Looking straight up the stone facade of a tall office tower against a blue sky.
Inspection services

We inspect what you'd rather we didn't.

From single-room hangouts to forty-storey club worlds, every structure is assessed against the same 140-point schedule, by the same inspectors, with the same clipboard.
Services

Inspection types

Before you publish

Pre-upload inspection

The only inspection that can still save you. We walk the world in its unpublished state and hand you the list before your first visitor finds it the hard way.

Every twelve months

Annual occupancy re-inspection

Worlds age. Platforms update. A floor that held in March may not hold in November. Your certificate lapses on its anniversary whether or not you were told it existed.

After every change

Post-update inspection

Every update is a renovation. Moving a lamp is a renovation. Changing the skybox is a significant renovation and requires a structural engineer.

Within 72 hours

Emergency inspection

For worlds where the instance is full, the floor is making a noise, and someone in the corner is saying "is anyone else seeing this".

Mobile structures

Avatar structural survey

Load-bearing accessories, unsupported hair, wing clearance in doorways, and tails that obstruct a path of egress. Avatars taller than the building they are in require a separate permit.

Neighbours

Complaint-driven inspection

Someone has reported your world. We cannot say who. We can say that they were very specific about the staircase.

The 140-point schedule

What we test, and how

§ 1600

Walls

Walked into at a walk, a run and sideways. A wall that permits the inspector's head but not their shoulders is cited as a partial wall.

§ 1607

Floors

Stood on, jumped on, and crouched on. Then stood on by everyone in the instance at once while the bass drops.

§ 1011

Stairs

Every tread, in both directions. Spiral staircases are climbed until they end or the controller batteries do.

§ 1010

Doors

Opened, closed and walked through. A door that is a picture of a door is recorded on the schedule as "wall, misleading".

§ 716

Fire doors

Checked for a self-closer, intumescent strips and a gap of no more than 4 mm. A fire door held open with a fire extinguisher is recorded twice, once under each.

§ 2902

Chairs

Sat in. A chair that lets the inspector through to the floor is reclassified as art and inspected as art, which is a separate fee.

§ 3103

Water

Water must be wet. Water that can be stood upon is a floor, and is inspected as a floor.

§ 1207

Acoustics

Ambient music may not exceed the volume of conversation. Music that follows a visitor from room to room is cited as a haunting.

§ 1300 Energy and environment

The environmental review

Every world is a building. Every building draws power from somewhere. In the case of a club world at capacity, it draws it from eighty spare bedrooms at once, each containing a graphics card working harder than anything else on its street. Since 2024 every inspection has included an environmental review, and every review has found something.

§ 1302 Avatars

Performance rating

An avatar rated Very Poor receives an energy label, affixed to the avatar at eye height, facing outward. At full particle load a Very Poor avatar draws as much power as a small neighbourhood, and on a cold night, the neighbourhood next to it.

§ 1304 Cooling

Water

Eighty graphics cards at full load must be cooled. Were the cooling drawn from a lake, it would empty a lake by Thursday. We have identified the lake. The lake has been notified.

§ 1305 Noise

Fan noise at the property line

A single apartment block with four PC players in it has been measured at 58 dB at the property line, at 03:00, and its assessed value lowered eleven percent. At a town meeting residents asked what the building was for. The answer, "a bar in a cabin, mostly", was not well received.

§ 1306 Particles

Pyrotechnics

Wings that emit four thousand sparks per second are a pyrotechnic display. They require a permit, a bucket of sand, and the consent of every other occupant's graphics card.

§ 1307 Download size

Freight

A 900 MB world shall provide seating in the loading screen. A world visited ten thousand times has shipped nine terabytes through other people's home routers, and is assessed as a distribution warehouse.

§ 1308 Unattended occupancy

Asleep in the headset

An occupant asleep in the headset is an unattended occupant. The computer running under their desk until morning is reclassified as a space heater, and inspected as one. It fails, for heating only one leg.

Fee schedule

Inspection fees

Fees are payable before the inspector enters the instance. Inspections cut short for any reason, including the floor, are billed in full.

Service Fee
Base inspection, first room Walls are not billed separately. They are walked into separately $180.00
Each additional room A room is any space with a ceiling, or any space that should have one $45.00
Each mirror Billed per mirror, not per occupant $60.00
Each staircase Spiral staircases billed per revolution $35.00
Body of water Includes the wetness test $75.00
Void survey The inspector is lowered beneath the map on a rope $250.00
Late-night surcharge World time after 02:00, when the floors are at their busiest $90.00
Re-inspection after failure Charged at the base rate. You will need it $180.00
A world with one of everything $915.00
Equipment

Our instruments

Dozens of brass, iron and wooden plumb bobs hanging on strings at different heights.

Gravity reference set

Gravity in a virtual world is a setting. Our plumb bobs establish which way is down, independently, before every inspection. If the plumb bob and the world disagree, the world is cited.

Close-up of the bubble vial of a spirit level, the bubble centred between two lines.

The bubble

If the bubble is not centred, the floor is not level. If the bubble is pink, see Magenta Abatement, and put the level down gently.

A lime-green tape measure with its yellow blade pulled out to eight inches.

Tape measure

Doorways must clear the tallest avatar in the instance. The tallest avatar in the instance is always nine metres tall. We bring a long tape.

A yellow rotary construction laser on a tripod in a grassy field.

Rotary laser

Sweeps a level plane through every room. Visitors routinely mistake it for a club light and begin to dance. They are counted for occupancy.

An empty brown hardboard clipboard with a metal clip.

The clipboard

An in-world clipboard that cannot be dropped, hidden or thrown. It has been thrown. It came back. It was cited for nothing; it is the clipboard.

A standalone VR headset with a fabric-covered front, lying on a woven mat.

Inspection headset

Factory-reset before every job, so that no previous world's calibration can influence our findings. The inspectors find this upsetting and are not consulted.