All You Wanted to Know About Prims and Didn't Ask

Part of living and working in SL includes understanding your surroundings and what is actually in front of you as you walk through a forest or though a busy club.

Understanding some basics will not only help you see your world in a new way, but also may inspire you to add your own contribution too.

There are four basic elements in SL: land, water, sky...and everything else. This post is about the 'everything else' part, but I'll explain the other three things first.

Land, water, and sky are all basic elements of the SL world. Every bit of land you walk on or fly over is owned by someone. The owner might be Governor Linden who owns almost all non-resident-owned land. Governor Linden owned land is usually reserved for roads, large areas of water (also known as void regions), new land not yet for sale, and resident-abandoned land.

The sky is visible everywhere and provides residents with daylight and moonlight (stars too). A day in SL lasts 4 hours - three hours of daylight and one hour of darkness per four hour period. You can fly up into the sky. If you have help, you can fly very high (millions of meters) but you can only build/live at 768m and lower.

Water comes in two forms: Linden water and other water. Linden water is as close to real water as you can get in SL. It moves just like real water, and gets dark as you deeper under the water. You can just walk right into the water - or fly around if you like. You'll notice that it is darker than it would be at the surface. You can buy attachments that detect Linden water and help you swim or scuba dive to add some more realism.

The last basic element, before 'everything else' is Land.

The smallest single plot of land possible in SL is 4m x 4m (or 16 square meters) and the largest possible single plot of land is 256m x 256m (or 65,536 square meters). The largest plot of land is often referred to as a sim (short for simulator) and each sim has its own name. Individual plots of land have their own names too and people refer to their land as the name of their plot followed by the sim name (and sometimes followed by numbers which represent coordinates within the sim).

Land governs a variety of things in SL including security (you can be banned or ejected from a certain lots/parcels of land), music and video (even though you may have seen radios and TVs/theaters in SL - these are actually supported by the land itself), capacity (only a certain number of people can be in a region at a given time), and of course, the capability to build and leave builds in place (also referred to rezzing and leaving builds rezzed).

Functions like security, music, and video work for all land, regardless of size. The amount land someone owns within a given sim determines how much can be built on the land - the more land you have within a single sim, the more you can build within that sim.

So, how does SL know how much you build? That is where Prims, short for primitives, come into play.

One prim is a single 3-D shape - a square, cylinder, sphere, torus, etc. Everyone has the ability to rez (create) prims. You can manipulate and combine prims to make things like tables, chairs, buildings, trees, and everything else that is not land, water, or sky.

Something that uses a lot of prims is said to be "prim-heavy" or "primy", and things that look good and use very few prims are referred to as "low-prim".

Depending on the skill of the person that makes something, a particular 'thing' (chair, house, bed, etc) can use a large number of small number of prims.

Land in SL supports a certain number of prims. A typical first-land plot of 512 square meters supports 117 prims. A tiny 16 square meter plot supports 3 prims, and an entire sim (65,536 square meters) supports 15,000 prims.

When you rez (place) something on the ground, SL determines if you are allowed to place that item. If the land does not belong to you, the owner may grant permission to build there as is done in sandboxes. If SL determines that there are enough available prims on the land, SL allows your item to appear. If there are not enough prims available then you'll see a message telling you that the 'parcel is full'.


You can see how many prims something uses by doing the following:

< coming soon >

In my earlier post (where I describe how to make money in SL), I discussed land in terms of the purchase price and monthly fee (tier). The more land you own, the more tier you pay per month (up to US$195/month for a sim). But the more land you own, the more you can build.

When you rent land, an apartment, a condo, or a place in the sky in SL the owner, manager, or landlord will tell you how many prims you are allowed to use. It is important that you abide by the prim limits and you should ask if you need more prims or are not sure how many you are using.

Keep track of the number of prims you are using by adding the number of prims each item uses and then totaling the numbers.

If you own the land, or the land is deeded to your group, you can check how many prims you are using by right-clicking the ground, select the About Land option, and then click the Objects tab.

I hope this information helps you, as always I appreciate your constructive feedback!