Hi, peeps!

I figured it was about time I dug back into my inventory-sorting tips, because we now have a new inventory-bloater to deal with: the extra sizes of mesh that we don’t wear, as well as the extra options fitted for mesh bodies and feet etc that we don’t own!

There will be lots of screenshots for this post, so hop behind the cut :)

We’ll start off by taking a look at a little freebie binge from the other day.

I picked up 33 items, and – before I’d even unpacked any that weren’t already just in folders – I ditched what I didn’t need. This includes:

• landmarks
• notecards
• unpacking scripts
• pose stands
• animations used for unpacking poses

And then I unpacked everything else, which meant a few of the original boxes and bags joined the list. Here’s a HUUUUGE screenshot of everything in that list:

That’s a lot of stuff. 100 items! And I hadn’t even begun sorting yet!

We’ll start with something simple: a set of shoes in four colour options. These are from YDEA at The Free Dove, and they come in: black, light black, red, and light red. Here’s the full screenshot of all the folders’ contents, after I’ve removed things like landmarks and scripts etc:

Have a look at that and see what you’d throw away as unnecessary. I’d guess you would at least ditch the ‘invisi feet’, since those don’t even work anymore. But would you throw out anything else?

Mar would. I’ve highlighted here everything she dumped in the trash:

And here’s that trash. Fourteen items!

Here’s what’s left:

So why did Mar ditch everything like that? It’s hard to show you without the images of the sandals, but they’re all the same design. Thus we only need one ‘sandal base’ for all of them. The HUD for shoe and skin is also identical for each one, so we only need one of those, too. And, of course, those invisi-feet had to go as well.

Here’s how Mar eventually filed everything. The top folder is named for the item, and inside that we have the single HUD and the shoe base. If an image was included for the item, that would be in here, too:

Opening up those folders shows just the sandals for those colours:

Everything’s neat and tidy and there’s nothing extraneous left. Four pairs of shoes, fourteen unwanted items ditched!

Now let’s get a bit more technical. Because there are so many mesh bodies on the market these days, many designers are including lots of different fitted versions in their mesh clothing and footwear. You can find as many as five or size mesh body sizes, as well as the same number of standard sizes in a folder for a single dress, and it’s very unlikely you’re going to need all of those!

So you apply the same principles to that dress as we did above with the shoes. First of all, make a couple of new folders inside the main folder. For this outfit, I’m creating folders for ‘not worn’  and ‘standard sizing’.

Into ‘not worn’ goes the fitted outfit for the mesh body (Slink Hourglass) that Mar doesn’t own. Mar has both Slink Physique and Maitreya Lara, so she’s keeping both of those. If the outfit was available fitted to other mesh bodies, those would go in ‘not worn’, too.

Into ‘standard sizing’ goes all of, well, the standard sizing! Plus the alpha layers needed for that. What remains in the top-level folder are the two sizes for the mesh bodies that Mar owns, plus the ad image showing what the outfit looks like:

The next thing to do is try on the standard sizing and find out which one fits your avatar. Once you know what it is, pack up the other versions into a box (call it ‘standard sizing – not worn’) and leave them for a minute. (Pack the un-needed alpha layers in that box, too. One of them will work better than the others, so the ones that don’t work can go into your archive box.)

Next, make another archive box (just call this one the same as the outfit and append ‘not worn’ to it, so it would be something like: ‘Gizza – Hunter Woman [not worn]’). Into this box, stuff the unwanted fitted mesh body sizes, and then your archive box of unworn standard sizes. Take that box into inventory and put it into the ‘not worn’ folder for that outfit. You can now delete all of the unworn sizes that you’ve just archived.

Why keep those outfits that are fitted to mesh bodies if you don’t own a mesh body? Well, Mar didn’t own one either, until about a week ago, so you never know when you might want one or be able to afford one, and it’s nice to know that you have some outfits that are especially fitted for mesh bodies, neatly archived in your inventory :)

Mar archived all of the standard sizes in the outfits that also had fitted mesh body versions, so the only standard sizes in this next screenshot are for outfits that didn’t have fitted mesh body versions. Look how organised it all is now! Inside each of those ‘not worn’ folders is a single archive box.

She did that for just 10 outfits, and this is how much she eventually threw away. (Remember, she still has 10 boxes – one for each outfit’s unworn sizes – but that’s still better than keeping all of this lot!)

So in total – from the initial throwing out of all those landmarks and scripts, and then throwing out and archiving the unwanted sizes – Mar ditched almost 200 items.

If you get time, do this every single time you go on a little shopping spree. It doesn’t actually take all that long; most of us know which standard sizes are going to fit our avatars, so there’s not much guesswork to be done. If you don’t get time after each shopping spree, set aside an hour or two once a week to go through everything. Your heaving inventory will thank you for it!