Where did my furniture go?

This is arguably building-related, so bear with me.

I decided (for the umpteenth time) to take up the last house I built and build a new one. Since I have a full copy of the house in a rezzer in inventory, I flew up in the air and just deleted each linked section of my house, leaving all my furniture and other items scattered about in the air above my plot.

Usually, I run through the house and right-click on each item, taking it individually back into inventory before going through this routine. However, this time I thought I'd be "smart", flew up above, and click/drag selected groups of items at a time and used the right-click and Take menu option. I expected to find all my individual pieces of furniture back in my inventory, but such is not the case.

My thinking is that when I selected a whole group of stuff and did the right-click/Take action that they were "linked" in some fashion and now all the items in each group are sitting in inventory under the name of the last item that was selected during the grouping.

Please tell me this is the case. I can't imagine that all that stuff just "disappeared" into thin air.

I've already sat out in the yard last night and rezzed each item named Object out of inventory to see if I found anything that way and no luck, so I'm down to named items.

I believe you have inadvertantly used the feature "coalescence". Do any of the items now appear in your inventory with an icon that looks like a set of stacked boxes, instead of the regular single box? These are several items grouped together. Rez a coalesced item and all the separate items appear, in the same spatial relationship they originally had. So you may wish to rez a coalesced item when you are up in the sky a bit, to avoid the possibility of rezzing things within the ground.

After thinking about it during the day, I had come to about the same conclusion. I remember seeing several "stacked block" icons in my inventory, so I'll start rezzing those one at a time and see what happens. I'll probably rez a 10x10 "floor" several meters above ground level and drop them onto that one at a time.

Initially, I has assumed if that was what happened that the group of items would probably be named "Object". However, the last item selected probably gave its name to the group of objects.

Will advise later if this is what happened, but I'm sure that's what it is.

By the way, this feature is very handy for picking up big things like houses that you don't want to link together. Particularly wonderful for builds that have all the windows as one linkset, etc.. Everything rezes in place together again. Yay! If I need to move the whole thing, sometimes I move one piece and then just keep track of the delta in position and move the rest the exact same amount. Easy as our favorite forum food...

w00t! Got my stuff back.

Now I have so much JP Lazyboy furniture I might have to add on another living room.

Be careful. No NOT depend on this technique for anything important, as it is extremely unreliable. The feature has been broken for quite some time now. Often, when you try to take a large number of objects at once (or sometimes even a small number), you only end up taking a fraction of them. The rest sometimes remain behind in-world, or sometimes they just poof out of existence altogether. Either way is extremely not good.

I learned about this problem the hard way, as did many other builders I know. If you've never experienced it, consider yourself extremely lucky.

For totally reliable results, use a good scripted packaging system. I use Rez-Foo myself, and I've never had a problem with it. From what I've heard, Rez-Faux and Builder's Buddy are just as good. It's a bit time consuming to drop the stucture script into all the pieces and then put every piece into the packager, but once it's done, it's completely failsafe.

Thank you, Chosen. I had no idea!

For my builds, I definitely use Rez-Faux. Just taking up six rooms of furniture what I'm not going to be placing them in the same location next time is time-consuming. However, considering the possibility something might be lost in the process of mass "picking up", I'll wander around the house and pack up my stuff neatly next time I get the sudden urge to build another style house.