“So sick of the hobos always begging for change
I don’t like how I gotta work and
They just sit around and get paid
I hate all of the people who can’t drive their cars.
Bitch you better get outta the way
Before I start falling apart”
Theory Of A Deadman – Hate My Life
Before we begin, I know we’re going to say “But Lucky it has a cost and since this is sponsored then you’re not giving an honest view.” Let me clear that up, and you can take this to the bank, I bought it first. I applied to blog it -after- I bought it. So this may be sponsored at the end of the day but I had already invested before the option even came along. Figured it would be good for anyone who reads this to know that. Like anything I blog in Second Life if it’s showing up here I either already bought it or would have. I don’t do things I don’t want to or like to. At the end of the day sponsored or not sponsored if I had an issue you would hear about it as well, I’m transparent on that.
I started this with 107,995 items in my Second Life inventory, which is probably the point where I have to admit that it stopped being an inventory a long time ago and became a storage facility. Fourteen-plus years in Second Life will do that to you. There are clothes for bodies I haven’t worn in years, demos I definitely meant to delete, landmarks for places that probably don’t exist anymore, notecards, unpacking scripts, duplicate copies, redeliveries, old blogging folders and whatever else I’ve managed to drag along with me over the years. None of it seems particularly ridiculous when you’re adding a few things at a time, but eventually you look at that number and realize you’ve somehow accumulated almost 108,000 things.
I’ve cleaned it before, or at least I’ve told myself I’ve cleaned it before. Usually that means I get motivated enough to open a bunch of folders, delete some demos, finally admit I’m never wearing something again and watch the inventory number drop just enough to feel like I’ve accomplished something. Eventually I get tired of opening folders one by one, decide I’ve done enough for one day and go back to whatever else I was doing. Considering that usually involves blogging, events or shopping, you can probably figure out why the number never really gets much better.
The photo probably isn’t doing much to convince anyone that I’ve got this problem under control either. I built the closet around the same basic mess I’ve managed to create in my inventory, with boxes, bags, clothes, shoes, old gachas and whatever else I could pile into the room until it felt like fourteen years of Second Life had physically spilled out around me. I even worked several things from the September round of The Arcade into the chaos, including YKFK, Since1975 & NoRush, kunst, GOOSE, BAMSE and Fourth Wall, because apparently the best way to illustrate a post about having too much stuff is to go acquire more stuff. The YKFK sign saying I don’t have time for this pretty much finished the thought for me.
That’s what made Cache Compass interesting to me in the first place. If somebody had figured out a better way to navigate this mess than expecting me to manually dig through fourteen years of folders, I was willing to give it a shot. Cache Compass is a Windows companion program built specifically to work alongside Firestorm, and rather than replacing the Second Life inventory system, it gives you another way to search through what you already own, find the things that have accumulated over the years, review what you don’t want anymore and then move only the things you approve into your normal Second Life Trash.
The review part was important to me because while there is obviously plenty of garbage buried inside 107,995 items, there is also a lot of stuff I actually care about. There are things I’ve bought, things I’ve blogged, older things that aren’t available anymore and probably quite a few things I couldn’t replace even if I wanted to. I’m not interested in giving a program access to my inventory and letting it decide what stays and what goes, and thankfully that’s not what Cache Compass does. It helps me find things, but I’m still the one making the decisions.
Getting started is pretty straightforward. You log into Second Life through Firestorm like you normally would, open your inventory and let it finish loading before opening Cache Compass. Firestorm stays logged into Second Life while Cache Compass reads the inventory information it needs locally, and at no point am I handing it my Second Life password. Considering we’re talking about software designed to poke around inside fourteen-plus years of my Second Life existence, I wanted to understand that part before I cared about anything else it could do.
Cache Compass is currently built for Windows 10 and 11 and works specifically with Firestorm, so this isn’t something you’re going to use with Black Dragon or the official Second Life Viewer right now. It’s also an independent third-party companion utility rather than something affiliated with or endorsed by Linden Lab or the Firestorm Viewer project. It’s a one-time purchase instead of another subscription, and the different license options don’t lock features behind more expensive versions. The difference is how many avatars you can register, with options covering up to three ($24.99 or L$7,500), five ($34.99 or L$10.500) or ten avatars ($64.99 or L$19,500), and you can purchase it in USD or through their in-world vendor with Linden Dollars.
Once I actually started using it, the part that surprised me most wasn’t necessarily the cleanup. It was the search. Second Life inventory search is useful when I know what I’m looking for, but that becomes considerably less helpful when all I remember is that I bought a particular kind of shirt for a particular body six years ago and have absolutely no idea what the creator called it. Multiply that across almost 108,000 items, hundreds of creators and years of completely different folder structures and naming conventions, and knowing I own something doesn’t necessarily mean I’m ever going to find the damn thing.
