Everything's boxed, how to use it?

I'm a newbie, so I went freebie hunting. I got a pack of free hair, because my avatar is bald for some reason, but when i went to it in my inventory, everything was "boxed". How to un-box it so I can use it?

Drag the box to the ground, right click on it, click open, click copy contents to inventory.

If you're having difficulty finding somewhere you can drag the box to the ground then search for a sandbox.

To unpack a box, you need to first find a place you can "rez" it, which means making the box appear in-world from your inventory. Search for a "sandbox" area - such places will have open rezzing permissions.

Drag the box from your inventory to the ground and you should see it appear in-world. Then right-click on the box, and select "Open...". A dialogue box should appear with the contents of the box, and the option to "Copy to Inventory." Select this option and your boxed items will now go into your inventory. You can now find them in your inventory and wear them by right-clicking and selecting "wear" or "attach".

Remember that in your inventory, any item that is made out of "prims" (the basic building blocks of items in SL) will have the little box icon next to them, whether they are boxed or not. So even if you have already unpacked you prim hair from the box and copied them to your inventory by the procedure I described above, they will still look like little boxes in your inventory listing.

You can't easily tell when an item in your inventory is boxed or not, without rezzing it or trying to attach it to your avatar and seeing what it looks like. That's why it's worth the effort to keep your inventory organized, placing unpacked items into orderly folders, so you can tell by where it is in your inventory whether it is unpacked or not.

i`ve cut out a lil corner with object creation enabled if you can`t find a quiet place

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sensual%20Estate/76/173/22

You know - this is the single most frequently asked question by everyone in these forums and in world. That should tell us it just isn't intuitive to use boxes. I'm not sure what their purpose is. I have received items from vendors in folders directly to my inventory, so I know it can be done.

If I ever get anything ready to sell or give as a freebie, you can bet I'm not going to use boxes if at all possible. At the very least I'll use a script so they will be self opening.

If someone wanted to use a box for some reason, I'd lean toward a box set with "open" as the default left-click action, and floaty text that says "Click me to open and get your stuff!". No script required, once the floaty text is set. Ideally put your freebie box inside another vendor box along with a brief instruction notecard, and sell contents so the notecard is right there visible in a new inventory folder.

But I have a feeling the biggest problem for new people is understanding that they need to drag it to the ground in the first place (especially since so many places one encounters don't allow that even if it occurs to you to try it) and then you still have to know how to find a sandbox or other public area with build + a sensible autoreturn to actually do it. Or I suppose you could just wear the box and open it while it's stuck on your hand rather than hunting for a sandbox - but that's an even less intuitive process to come up with.

I agree though - best bet would be to "sell" freebies as contents so they are delivered as an inventory folder, ready to wear.

I agree with everything you said, but this part about finding a sandbox really struck a note with me. Ah, the memories of using Search to try to find someplace both relatively quiet, and where I wouldn't get bombarded by sales pitches from the owner of the sandbox...not happy memories. Not happy.

I'm sure this has been suggested before (and I'd be interested to know the reasons given for not doing it), but why can't LL carve up some of those up-for-auction parcels that cover all the continents, and make them public sandboxes, and (most importantly) have a tab in Search for said public sandboxes?

Sure, I know, they want to encourage people to buy land, and I'm not arguing with that. It's a business, not a charity.

But I think that having better access to public sandboxes (without the sales pitches from owners) would encourage more newbies to get, well, addicted to making stuff.

LL could keep the public sandboxes small, to whet people's appetite for purchasing a larger parcel....maybe make the public sandboxes 256m each. Post 'autoreturn to your inventory in 2 hours' (or whatever) to prevent people from trying to live on them.

I think it would sell a lot of newbies on SL.

There are already several public sandboxes - Morris is the one that comes to mind most quickly for me (at least one of my products was built there ) but there are others, too.

The main reason why boxes are used is because it's the only way a networked vendor can deliver multiple items, due to llGiveInventoryList (the LSL function used to give multiple items in a folder) not working reliably across sims. There's a JIRA to vote on for fixing it: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-868 .

on this same subject?

After you unpack the box...do you have to keep it?
I have deleted some with no bad things happening...
but with my expensive items, I seem to be afraid to 'delet' the
box the stuff comes in?

answers?

I made a folder I called "Original Packages" so I could keep the box for the same fears. If you have an outfit in a folder and put the box in the folder you can't drag the folder to wear without also wearing the box.

Eventually I've come to realize they're just taking up space and started trashing them, after I'm sure they're empty. Some of them still give me a warning window about some contents not being copyable even though there's nothing in the box. I assumed this was some sort of script residue, like the hovering text that remains after you delete the text script.

No harm has come to me either from deleting these boxes.

That's good to know. But I can tell you that when I was looking for one, back in May, I couldn't tell from Search which were truly public (run by LL) and which just had "public" in the name, but would hit you with ads (of various types) when you went there.

If the item is copyable and expensive, it'd be worth keeping the box. Otherwise, there's no real point. Do make sure you pick up or delete your box though...it's rude to litter.

If you cannot find someplace to rez the box, you can wear it (should attach to your right hand), then right-click > Edit the box. If this opens as a small window, click the 'More' button, then go to the Contents tab. From here, you can left-click and drag your item into Inventory. If there are several items in the box, you may want to create a new folder in Inventory before dragging them over.

see, i feel the opposite way. if the item is copiable then i cant see a reason to keep the box. the only boxes i keep are for no copy/transferable items, so i can drop the item back in the box and sell/give it the way i received it.

I keep them as a back up, in case the asset server decides to eat the version I have unpacked.