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.

Resource

Inherits: RefCounted < Object

Inherited By: Animation, AnimationLibrary, AnimationNode, AnimationNodeStateMachinePlayback, AnimationNodeStateMachineTransition, AudioBusLayout, AudioEffect, AudioStream, BitMap, BoneMap, ButtonGroup, CameraAttributes, CryptoKey, Curve, Curve2D, Curve3D, EditorNode3DGizmoPlugin, EditorSettings, Environment, Font, GDExtension, GLTFAccessor, GLTFAnimation, GLTFBufferView, GLTFCamera, GLTFDocument, GLTFDocumentExtension, GLTFLight, GLTFMesh, GLTFNode, GLTFPhysicsBody, GLTFPhysicsShape, GLTFSkeleton, GLTFSkin, GLTFSpecGloss, GLTFState, GLTFTexture, GLTFTextureSampler, Gradient, Image, ImporterMesh, InputEvent, JSON, LabelSettings, LightmapGIData, Material, Mesh, MeshLibrary, MissingResource, MultiMesh, NavigationMesh, NavigationMeshSourceGeometryData2D, NavigationMeshSourceGeometryData3D, NavigationPolygon, Noise, Occluder3D, OccluderPolygon2D, OggPacketSequence, OpenXRAction, OpenXRActionMap, OpenXRActionSet, OpenXRInteractionProfile, OpenXRIPBinding, PackedDataContainer, PackedScene, PhysicsMaterial, PolygonPathFinder, RDShaderFile, RDShaderSPIRV, RichTextEffect, SceneReplicationConfig, Script, Shader, ShaderInclude, Shape2D, Shape3D, Shortcut, SkeletonModification2D, SkeletonModificationStack2D, SkeletonProfile, Skin, Sky, SpriteFrames, StyleBox, SyntaxHighlighter, Texture, Theme, TileMapPattern, TileSet, TileSetSource, Translation, VideoStream, VideoStreamPlayback, VisualShaderNode, VoxelGIData, World2D, World3D, X509Certificate

Base class for serializable objects.

Description

Resource is the base class for all Godot-specific resource types, serving primarily as data containers. Since they inherit from RefCounted, resources are reference-counted and freed when no longer in use. They can also be nested within other resources, and saved on disk. Once loaded from disk, further attempts to load a resource by resource_path returns the same reference. PackedScene, one of the most common Objects in a Godot project, is also a resource, uniquely capable of storing and instantiating the Nodes it contains as many times as desired.

In GDScript, resources can loaded from disk by their resource_path using @GDScript.load or @GDScript.preload.

Note: In