Cooking & Packaging

When you ship, your loose assets are cooked into a compact, runtime-ready form. You do not run the cooker by hand, File > Package Project does it all.

What packaging does

1. Cook. Starting from your startup maps, the cooker follows every asset dependency and bundles only the assets your game actually reaches. Editor-only data is stripped out, and a cache skips re-cooking assets that have not changed.
2. Bundle. Cooked assets are written into .pak archives.
3. Build. Your game module is compiled (Shipping by default), and the executable and archives are copied to the output folder.

The result is a self-contained build you can distribute.

Options

The Package Project dialog lets you set:

• Output Directory, where the build is written. Defaults to a Build/ folder in your project.
• Configuration, the build configuration, Shipping by default.
• Loose scripts, mirror your Game/Scripts next to the executable instead of inside the archive, handy for tweaking gameplay scripts after a build.

How the shipped game loads

The packaged executable mounts its .pak archives at startup and runs against them. If no archive is present, it falls back to a loose /Game folder next to the executable. Either way, your content resolves by the same content paths it used in the editor.