Units - Building Your Level

You build your level using what’s called “Units”. Basically everything in this game is a unit. From the level architecture to props, equipment, loot, even characters.

You start by navigating to the Spawn Menu and to the “Unit” tab. You can use the search bar to look for whatever units you need to build your level.

If you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for, you can always open other levels in the editor and see what units have been used elsewhere.
Clicking on a unit in the spawn list and spawning it will automatically load it into your level. Except for some rare cases you don’t have to manually load anything.

Now you can just place it into your level and move or rotate it however you like.

After placing units in your level, there are various settings for them:

Name: Lets you give the unit a custom nickname, so you can find it more easily when searching for it.
Unit: This is the path to the unit file, you can change it by pressing on the “Browse Unit” button next to it. Selecting a new unit path will actually change the unit, however a reload might be required to properly apply the change.
Continent: lets you change what continent the unit belongs to.
Enabled: Lets you enable and disable the unit. It will hide the unit and disable all collisions it may have. This does not save between restarts and units are always enabled when loading into a level, but can always be toggled with EnableUnit and DisableUnit Elements for the duration of the heist. For randomizations for example, just disable all unneeded units with a DisableUnit element when starting the heist.
Hide On Projection Light: Generating light projections will completely ignore any unit that has this option enabled.
Disable Shadows: Will disable any shadows the unit is casting.
Disable Collisions: Will disable all collisions of the unit. It cannot collide with any player or dynamic physics object anymore and won’t be affected by physics simulations. Additionally you will not be able to select it by clicking on it and must be selected via the Select Menu.
Disable On AI Graph: Generating your nav-mesh will ignore any units that have this option enabled. This can be useful when your Unit’s collision is too big and blocks too much of the navigation from generating.
Delay Loading: Units with this option enabled will not actually spawn in the level when playing and must be loaded in with a LoadDelayed Element. This is not very reliable and should be used with caution.

Units that have a Sequence Manager will have an additional Mesh Variation option, in which you can choose a sequence the Unit runs by default.

Some Units have special properties and will have additional settings when selecting them. For example with omni_light units, you can tweak the light settings, or dev_ladder which lets you change height and width of the climbable surface.
Another good example would be the zipline, on which you can customize the end position, speed, as well as slack of the zipline wire, or if it can carry loot or players.

Editor Units

Editor Units are only visible in editor and with the Draw Editor Units setting enabled. There are different types of editor units, most commonly Navigation Splitter and blockers, omni lights and collisions.
Don’t confuse editor units with the Editor_Only continent. Despite being called editor Units, most of them have to be loaded in the level to work, with the exception of Navigation Splitters, blockers and cover points, which are only used to generate the nav-mesh and should be moved into an editor_only continent.