Prims underground - can't edit them

I should know better than to try to build late at night. When you're tired, your fingers do things you didn't want them to do

I own land that is partly in water. So the house I'm building is suspended some distance in the air. I have a nifty elevator that takes me up to the gathering area, and after a week of building and fiddling I finally got things the way I wanted.

Of course, that's never enough is it? I started building a nice stone fountain at one end of a room. I had it built and scripted, then decided it was time to link it all together. But to do so I had to raise the top layer of water in order to select the bottom layer - the plan being that I would link everything, then just lower the top layer.

What happened next I don't know. I selected the top layer of water and typed in the Z axis I wanted in order to seat it back on top of the lower layer perfectly. I think I put in a "1" instead of the 3 digits I wanted. Poof, the entire fountain disappears. I go to the ground floor and don't see it. I dig a deep hole in my land where the fountain would be (under water at this level), but I can only dig down to 5 m. The fountain is hardly taller than 2m, and I can't play camera angles to see it. I can't lower myself sitting on a prim lower than 5m.

I did the CTRL ALT SHIFT 5 trick to remove terrain from my client view, but I see nothing underneath. Nothing.

I doubt very strongly that I deleted the fountain -- that would have required I use the radial menu, not the size/position menu pane. But I have to believe there is *some* way to see this object -- a nice "view objects" land tool would be MOST handy about now.

Any ideas or advice from anybody? I would just start over on the fountain except that it represents about 7 or 8 prims I don't want to leave lying on my property.

Try sitting on a prim and editing it's Z to 720 or so. That should take you up to the build ceiling to see if it ended up there. You may have entered a large number by mistake. If it was below you, you would have seen it when you hid the ground.

Not that *you* would make the same stupid mistakes that I did when learning to build, but is it possible that you set a coordinate other than the one you wanted? If you set X = 1 then the object is over in the corner of the sim and not below ground at all. If you're lucky it will be auto returned. from someone else's parcel to your lost+found folder.

There is a product called "scan-foo" - I think made by Crystalshard Foo - that makes finding lost prims much easier, especially if you named the object. If you find me in game (rare these days) I'd be happy to help you hunt.

Oooh! Now that sounds like the best possible explanation. I did take my jetpack and go up to about 680 or so, but didn't know the build limit height. I'll have to try that, thank you!


Thank you Malachi I'm sure (at least pretty sure) i was typing into the Z axis field, which is below the x and y. But if using Tiger's idea doesn't help I'll pick up a scan-foo. Sounds like a wonderful and very useful tool in any rate, especially when you have fumble fingers like me

Update!

I bought a 600L Scan-Foo but due to its short range it didn't help. I'll use it for other things on my land, though.

A friend of mine was listening to me rant about losing all that work and suggested that I open the mini-map. All objects belonging to me show up as blue.

Fortunately, my house is not too far from the edge of the sim and there isn't another sim beyond that. There, over at the edge of the world, was a little blue dot! So whatever the fountain did, when it fell out of my house it scooted off the edge and was sitting there, still on my mini-map, 60 or 70m away under the ocean.

I have it back now, and most importantly I learned a lesson: Never do 3-dimensional position math when you're tired

Here is a quick way of getting your items back that are undergoround.

Hit control / alt / shift / d (This places you in debug mode)

At the top of your screen should now be a tab called Debug....

Then select Debug / Rendering / Types / Surface Patch

That will make all the ground see through until you set it back to normal.

Problem solved...

Same exact thing. One is the hotkey combo for the other. Just wanted to point that out in case anyone didn't get the connection.

Glad you found your stuff, Cindy. You're right, by the way. Never do coordinate math when you're tired. I've sent things to pretty strange places before. What's even worse is when you're so tired you enter a whole set of XYZ location values into the rotation fileds, and vise versa while focusing on the editor window so that you don't pay attention to what the object is actually doing. Then, when you finally find it, it's totally out of whack because of the crazy rotations you gave it.

Sometimes CTRL Z works. Sometimes it doesn't

I also will sometimes make a copy of my project at various stages and paste it into my "Projects" folder in inventory. Then if I so completely screw it up that it's unsalvageable, I just delete it and rez a new copy from my last save point.

Unfortunately, when I'm tired I forget to do THAT too

Not so long ago I was working on something and went to move it a few feet and it shot off into the night.

I've searched and a friend had one of those scanners. Neither of us found it, but apparently I can "move" it from one side of the 'world' to the other (not just limited to sim) so it could be anywhere now and there's no way to get it back. This was over a week ago so if it was on auto-return land it would have come back. It hasn't.
Be careful when positioning things as it can be buggy and shoot things off out of your sight. After it shot off, it disappeared from my EDIT focus (presumably because it was too far away to retain focus) so there was no way for me to type numbers in. I was in a skybox when I was working on it too, so that makes it all the harder.