"Help! I am new in SL and there are so many concepts that it's overwhelming! I swear I'm not a boomer but how do I even start wrapping my head around this?"

The less-than-helpful answer generally given is "you'll get used to it", which is technically true, but really SL has a lot of idiosyncracies that could be presented more clearly to new players. I have an overabundance of autism, therefore I decided to write this guide to summarise what I've learned in the past ~2 weeks of playing, and hopefully help completely new players hit the ground running faster than having to take 1-2 weeks to figure out the quirks. In other words, "things I wish I could've found a guide for two weeks ago".

The PDF guide in the OP, made by HMART, gives decent step-by-step instructions on getting your first pony. It doesn't explain much, though. You can follow that first thing, if you want; this guide will not give any tutorial, nor tell you how to make a pony, but rather try to explain the concepts of the game.

This assumes Firestorm since that's what everyone uses. I've not tried any other viewers.

1. BASIC CONCEPTS

This should guide you through the basics, enough to feel like you aren't floundering around on your first day.

1.a Inventory, wearing, and rezzing

SL's inventory management is weird as fuck. Basically, most things can either be "worn" (attached to you) or "rezzed" (i.e. spawned in-world as an object). To rez, click and drag things out of your inventory onto the ground. To wear, right click and select Add (note that Wear will replace anything else worn at the same attachement point, so Add is what you want to use almost any time). You can also select "Attach To->" to select a specific place where to wear an item - usually that's not necessary for items that are already properly set up. See also 1.d for adjusting items that weren't made for OpenPony.

An important thing to note here is that HUDs are ALSO an item that you must wear. The OpenPony customisation HUD? You right click->Add to show it, and then right click->"Detach from yourself" to remove it from your screen, as if you were putting on a hat or a mane then taking it off. This is normal for all user-made HUDs (not to be confused with the built-in Firestorm UI - the distinction between "the UI" (part of Firestorm) and "a HUD" (an in-game hud) is important here).

And yes, manes and tails are also worn. Yes, you can wear multiple manes at once, if you click Add. (It's unlikely to look good, but the point is the mechanics of the game let you do that.) Replacements for body parts exist (e.g. "tiny hooves" on the marketplace) - also worn. An invisible cube around your mane that has a script letting people "pet your mane" when they click on it? Also worn. Basically, anything you want to attach to your avatar is worn. Most of these things can also be rezzed in-world, though usually there's not much point in spawning a mane on the floor (it may be necessary sometimes to e.g. let someone else edit it). Yes, you can also wear a car or a piece of furniture instead of spawning it in (it will look extremely autistic).

The OpenPony body is just something you wear, which replaces the default ugly human body in SL. Your wings and horn, if any, are also just objects you wear and can take off. Your expression HUD, which lets you do a variety of animations - worn. The OpenPony also comes with an AO, "animation override", which basically scripts your avatar to use pony animations instead of the default SL ones intended for the default SL human body. You guessed it, it's also "worn" - it's not a visible object in any way, but while "wearing" it the animations and scripts are active. You can take it off if you want your pony to look like an eldritch abomination.

This are the basic principles that make SL tick; almost everything else is based on this. Scripts, cool items, new animations, HUDs that let you trigger new animations - wear them to be able to use them. Furniture, vehicles, props - rez them by dragging them out.

1.b Camera and movement

This is possibly the most clunky part of SL. Make sure you enable WASD movement like the HMART OP guide tells you to. Now, you're gonna want to get used to these:

• Alt + Click'n'drag mouse: horizontally, rotates your camera around the point in the world you clicked on. Vertically, zooms in and out towards that point.
• Alt + Shift + Click'n'drag: rotates your camera in all directions. In other words, pressing shift switches vertical mouse movement from a zoom to an up-down rotation.
• Alt+ Ctrl + Shift + Click'n'drag: pans your camera.

