DUmb Newbie Question - Building in sand boxes

If I build in a sandbox is there a way to save something there? Or save it to my inventory where I can pull out something to put in the sandbox?? Say if I've got a house set up w/furniture & pose balls etc...will the whole package save? Thanks!!

Most sandboxes have auto return, so eventually it would wind up in your lost and found. But as a courtesy you should clean up after yorself when you leave the sandbox.

If you start building something from scratch in a sandbox, you can either right click on it and select 'Take' to pull THAT OBJECT into your inventory, or select "Take a Copy" to save a copy of it in your inventory.

Re: the House with furniture and poseballs; they will all save as individual items unless you link everything together as one object.

On the other hand, you can also right click on an object, select 'edit' then draw a box around EVERY item (make sure that in the Tools menu, you've checked 'select my objects only') and choose 'take'. This will lump all the objects into a little building blocks type looking thing in your inventory.

A sanddox is a very temporary place to build, mostly for practice, or sometimes because you need more prims than you have free on your own land. It isn't a place to set up housekeeping, even tempoarily.

But yes, you can build an entire house, and furnish it, complete with pose balls, and then take the entire thing into your inventory to rez later, ready-made. Just select all your items, and take the group into inventory. You'll get one item in inventory, with an icon that looks like a stack of cubes, instead of a single cube icon. The name will be the name of one of the linksets that you selected. Usually the last one you clicked on. You can rename the grouped objects in your inventory. Like "My fully furnished house".

When you put it back out, have the building edit panel already open. Then drag the item from inventory to the ground. It will all remain selected, so you can position it as needed.

Welcome to SL and the forums, Anya! The name for what Ceera described so well is "coalescence", if you want to look it up in the knowledge base.

It is just as well to use 'Take a Copy" when working in a sandbox, because public sandboxes are subject to wild fluctuations in performance, and you don't want to risk losing your build if the "Take" doesn't quite work due to lost packets or something.

But once you have it, do clean up

The cleaning up part I learned early, it's very annoying to come across other people's empty boxes & props. Thanks again for all the tips!!