Your first scene

This page walks you from a blank project to a saved scene with one cube in it. Five minutes, give or take.

Pick a starting point

Two starting paths:

New Project > Game on the launcher (or jd new my-game from the terminal). You get a normal Bevy crate: a lib.rs with a GamePlugin, a main.rs that runs the standalone game, a starter scene, and a jackdaw.toml. Pick this if you want to ship a real binary later.
New Scene inside an already-open project. Use this if you just want to author a scene next to ones you have.

A new project opens immediately. The editor builds the project’s cargo binary in the background (same as cargo build in the project root) and asks it for its reflected type schema. Your own components show up in the inspector once that finishes. Placing brushes and saving scenes works right away, so you do not have to wait for it.

Expect that first build to take around nine minutes: it compiles Bevy from source, the same as any Bevy project. Every project pays it once. Rebuilds after that are 1 to 4 seconds, so this is the only time you will sit through it.

Place a cube

Once the editor is open:

In the Hierarchy panel, right-click and pick Add > Cube.
The cube appears at the origin. Click it in the viewport or in the hierarchy to select.
With the cube selected, drag a translation arrow on the gizmo. The default mode is translate; press R for rotate, T for scale, Esc to return to translate. Arrow keys nudge on the grid.

That cube is a brush, not a .glb import, so you can edit its faces in place. See the Brushes chapter when you want to do that.

Save the scene

File > Save (or Ctrl+S). A project from the Game template already has assets/scene.bsn open, so this writes straight back to it. A scene created with File > New Scene asks where to put the file the first time; pick assets/scene.bsn to match what the template loads.

Open that .bsn in your text editor if you want to peek. It is plain text, with one entry per entity and reflected component data inline. See BSN Format for the syntax.

See it run outside the editor

From the project folder:

cargo run

This launches the standalone binary. main.rs adds jackdaw_runtime::JackdawPlugin, which registers the asset loader for .bsn files, and the template’s GamePlugin spawns a JackdawSceneRoot pointing at scene.bsn. No editor in the loop. The cube sits where you placed it, and any components you attached in the inspector are alive on the entity.

Bevy cannot load .bsn on its own; the loader ships in jackdaw_runtime, which is an ordinary dependency of your crate.

What you have now

A project with one scene, one cube, and a save/load round trip you can iterate on. Next steps:

Viewport Navigation for getting around the 3D view.
Custom Components to attach your own behaviour to the cube.
Migrating an Existing Project if you already have a Bevy game and want to wire jackdaw into it.