The Ultimate Guide to Shaper

About

Long before VRChat or Second Life, there was Worlds, the first multi-user 3D chat. Back in the day, it was an incredible piece of technology, being featured in mainstream news and attracting the attention of celebrities such as David Bowie and Steven Spielberg. Nowadays, its popularity has waned to a fraction from the 90s, but it remains online as a virtual museum of the old internet.

With Shaper, anyone could build their own world, host it on a simple website, and invite the public to come visit. Despite its attempts to be user-friendly, there is a lot to learn about making worlds that quickly discourages people from trying.

I first joined Worlds in 2012 and, like many of the tourists at that time, was completely clueless about how Shaper worked. I was simply engrossed with exploring all the secrets of the worlds made by users that came before me. After taking a break, I returned to Worlds in 2020 with the goal of creating my own hologram avatar. It was much more obscure than I was expecting and led me down the rabbit hole of Shaper and all its quirks, but I did succeed, and with all the knowledge I gathered, was able to make a new world: Decennary, a celebration of my 10th year on the platform, which became, not to boast, one of the community's favorite modern worlds.

On this page, I intend to lay out all of my accumulated knowledge of world building so that the community can learn from it and continue to make new, great things on Worlds.