Serialized references#

How-to#

• Referring to objects from the scene.
• Referring to objects between scenes.
• Referring to prefab assets, and instancing them.
• Referring to objects in the scene from prefab assets.
• Referring to children of a prefabs.
• Referring to many instances.

For a visual representation of valid serialized references see this diagram.

Issues#

First use the how-to guide to understand whether your reference is valid.

• I cannot drag a reference into an object field.

What is serialization?#

Serialization, from the Unity manual#

Serialization is the automatic process of transforming data structures or GameObject states into a format that Unity can store and reconstruct later.

Serialization is saving data. In the context of Unity's serialization, this generally means it's editable via the inspector. You can open .asset or .scene files as text and see what's being serialized long-term; the serialization format used by Unity is called YAML.