The Almighty Prim

Time to take a short walk down the path of just what is a prim, why are they important to me and why do so many folks alternately worship and hate them? The following is a short piece on prims, not how to build with them, but rather simply what they are, how they are used in general, and mostly what your limitations are on your property when using them.

A prim, simply put, is a build block or LEGO™. Every object that we interact with, including most shoes, hair and often clothing bits (such as skirts, coat tails, and so forth) are made of these building blocks. Most items require more than one prim to make.

Every region or sim in Second Life can hold no more than 15,000 fully rezzed prims, those set out for display or use and not worn.

What does this mean to you? As you buy land in Second Life or use land set aside for the public or a friend's place to set out objects, each parcel has only so many prims that it can contain. On the mainland this is a fixed constant rate. Standard sized mainland parcel prim limits are listed below:

Size	Prims
512m²	117
1024m²	234
2048m²	468
4096m²	937
8192m²	1875
16,384m²	3750
32,768m²	7500
65,536m²	15,000

Note that a full sim or region is 65,536m².

The prims allowed for any parcel can be determined by going to World ? About Land. Then look at the 'objects' tab.

The first line will tell you all the available prims for the same owner or group within the region. The second line tells you all the available prims for the particular parcel you are on. Please note the distinction in these two lines sentences.

**All parcels owned by a single owner or group in the same region or sim combine to form one collective number of prims.**

This means that you can own two parcels that are not contiguous or not joined together and use all the prims on one parcel or split them between the two in any manner you desire. Caution must be used if ever transferring ownership of one or more parcels with shared prims so as to not cause any parcel to suddenly have more prims on it than it is allowed. If this should happen, enough prims will be automatically returned to their respective owners to bring the parcel back down to its limits.

If you try to rez an object when there are not enough prims left, you should simply get a warning that the lot is full and the object will remain in inventory.

There is also a means by which to employ temporary rezzing of objects in a way that bypasses the normal prim limits of a lot and keeps the object on display at all times with very little flash or blink between temporary rezzing. Keep in mind, however, that these 'cheats' are draining on sim resources and when used improperly or in excess can and will cause lag in your region, something your neighbors will not take kindly to!

DOUBLE PRIM SIMS or other bonus prim allotment parcels:

Ok, so we've already established that no sim can have more than 15,000 prims, so what's the deal with these double prim lots I see advertised?

First, all of these double prim or one and half times prims or whatever sims still have only 15,000 prims and are all estate sims (Please see Estate & Mainland: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly to understand the difference).

On these sims the Estate Owner has changed a setting called the prim bonus factor. We'll work with straight double prim as an example. By setting this to 2.0, every parcel of land on the entire estate suddenly shows that its allowed double the number of prims.

But wait! That adds up to 30,000... So what now?

Simply put, the Estate Owner parcels off only half of the estate, or in some cases a bit less than half so they can put out trees or other infrastructure, and leaves the rest empty. This gives folks more prims on their land and some pretty surroundings too.

But these parcels are more expensive... Well, yes. Consider that the estate owner has to leave half the estate empty to accommodate the double prim parcels. They still have to cover their tier payments and make a bit of profit or there won't be a region there for you to live on next week.

In the end what you might realize is that it's the number of prims per parcel we're paying for, not the square meters of land.

Sincerely,

Char

Charlene Trudeau
SkyBeam Estates