Second Life includes built-in tools that you can use to create complex objects out of a set of basic building blocks known as prims (short for “primitives”).You can create objects to keep, give to others, or sell. You can combine prims to make sunglasses, vehicles, buildings, furniture, sculpture, or almost anything else you can think of.

In this section I’ll move forward from the simple move, rotate, and resize manipulation of single prims and deal with copying and linking prims.

When I first started building in SL, I pretty much only used the visual drag and rotate options and stayed well away from all those fiddly looking controls and numbers in the full Edit menu. Same applied to rezzing things like houses—I just dragged them where I wanted them on my little plot of land. Big mistake!

There are multiple ways to build spiral stairs in Second Life, from the simple, low-prim examples I describe in the Quick Builds section, to much fancier stairs. This article will be a work in progress for a while, as I add information on various ways to make spiral stairs.

So-called megaprims are prims larger than SL’s 10 by 10 by 10 size limit. SL management has had an ambivalent relationship with them, at various times trying to eliminate them completely, and at other times tolerating their use.