Attention: Here be dragons

This is the latest (unstable) version of this documentation, which may document features not available in or compatible with released stable versions of Godot.

PackedScene

Inherits: Resource < RefCounted < Object

An abstraction of a serialized scene.

Description

A simplified interface to a scene file. Provides access to operations and checks that can be performed on the scene resource itself.

Can be used to save a node to a file. When saving, the node as well as all the nodes it owns get saved (see Node.owner property).

Note: The node doesn't need to own itself.

Example of loading a saved scene:

# Use load() instead of preload() if the path isn't known at compile-time.
var scene = preload("res://scene.tscn").instantiate()
# Add the node as a child of the node the script is attached to.
add_child(scene)

Example of saving a node with different owners: The following example creates 3 objects: Node2D (node), RigidBody2D (body) and CollisionObject2D (collision). collision is a child of body which is a child of node. Only body is owned by node and pack will therefore only save those two nodes, but not collision.

# Create the objects.
var node = Node2D.new()
var body = RigidBody2D.new()
var collision = CollisionShape2D.new()

# Create the object hierarchy.
body.add_child(collision)
node.add_child(body)

# Change owner of `body`, but not of `collision`.
body.owner = node
var scene = PackedScene.new()

# Only `node` and `body` are now packed.
var result = scene.pack(node)
if result == OK:
    var error = ResourceSaver.save(scene, "res://path/name.tscn")  # Or "user://..."
    if error != OK:
        push_error("An error occurred while saving the scene to disk.")