Cache Compass handles that differently because its keyword search can look through both item names and the folder paths those items are sitting inside. That folder-path part ended up mattering a lot more than I expected because something doesn’t necessarily need the word I’m searching for in the actual item name if that information exists somewhere in the folders around it. The creator gave me an example before I started using it where searching “reborn top” through their regular inventory returned one result, while Cache Compass returned more than 1,100. They specifically told me not to sleep on keyword search, and after spending time with it, I understand why.
That’s the kind of claim I don’t want to just repeat, so I’ve been throwing my own inventory at it. Geralt gave me 5 through Firestorm and 42 through Cache Compass. When I tried Jake, Firestorm found 32 while Cache Compass returned 207. Then I went looking for Omega and got 12 compared with 90. Firestorm wasn’t necessarily failing at those searches, Cache Compass was just surfacing those words in places Firestorm wasn’t showing me, and with an inventory this big that difference adds up pretty damn quickly.
I originally went into Cache Compass thinking mostly about how much stuff I could get rid of, but search made me realize that finding what I actually own is just as much of a problem when an inventory gets this big. I can’t clean something I can’t efficiently find, and having an item somewhere in my inventory doesn’t do me much good if it’s buried so deeply that I eventually give up looking for it. That’s also what gives Search Only some usefulness after the big cleanup is over. It can show me what kind of item I’m looking at and the folder path where it lives without turning that search into a cleanup job. I’m not going to need to delete eleven thousand things every week, but I absolutely will forget what somebody named a shirt.
Once I started digging into the actual cleanup, I began finding things I didn’t even realize were taking up space. There were tons of empty folders and duplicate folders scattered throughout the inventory, and apparently my LeLUTKA head folders needed their own intervention because I managed to cut almost 3,000 items just from going through those. That’s exactly the kind of thing I never would have found by casually scrolling through my inventory because there was nothing telling me thousands of unnecessary things were hiding in one area until Cache Compass actually put them in front of me.
It also found demos I’d completely forgotten were still buried inside product folders and old body sizes attached to clothing and accessories I still wanted to keep. That gave me a chance to finally start getting rid of years of sizes for bodies I’m just not using anymore. Sorry Jake, Kario and Gianni, but I prefer Legacy. Don’t take that as hate for those bodies either, it’s not, they’re great and to each their own. Legacy just works for me, it’s what I wear and I don’t see myself suddenly going back, so there really isn’t a reason for me to keep all of those other sizes just because I never removed them when I unpacked everything. I can find a folder named DEMO and delete it myself, but realistically I am never going to open every clothing folder I’ve accumulated over fourteen years looking for a Jake size buried three folders deep. Being able to search across the entire inventory and put those things in front of me was a hell of a lot easier than attacking hundreds of product folders one at a time.
Then there were the notecards, scripts and landmarks, and apparently I have spent fourteen years collecting enough of those to start my own archive. One purchase leaves a landmark, another leaves a notecard, another has an unpacking script you never bothered removing, and none of that seems like much when you’re looking at one folder at a time. Multiply it across years of shopping, events, gifts, redeliveries and blogging and suddenly there are thousands of little things scattered everywhere. Duplicate notecards, scripts and landmarks ended up being a huge part of what I was able to clean because Cache Compass could bring them together instead of expecting me to hunt them down individually. The closet behind me might be staged, but the inventory version of it absolutely isn’t.
The important thing through all of this is that finding something doesn’t mean Cache Compass automatically decides it should disappear. It builds the results, I review what it found and I decide what actually gets moved. If that first pass gives me more than I want to deal with, I can narrow the results down further and only select the things I’m comfortable moving. Duplicate cleanup also keeps a copy from the duplicate set rather than handing me every copy and hoping I remember not to delete them all, and there are protections around things like no-copy inventory, inventory links, items referenced by your Current Outfit, Marketplace folders and protected system folders. I can also choose my own Protected Folders, which is basically my way of telling Cache Compass that whatever I’ve put in there is off limits when I’m cleaning. I was still paying attention to what I approved because this is fourteen-plus years of inventory we’re talking about, but having those protections in place made me considerably more comfortable being aggressive with the stuff I knew I didn’t need.
Eventually you get through the review, approve what you want gone and Cache Compass starts moving it, and this is the part where you’re going to notice that it isn’t instant. The creator specifically wanted me to mention that because Firestorm throttles how much inventory can be moved, so Cache Compass isn’t going to find fifteen hundred things and make them disappear in thirty seconds. It works within those limits and takes its time rather than trying to force everything through as quickly as possible, which is probably exactly what I want something touching an inventory this old to do.