This is weird, and you'll just need to get used to it. Muscle memory will come with time and it'll get more natural. People have different preferred ways to make use of this; personally, I use the Alt vertical movement zoom as a "pan" to move forward and backward, then re-click on a new point on the floor to pan around somewhere else, and press Shift when I wanna rotate up and down.

1.b.i) Some more tips

• Firestorm has a popup window that lets you adjust the camera using an on-screen GUI, click on one of the buttons at the bottom to open it. It can be useful for fine adjustements, since the Alt+Click method always re-centers on whatever you click on, which you might not want. That GUI also has buttons to re-center your camera, though I think 'C' works as well.
• 'M' goes into mouselook (first-person), where your camera is directly controlled by the mouse and also you can stare at everypony's asses in first person.
• You can turn "camera resets on avatar movement" on and off in Firestorm settings. If it's on (by default), whenever you press WASD your camera will snap back to you, bear that in mind if you're trying to line up a good view (or use it to quickly reset if you've lost where you are by looking out super far away).
• You can left click and hold on your avatar and then moving your mouse will steer your avatar. A bit weird but an option you can try out.
• A final note is that if you use the Alt+Click and click on something that moves (like another player, or a vehicle), your camera will follow that object as it moves.

1.c Miscellaneous tips and settings

These are worth bearing in mind:

• Chat whisper + shout: when sending a message, instead of Enter press Shift+Enter to whisper. Press Ctrl+Enter to shout. In Firestorm options, you can enable a radius display on the minimap to visualise the range different messages carry.
• LookAt: by default, you can see where people are pointing their camera, or what object they're focusing on. Everyone can see that for you, too. In Firestorm, you can find the LookAt options and disable broadcasting that, if you don't want people to see when you're staring at their ass.
• Media: in the top-right of Firestorm, there is a music note icon which lets you enable and disable media. This is music (and/or video) that some area is streaming. For example, the /mlp/ hangout has a TV that broadcasts media, and people usually use it to watch cytube together. You can allow (and whitelist/blacklist) domains, and generally turn media on and off as you wish.
• Volume: the volume sliders in Firestorm are comprehensive. Feel free to adjust voice (from other people), media (as above), sounds (stuff played by scripts or objects or gestures) etc. as necessary, or even turn them off if e.g. you don't want to hear micspam at that moment.
• Privacy: voice calls (as distinct from local area voice chat) are p2p; bear that in mind. Media is loaded from external sites; also bear that in mind, just like you would when clicking on random links strangers send you. 99.9% of the time it's some internet radio link, but exercise common sense.
• Bandwidth and cache settings: might be worth adjusting from the defaults in Firestorm. For Bandwidth, IIRC set it to 1500kb/s assuming you've got broadband (apparently going higher can cause problems?). For cache, if you've got the disk space crank it up - you can never have too much cache.
• Graphics - disabling shadows and disabling water reflections can give big boosts to FPS. Crank up "non-impostor avatars" to increase the amount of avatars that get rendered - above that limit they're displayed as cardboard cutouts.

1.e Basic editing, outfits, and inventory management

Once you get some items, it's worth playing around with some basic editing. The HMART guide already tells you how to recolor your mane, including the use of Select Face. Generally, you can edit anything you own either by right-clicking it in world, or right clicking it in your inventory (the latter may require you to wear the item). On top of color editing, position/rotation/scale editing can be very useful if some unrigged item was not made for OpenPony - unrigged means it's not animated, but it will probably be positioned wrong, so you can just move where it's attached (Rigged items will amost certainly have their animations break completely and are not worth bothering with.)

The Contents tab is where you will see stuff like animations, sounds and scripts for items that use them. (For example, the OpenPony expressions HUD has its HUD scripting in the contents - and all the default animations included in the HUD there, too. You can drag them out to your inventory and click on them to use them without the HUD, or use them in your own items.)

Press Ctrl+O for outfits - here you can essentially save sets of items you're wearing at once. Note that many "clothes" come in multiple parts, and are actually sets of clothes, ripe for mixing, matching and recoloring. Oh, and remeber that your pony is also just something you "wear" - unbox another Mare Box, get a new pony, make a different OC. The pony body (and wings and mane and AO and HUDs...) is also part of your "outfit", so you can use that to switch between different ponies just as easily as changing clothes.

