We're proud to introduce the all-new "Fantasy" starter avatars, covering a diverse range of "genre" styles including steampunk, vampires, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic… and beyond!

There are 10 fresh starter avatars available right now, and you can use them as a basis for further customization — explore the Second Life Marketplace and personalize to your liking. These new avatars have normal "system" bodies with mesh wearables, which makes it easy to change their hair, clothes, accessories, and more!

A bit more history about our long-term starter avatar collections:

Back in May 2014, we introduced a round of mesh-body starter avatars to replace even older starter avatars (that you can still find in your inventory's Library > Clothing > Initial Outfits folder).

Then in November 2015, we superceded all of those with a new batch of “Classic” avatars using "system" bodies that are easier to customize, partially in response to Resident requests pointing out the inflexibility of the all-mesh bodies.

Over the years, we've continued to apply what we've learned about building techniques to our starter avatars, improving their aesthetics and optimizing them to load quickly. Our latest Fantasy starter avatars are vibrant examples of what we consider "balanced content" that is both performance-optimized and looks beautiful — they can save you time getting immersed in one of our many roleplaying communities without unnecessarily lagging yourself or others. We know that content creators want to create optimized content for their customers, and we encourage creators to study these new avatars as examples of balanced content.

In our ongoing quest to help creators be aware of balanced content, we introduced the Avatar Rendering Complexity (ARC) project. And more recently, we rolled out "JellyDolls" — a visual feature to raise awareness of ARC and help you control the resources your Viewer spends rendering others' avatars. We practice what we preach, so our Fantasy avatars have been fine-tuned for low, efficient ARC scores. These are just a couple of the initiatives that help make your Second Life a more enjoyable experience.

Ready for your next adventure?

In the Second Life Viewer, go to Me menu > Choose an Avatar to see the Fantasy avatars. New users will also be able to select one of these avatars during the signup process. Try them today!

There was an internal video made to introduce these avatars to the company, and we loved it so much, we'd like to share it with you!