# Copying Sectors

Start out making two separate sectors. In the left-most sector, create a little circular sector that is valid player space; this will be your source sector. In the right-most sector, create a void-space area that is larger than the circular sector in your source sector.

  Now make a copy of the small circular sector. Do this by pointing your mouse crosshair a little bit above and to the left of the circular sector and pressing right-alt. Keep the right-alt button down, and drag your mouse down and across the circular sector. You'll see a green-bordered box form. Once you've totally enclosed the circular sector within the green box, let go of the right-alt button. Now that entire sector will begin to flash green. Point your mouse crosshair anywhere in the middle of the highlighted sector. Be careful in the next few steps and avoid moving the sector. While holding the mouse in a constant position, press and hold the left-mouse button.
  What we've done here is highlight the sector and any sprites within it for moving. But there's a handy tool built into the Build engine, and that's the ability to copy. While keeping the left-mouse button down and not moving the sector at all, press insert once, but do not let go of the left-mouse button. Be sure the sector lines up with its original coordinates. If you play around with this at all on a test map, you'll see as you move that sector out before pressing insert, white lines will replace the original red ones. Don't worry if that happens to you, just move it back in place and you'll be fine. Now that you've copied the sector into its original location (sounds weird, doesn't it,) you can safely move it around for placement elsewhere. So we'll move it to our void-space area in the right-most sector. You can now do one of two things here. Either a) drop the sector by letting go of the left-mouse button, or b) press insert again to make another copy. We're only going to make a single copy, so let's drop the sector in that void space area. Press the right-alt button again to disengage the highlight, and we've finished the move.

  We must now meld that copied sector into its bigger, surrounding sector. This is what we created that void-space sector for. If you tried to just plop down that copy in the middle of the existing sector, you'd get many, many strange effects, and probably lock the game. It's a cardinal sin in Build to have one sector cross red lines with another, and the same holds true for copying sectors anyplace other than their origin. You can take a copied sector and place it down in void space anywhere, so we're safe with our little void-island. Begin drawing a new sector, starting with point number 1 in the following image. Hit every point in sequence through 8, stopping back at 1. It is imperative that each and every vertice & line of our copied sector is joined with the new sectors. We're going to create two of them.

  |

  Create another new sector for the remaining void area. |  |

  All lines should now be red, indicating we've successfully removed any void space. You probably don't want, and really don't need, those two temporary sectors we used to take up the void space. Let's join them with the parent sector. Point the mouse crosshair anywhere inside the biggest, right-most sector. Press 'J' once. Make sure you see at the bottom of your screen (in the action bar) the line reading "Join sector - press J again on sector to join with" before going any further. If you don't see this, then it didn't register you hitting the 'J' key. Press 'J' on one of the two temporary sectors, and it will merge with the parent. Follow the same procedure for the other temporary sector.

  Notes on Joining sectors: Whichever sector you hit 'J' on first will retain its floor/ceiling heights, shading, tiles, etc. The other sector will lose all of those attributes, and basically disappear. It's very upsetting to accidentally join a junk sector with a good sector. You can only join sectors that share at minimum one red line, or if the sector is within another. Avoid at all costs joining sectors that overlap other sectors. If you point your crosshair in any area which could be two or more separate sectors and hit 'J', there's no way to tell which sector you've hit. Pressing 'J' on the other sector may cause an underlying or overlying sector to be joined with a totally unattached sector. This is deadly. There is no way of backing out of this error without reloading your level.

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