Now a note on inventory management. There's no easy undo in SL; if you edit something and fuck up e.g. it's color or position, you can't just "go back to the previous state". If an item allows copying, it's a good idea to copy it if you want to customize it. Many items also come "boxed" (as you've probably discovered when making your OpenPony) - this makes it convenient to unbox a new one if you ever need a fresh, unmodified copy.

TODO: mention "edit links" here because I forgot how it works but it's super useful when you need it

1.e Viewers - Firestorm vs. Black Dragon vs. Alchemy (my understanding)

Everyone uses Firestorm, but it's worth giving a quick rundown on the other main viewers:

• Black Dragon has a different control scheme (which some people prefer), and a much more powerful rendering engine (which people use for screenshots). However, the dev is autistic and so it lacks a lot of the quality of life features of Firestorm. You can play the game with it, but you might miss a lot of the stuff Firestorm adds.
• Alchemy is meant to be performance and stability focused, though it also has less features than Firestorm. I haven't tried it but might be worth a try if you have a potato and Firestorm melts it.

Otherwise, indeed, Firestorm is just the best option.

1.f SL Knowledge Base

Here's the official "knowledge base" from Linden Labs: https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/ It's a bunch of stuff, varying in helpfulness and depth, and worth taking a look at.

2. OBJECTS AND CONTENT

SL is all about the content, which is almost entirely made by users. Again, it's got a ton of idiosyncracies, and getting the hang of the key concepts is important to make use of it all - and a basic prerequisite to know where to go if you want to make your own.

2.a Permissions and sharing

Something that's not super obvious is that objects come with three permissions that can be on or off: Copy, Modify and Transfer. When you create something, you can set "next owner" permissions, which is how sellers control what you can do with items you buy for example. Freebies are often full-perm (i.e. all three enabled); most normal items are no-transfer (so you can't just buy it and give it to everyone else for free). Some items are no-modify (which means you can't edit their textures, content/scripts...) and/or no-copy (which means if you fuck one up by editing, you can't easily get a new one back, nor can you make several versions with different colors for example). Bear this in mind.

2.b Animations, textures, sounds, and gestures

Most items can be "worn", but some are exceptions. Animations can be toggled (Firestorm lets you preview it locally, or actually play it for everyone to see). Sounds can be played (Firestorm also has a preview feature). Textures can be applied to stuff, but are not useful on their own.

Gestures are a special type of item that can combine a number of chat messages, sounds and animations, in a predefined sequence and with optional delays. They can be bound to a hotkey. When you see somepony play a sound effect while doing some animation or a message gets posted to chat, that's a gesture. They're easy to create and/or edit.

2.c The edit menu

The edit menu is quite featureful in SL. It's worth playing around with to discover its features. Some notable things:

• Movement, rotation, and scaling, as mentioned earlier.
• Texture editing: not only can you change the color, but here's also where you set the texture for the object. Here is also where you can edit the alpha (transparency). SL also has normal maps and specular maps you can set here (e.g. set a full white specular texture to make the entire object shiny).
• Content: this is where you drop scripts, and this is also where you drop any resources those scripts need, such as animations, sounds, etc.

The HMART guide already mentions how to edit faces, but it's also worth mentioning the "edit linked" feature. Objects in SL can contain child "sub-object" known as links (though as far as I'm aware only to one level, not as a proper hierarchy); using "edit linked" you can select a specific link to edit, which itself can have its own set of properties (textures, scripts/items in contents, etc.) There are two small arrows that let you cycle between links, if clicking on them in-world is too hard (as it often is).

2.d Scripts

Scripts are generally used in objects (and inserted in the Content tab of the edit menu). Scripting can do a LOT of things in this game; easiest way to get started is to grab some pre-existing script with modify permissions and check how it does what it does.

