Scenes & Hierarchy

A scene is your game world: the characters, props, lights, and cameras that make up a level or a screen. You build it by arranging objects in the Hierarchy panel, then save it as a scene file you can reopen and ship.

This page walks you through that, no coding required.

The Hierarchy panel

The Hierarchy is the list of everything in your current scene, shown as a tree. Anything you can see in the viewport has a row here.

At the top you get three handy controls:

• + Add Entity — drops a new object into the scene.
• Search box — type to filter the tree down to matching names.
• Filter funnel — narrow the list to one kind of object.

Below that is the tree itself. Click the little arrows (carets) on the left to expand or collapse a group, like the imported model in the screenshot above. On the right of each row are an eye (show/hide) and a lock toggle.

Starting from scratch? When a scene is empty, the tree is replaced by a starter picker so you can begin from an Empty Scene, a 2D Scene, or other ready-made starters.

Adding objects

Click + Add Entity to open a searchable list, then pick what you want. The list gathers a few groups in one place:

• Presets — common scene objects: Empty Entity, Directional/Point/Spot/Ambient Light, Camera 3D, Camera 2D, Sprite, Node 2D.
• Shapes — ready-made meshes: Cube, Sphere, Cylinder, Plane, Cone, Torus, Capsule, and more.
• Components — add a single rendering, post-process, effect, or audio component as its own entity.

Installed plugins (physics, terrain, foliage, world environment) add their own entries too, so the list reflects whatever your project has loaded.

Just added the wrong thing? Press Ctrl+Z to undo it like any other action.

Selecting objects

Click a row to select it. The viewport and the Inspector both follow your selection, so you immediately see and edit whatever you picked.

What you do	What happens
Click	Select just this object
Ctrl+Click (or Cmd+Click)	Add or remove this object from the selection
Shift+Click	Select everything between the last pick and this one
Double-click	Rename it right in the tree
Escape	Deselect everything

You can also Select All, Hide Selected, or Isolate Selected (hide everything except your selection) from the editor's actions.

Parenting & reordering (drag and drop)

Drag a row to move it. Where you drop it decides what happens, based on the part of the target row you hover over:

• Top of a row → Before — move it just above that row.
• Bottom of a row → After — move it just below that row.
• Middle of a row → As Child — tuck it inside that row as a child.

Children move with their parent: rotate or move a parent and its children follow. The editor won't let you drop an object into one of its own children, and the whole move is one undo step.

Right-click a row for more options: Add Child Entity, Rename, Duplicate, Unparent, Group as Children, label color swatches, Delete, and (for cameras and scene instances) a few extra commands covered below.

Showing, hiding & color-coding

Each row's eye toggles whether the object is visible, and the lock prevents accidental edits. Both are undoable. To keep a busy scene organized, give related objects a label color from the right-click menu.

Just left of the eye and lock you'll also see small asset badges when an object carries authored assets, so you can tell what's attached without opening the Inspector — and click a badge to jump straight to that asset's editor:

• a code icon — the object has a script (a .lua/.rhai file or a registered script); clicking opens it in the code editor;
• a blueprint icon — it has a visual blueprint (a .blueprint attached to its Script component); clicking opens the blueprint graph;
• a palette icon — it has a material assigned (a MaterialRef); clicking opens the material graph.

An object can show several badges at once (e.g. both a script and a blueprint).

Moving, rotating & scaling

Select an object and a gizmo appears so you can move it around. Switch tools with these keys:

Key	Tool
Q	Select (no gizmo)
W	Move
E	Rotate
R	Scale

Blender-style quick transforms

Prefer to work with the keyboard? Press a key, move the mouse, then click to confirm:

Key	Action
G	Grab / move
R	Rotate
S	Scale
X / Y / Z	Lock to one axis (press again to clear)
Shift+X/Y/Z	Lock to the flat plane facing that axis
Type numbers	Enter an exact amount
Enter or left-click	Confirm
Escape or right-click	Cancel

Saving your scene

Press Ctrl+S to save. Scenes are stored as .ron files, kept by convention in your project's scenes/ folder. You almost never edit these by hand — the editor writes them for you — but they are plain text if you ever want to peek.

Auto-save

The editor saves for you on a timer — on by default, every 5 minutes. Adjust it under Settings → Auto-Save (in the sidebar's Editor group): toggle it off, or change the interval (in seconds). In the last few seconds before each save the bottom-left status bar replaces Ready with a live Auto save in Ns countdown; when it reaches zero the scene is saved — through the exact same path as Ctrl+S, so a focused asset tab (a material, script, etc.) is never overwritten — and the label returns to Ready. Auto-save pauses while you're in Play mode.

Your project picks which scene loads first when the game runs. That's set in project.toml with a single main_scene line:

name = "My Game"
version = "0.1.0"
main_scene = "scenes/main.ron"

You can also list autoload scenes that load before the main scene and stay alive the whole time — handy for a loading screen, background music, or saved game state that should never be cleared:

main_scene = "scenes/main.ron"
autoload = ["scenes/loader.ron"]

Good to know: only objects with a name are saved, and the editor leaves out runtime-only data (like rebuilt physics colliders and render handles) because the engine recreates it automatically when the scene loads. For the full technical breakdown, see Project Structure and Components.

Reusing scenes inside scenes

You can drop one scene inside another as a scene instance — great for a prop, an enemy, or a room you want to reuse in many places. Edit the original once and every copy updates.

There are three ways to add one:

• Drag a scene file (.bsn) from the Asset Browser onto the viewport — it drops at the spot under your cursor.
• Drag the same file onto the Hierarchy — it's added at the scene root.
• Right-click in the Hierarchy and choose Instance Scene…, then pick a file.

Its contents appear nested under a new instance row. Choose Unpack Scene Instance if you'd rather break it apart into normal objects.

When you save, only the instance's own position and overrides are stored in the host scene — its insides still live in the original file, and any edits you make to them are saved back there. The editor also blocks a scene from referencing itself, so you can never create an endless loop.

Handy scene shortcuts

These are the everyday shortcuts (all rebindable in Settings → Keybindings):

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+N	New scene
Ctrl+O	Open scene
Ctrl+S	Save scene
Ctrl+Shift+S	Save scene as…
Ctrl+D	Duplicate selected
Alt+D	Duplicate & move
Delete	Delete selected
Ctrl+Z	Undo
Ctrl+Y	Redo
F	Focus selected in viewport

See Keyboard Shortcuts for the full, categorized list.