I got a pretty good example of that during one of my cleanups when I approved 1,536 items to be removed and the move took about 20 minutes. Twenty minutes might sound like a long time until you remember we’re talking about more than fifteen hundred individual things being moved through Second Life while Cache Compass is respecting Firestorm’s throttling instead of trying to bulldoze through it. I’d rather wait twenty minutes for it to work through the list than save ten minutes by pushing inventory operations harder than Firestorm wants them pushed.
You also need to leave Firestorm alone while that’s happening. Keep it open in the background, keep Cache Compass running and let it do what it’s doing instead of deciding this would be a great time to reorganize another inventory folder or switch avatars. If Cache Compass detects competing inventory activity, it stops rather than continuing while something else is trying to change the same inventory. Considering what it’s doing, I actually like that it errs on the side of stopping instead of assuming everything will probably be fine.
Nothing I’ve approved is immediately gone forever either, because Cache Compass is moving those items into my normal Second Life Trash, not permanently deleting them. If I screw something up, I still have the opportunity to go into Trash, find it and put it back before I empty Trash myself. Cache Compass doesn’t make that last decision for me, and after I started selecting hundreds and eventually thousands of things at a time, knowing I still had that final safety net made it a lot easier to trust what I was doing without becoming careless about it.
If you want to see that process in more detail instead of just reading me explain it, SimplyFox has a much more in-depth walkthrough that shows Cache Compass in actual use, including search, cleanup, Protected Folders and the review process. It’s a good companion to the shorter promo because you can actually see how the pieces fit together before deciding whether you want to point it at your own inventory.
I’ve spent a little over five hours actually using Cache Compass over the last week, but I didn’t sit down for some five-hour inventory-cleaning marathon because I don’t hate myself that much. I’ve been using it off and on between working on posts and everything else I’ve had going on, which ended up being a pretty natural way to use it. I’d search for something, clean out a section, let Cache Compass work through a move while I did something else and then come back later when I felt like digging into another part of the inventory.
After a little over five hours of doing that, my inventory went from 107,995 items to 96,416, which means I’ve removed 11,579 items, or about 10.7 percent of my entire inventory, and I’m not finished with it yet. More importantly, those weren’t eleven thousand things I already knew were sitting there waiting for me to delete. A huge amount of it was stuff I had completely forgotten about or stuff I knew existed somewhere but never would have found scattered across years of folders without spending an absurd amount of time looking for it.
The number is great, but watching the counter drop isn’t really what sold me on Cache Compass. What sold me was realizing how much of those 11,579 items I never would have found on my own. It wasn’t sitting in one giant folder waiting for me to finally delete it. It was buried all over the place in little pieces I’d forgotten about, stopped using or didn’t even realize were still there. Cache Compass made that mess manageable enough that I could actually do something about it, and that’s the reason I’m going to keep using it.
Getting from 107,995 to 96,416 also means I finally dropped back under the 100,000 mark, which feels like an accomplishment even if 96,416 isn’t exactly minimalist living. I know there is still plenty left in there that I can get rid of, and I’m going to keep using Cache Compass to find it. That’s probably more telling than anything else I can say about it because I’ve attempted inventory cleanups plenty of times before and eventually gotten sick of doing them. This time I actually want to keep going because I’m seeing enough disappear to make the time I’m putting into it feel worthwhile.
If your inventory is approaching 100,000 items, already blew past it years ago or has simply reached the point where you know there’s a mountain of stuff buried inside that you don’t need anymore, I think that’s where Cache Compass becomes especially useful. A smaller inventory can obviously still benefit from it, but the older and larger an inventory gets, the more chances there are for exactly the kind of forgotten garbage it kept finding in mine. When you’re dealing with years of products scattered across thousands of folders, having something capable of narrowing that down to the things you actually want to look at saves a ridiculous amount of digging.
For me, a little over five hours was enough to know I’m going to keep using it. I’m still finding more things I can get rid of, but I’m also not going to pretend I’ve suddenly become one of those responsible Second Life residents who deletes demos immediately, cleans every product folder after unpacking it and maintains a beautifully organized inventory. Fourteen-plus years of evidence says otherwise, and the photo attached to this post isn’t exactly helping my case. Cache Compass can clean the inventory, but it can’t stop me from being me, so yeah, I’m probably going shopping.
“I hate my job, all of my rich friends
I hate everyone to the bitter end.
Nothing turns out right
There’s no end in sight
I hate my life!”