3. FIRESTORM FEATURES

Some neat things worth pointing out that may be helpful.

3.a Sound viewer, object explorer, Inspect menu

The sound and objects explorer are found in the World menu. The Sound explorer can tell you where sounds are coming from; check the Avatar checkbox and it will also show you sounds people are playing - e.g. through gestures. So if you hear a gesture you want, you will know who to bug for it (or if you hear ear-rape, you will know who to blame). The object explorer can let you find specific objects in the area (e.g. search for "mare bits"), it can tell you where they are, and even let you interact with them. These are both quite useful for getting your bearings on what's going on around you.

The Inspect menu in Firestorm can be gotten by right-clicking on something. This is extremely useful for getting the name of objects. For example, it will usually let you find someone's piece of clothing on the marketplace by name.

3.b Screenshot options, camera tools

There's a few things worth mentioning for screenshots. Firstly, in the Advanced menu (which you have to first enable in preferences), you can enable "Quiet screenshots" - this disables the shutter sound that everyone can hear when you take a screenshot. You can also enable High-res Screenshots. Secondly, something people miss often is the "360 snapshot" button in the bottom right of the Screenshot window (Ctrl+Shift+S for that, by the way). And finally, Ctrl+` takes a quick screenshot without bringing up the window in Firestorm.

In one of the menus (TODO: find where), there's an option that lets you change a lot of the rendering settings for the camera. You can control the lighting, focus, etc. As mentioned earlier Black Dragon is generally the best way to get the best screenshots, but with some tweaking you can get Firestorm looking pretty decent, without having to switch viewers.

4. RESOURCES FOR CONTENT CREATION

Making things in SL both lets you get whatever you want if it doesn't exist yet, is fun if your friends enjoy using what you've made, and can make you some dosh if you sell it and there's some demand. There's a lot of stuff to learn so this section is mostly just going to be a dump of resources:

• Blender (meshing - i.e. creating 3D models): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3k43vbUnAdm8yOuoKNtNww/videos has multiple videos from the WHU, a pony sim which ran blender classes specific to SL. Some are pretty long-winded, but may be worth watching at 2.3x speed, or consulting if you need to figure something out; it also covers some quirks like potential issues when importing to SL, how to add physics if needed, etc. Otherwise, the famous donut tutorials on youtube are pretty good for just getting started with blender in general (and if you've never used Blender at all, I recommend starting with those, rather than the WHU videos). If you already know Blender, then there's not much to it - export as Collada .dae, and upload in SL.
• BOM texturing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zb_V8fHkGM, while focusing on the deer kit, does explain the fundamentals of how BOM works and should be a decent starting point for both enabling BOM, and also knowing where to go to make your own BOM textures.
• Scripting: the wiki is actually pretty comprehensive: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal If you've got any experience with programming, LSL is pretty easy to start with.

5. THINGS I DON'T KNOW

I've only been playing for two weeks; I believe (perhaps pretentiously) this puts me in a position to explain to a new player what I wish I could've known two weeks ago, as I remember clearly what exactly was weird or unclear as I started playing, but it also means I'm by no means an experienced player. These questions can serve as both a starting point for further research ("know what you don't know"), or if you've got experience with these and want to write up a quick guide on these topics you're welcome to and it can be added to this document.

5.a How to find things to do

Lots of people have been exploring a lot and might pitch in; I've been sitting playing around with items and mechanics but I am mostly lost if I don't have people to follow when exploring. The mainland is vast, lots of places are either empty or ugly (or just gay furry sex clubs). Contributions from other people on how to do this are particularly welcome, and might deserve its own section in the guide if someone can help me fill it in.

5.b Prim building

You can make things just using the built-in SL tools. It's worth playing around with; I haven't yet.

5.c Finding living places

Renting, buying, squatting? A mystery to me so far. Though also not a priority since everyone has the parcel to hang out on.

5.d Rigging/animating stuff with avastar

Haven't found good resources so far, though I haven't looked much for non-pony resources yet.