticed 1/100 spaces being occupied. This is the largest ghost town.

AngZaar Output – Another random gigantic park

Genesis Plaza – There is a hot air balloon you can ride around the starting point

There are so many locations featuring mini-games. I lost so many brain cells wasting time playing buggy games. Most games are similar to: Spend 10 hours collecting items around this location until you have enough to collect a free NFT worth $0.20. You’re better off getting a minimum-wage job.

There wasn’t a single mini-game I found fun.

Metamine – One of the locations featuring an incredibly boring mini-game

Random cars and girls

The vast majority of DCL is empty spaces. Lot after lot of empty spaces, some of which are decorated by the DCL team.

Empty spaces

Another empty parcel, decorated as a skate park

One of many random locations that don’t really seem to have any obvious purpose

About 20% of the spaces are ads

Giant ads everywhere. There are so many squatters, which makes no sense since there are so many unsold plots.

More ads

Reminds me of MoonPlaces with these ads and squatters. At least MoonPlaces sold out while only 25% of land in DCL is purchased.

More squatters. This one bought many tiles around the game and decorated it with Mario themes. I’m surprised it hasn’t been hit with copyright violations.