Theory Of A Deadman – Hate My Life
Credits:
~Him~
Head: LeLUTKA.Head.NOA.4.0 ~ Jaden Nova
Head Applier: Stray Dog HERVE EVOX TAN (V) NO BROWS ~ Gac Akina
Hairbase: LeLUTKA.EvoX.Hairbase.044 (BOM) ~ Jaden Nova (Comes with the LeLUTKA NOA Head)
Eyes: [ContraptioN] Depthglass Eye ~ Walton Wainwright
Eyebase: Avi-Glam. Prism Eyes – Pack 2 ~ Eye Daddy
Ears: ^^Swallow^^ Gauged S Ears ~ Luciayes Magic
Beard: [MFCNT] Ducky Skunk Beard & Stache ~ LeBarbier Alpha
Beard Layer: PHYSIQUE X – Logan Facial Hair (v1) Tintable ~ PhysiqueX Resident
Body: [LEGACY] Athletic Edition (1.7.1) ~ MeshBody Resident
Skin: VELOUR: PICASSO HOMME Skin for Legacy (FIT/TAN) Picasso Neck ~ Kiria Mama
Nails: Pare.Cure Mesh Nails Both Hands [Short] – Legacy ~ Flazedo Resident
Hat: Shoeminati. Snapback – LA – Icon Limited ~ Seanmb419 Mills
Earring (Right Ear): Varela – Lucky Earrings ~ Sylvanas Varela
Jacket: [Deadwool] Bjorn jacket ~ Masa Plympton
Shirt: cold ash. BLAISE Tee (Pride) ~ Coldash Resident
Pants: Kalback Cargo Joggers M2 ~ Patrix Beck
Shoe (Right Foot): FLite.– SB Dunks Animated ~ FliteCo Resident
Boot (Left Foot): THIRST – Duke Chaps ~ AlexanderPowell83 Resident
Watch: [Deadwool] “Petite tuile” watch ~ Masa Plympton
Rings/Bracelets (Right Arm): *RE* Atreides Bracelet & Rings ~ Crashnoww Resident
Rings (Left Arm): *RE* Aeon Bracelet & Rings ~ Crashnoww Resident
~Scene~
Closet/Island/Pouff: -David Heather-Salvatore Closet ~ Gianna Broda
Pose: Secret Poses – Mateo ~ SweetDaniellee Resident
Sign: 07. [YKFK] Protest Sign – Don’t Have Time ~ Mariana McCann ~ NEW GACHA @ The Arcade (Sept 1-Sept 30)
Backpack: 09.[Since1975]&Norush- Classroom / Bag (Pink) ~ Noordinarymind Resident ~ NEW GACHA @ The Arcade (Sept 1-Sept 30)
Stool: .03 [ kunst ] – Bar stool (Adult) RARE ~ Kunst Himmel ~ NEW GACHA @ The Arcade (Sept 1-Sept 30)
Bowling Bag: MadPea Bowl-O-Rama Bowling Bag – Black ~ MadPea Resident ~ GACHA
Cardboard Box: GCD – Cardboard Box Fully Open (CLEAN with POSTAL MARKS) ~ Supershine Zapedzki
Boxes: dby Dream Updates [boxes set] ~ Debora Stine
Packages: Peridot By Apollo – Rosalyn Box Decor ~ Apollo Peridot
Award: [Commoner] Award Statuette / Occupational (Best Deejay) ~ Emery Milneaux ~ GACHA
Perfumes: -tres blah- Jolie – Perfume Collection RARE ~ Julliette Westerburg ~ GACHA
Statue: CryBunBun – Collectibuns: Halloween – Bunser – ULTRA RARE ~ Heaven Goat ~ GACHA
Makeup Bag: -tres blah- Jolie – Makeup Bag RARE ~ Julliette Westerburg ~ GACHA
Mannequins: LUX AETERNA [L & Co. Clothiers] Sewing Mannequins ~ Sad Husbando ~ GACHA
Artwork: GOOSE – Old Art ~ Tyrek Resident ~ NEW GACHA @ The Arcade (Sept 1-Sept 30)
Rabbit: BAMSE : RBBT – Plush ~ LiamZander Resident ~ NEW GACHA @ The Arcade (Sept 1-Sept 30)
Holder: .05 [ kunst ] – Wild Stallion’s holder / wood RARE ~ Kunst Himmel ~ NEW GACHA @ The Arcade (Sept 1-Sept 30)
PC Box: [VEX] Elite Gamer Rig *rare ~ Vexiin Takeda ~ GACHA
Boxers: BLACK NEST / Hohto Boxers – Blue ~ William Wanderer
Shoes: BLACK NEST / Hohto Steel Toe Shoes ~ William Wanderer
Grey Shirt: BLACK NEST / Hohto T-Shirt – Light Grey ~ William Wanderer
Jeans: BLACK NEST / Hohto Jeans – Light Denim ~ William Wanderer
Socks: BLACK NEST / Hohto Socks – White ~ William Wanderer
White Shirt: BLACK NEST / Hohto Shirt – White ~ William Wanderer
Rug: Fourth Wall / Fuzzy Fall – Forest Rings Rug ~ William Wanderer ~ NEW GACHA @ The Arcade (Sept 1-Sept 30)
You must be logged in to post a comment.