Every Unity project has an Assets folder in the project root which contains the project’s assetsAny media or data that can be used in your game or project. An asset may come from a file created outside of Unity, such as a 3D Model, an audio file or an image. You can also create some asset types in Unity, such as an Animator Controller, an Audio Mixer or a Render Texture. More info
See in Glossary. The Project windowA window that shows the contents of your Assets folder (Project tab) More info
See in Glossary displays the contents of the Assets folder.
Some limitations apply when choosing names for new folders. There are some names for subfolders of the Assets folder that Unity reserves for certain subtypes of assets, and which have special compilation significance or are used to categorize assets for the Editor or Player. These folder names and their meaning are detailed in the following table.
| Folder name | Description |
|---|---|
Editor |
Reserved for Editor scripts, which add functionality to the Unity Editor at authoring time but aren’t available in Player builds at runtime. An alternative to placing scripts in a folder called Editor is to create an assembly definition asset for Editor code. The exact location of an Editor folder determines the script compilation order of its contents. For more information, refer to Special folders and script compilation order.Maximum number of folders with this name per project: Unlimited Valid location for folder: Root of the Assets folder or any of its subfolders.Place relevant assets in: Editor folder or any of its subfolders.Note: MonoBehaviour scripts in an Editor folder can’t be attached to GameObjects as components. |
Editor Default Resources |
Reserved for asset files that Editor scripts can load on-demand using EditorGUIUtility.Load. Maximum number of folders with this name per project: 1 Valid location for folder: Root of the Assets folder only.Place relevant assets in: Editor Default Resources folder or any of its subfolders.Note: Always include the subfolder path in the path passed to EditorGUIUtility.Load if your asset files are in subfolders. |
Gizmos |
Reserved for image files used by the Gizmos.DrawIcon function to draw icons in a Scene view. For more information, refer to Gizmos and Handles. Maximum number of folders with this name per project: 1 Valid location for folder: Root of the Assets folder only.Place relevant assets in: Gizmos folder or any of its subfolders.Note: Always include the subfolder path in the path passed to the Gizmos.DrawIcon function if your asset files are in subfolders. |
Resources |
Reserved for assets to load on-demand from a script at application runtime rather than creating references to assets in a scene. For more information, refer to Loading Resources at Runtime. Maximum number of folders with this name per project: Unlimited Valid location for folder: Root of the Assets folder or any of its subfolders.Place relevant assets in: Resources folder or any of its subfolders.Note: Always include the subfolder path in the path passed to the Resources.Load function if your asset files are in subfolders. Assets in a Resources folder increase the size of Player builds and assets not required at runtime must be manually cleaned up to prevent them degrading your application’s performance. For more information, refer to The Resources folder. If the Resources folder is an Editor subfolder, the assets in it are loadable from Editor scripts but are removed from Player builds, so use the EditorGUIUtility.Load to load them instead. |
Plugins |
Reserved for third-party plugins. For platform-specific information on valid folder path patterns, refer to Import and configure plug-ins. |
StreamingAssets |
Reserved for asset files that should be available in their original format at runtime for streaming. For more information, refer to Streaming Assets. Maximum number of folders with this name per project: 1 Valid location for folder: Root of the Assets folder only.Place relevant assets in: SteamingAssets folder or any of its subfolders. |
For information on folder name formats and extensions which denote plug-insA set of code created outside of Unity that creates functionality in Unity. There are two kinds of plug-ins you can use in Unity: Managed plug-ins (managed .NET assemblies created with tools like Visual Studio) and Native plug-ins (platform-specific native code libraries). More info
See in Glossary or asset types specific to particular platforms, refer to Platform development.
During the import process, Unity ignores the following files and folders in the Assets folder and its subfolders:
., except for those under StreamingAssets where this pattern is not ignored.~.cvs..tmp.This prevents importing special and temporary files created by the operating system or other applications.
Note: For folders created through the Editor’s create menu, the Editor automatically converts a dot (.) prefix into an underscore (_) prefix to prevent crashes. For example, a folder created in the Editor and named .folder is automatically renamed _folder. If you want to name a folder with a dot prefix, create it directly in your local file system instead.