Core

The engine's own concepts, in the order they build on each other: worlds, scenes, entities, components, assets, scripting, multiplayer, and how a running world is put together.

• Getting started

  This is the one read that shows how the pieces fit together. Each system has its own guide; this walks the whole chain once — world → scene → players + camera → entities → components + assets —…

• Worlds & ZeroMind

  A world is the project you're working in — all of its entities, scenes, components, materials, and code. It's a shared, multi-user, persistent container backed by ZeroMind (the content backend).…

• Scenes

  A scene is a loadable arrangement of a world — its entities (with their components, transforms, and lighting), plus a startup script — saved as a .scene asset. A scene is the unit of "level" or…

• The engine

  Working in Zero means working inside a live, shared world. Three things make up the engine's model, and understanding them up front saves a lot of confusion: the world is live and persistent, it runs…

• ECS

  You work with the ECS layer through ecs. and entity. — two views of the same thing. entity. spawns and finds the entities; ecs. attaches and reads the native components that give them their…

• Entities

  An entity is a named handle with a stable id, a transform, and a place in a hierarchy. On its own it does nothing — it has no shape, no physics, no behaviour. Every capability comes from the…

• Components

  A component is the primary unit of gameplay code: a piece of behaviour + data attached to an entity. Movement, AI, animation drivers, UI panels, network sync, per-entity state — all of it lives in…

• Requiring modules

  require is how one piece of Luau pulls in another. You hand it a string; it hands you back the table that module returned. The interesting part is the string — what you write decides how the engine…

• Generating assets & content

  You're building something — a scene, a game, a level — and you need an asset that doesn't exist yet: a 3D model of a dragon, a door-slam sound, a stone-tile texture, a walk animation, a whole…

• Scripting & tasks

  Two kinds of code run in Zero, and it's worth knowing which you're writing:

• Runtime data

  runtime_data is a world's persistent, replicated data layer — where you keep state that must survive restarts and reach every player: progression, saved builds, unlocks, per-player records, any…

• Assets & asset types

  The asset system is the backbone of a Zero world. Almost everything you work with — a component, a material, a scene, a tool, a mesh, a texture, a shader, a bundle — is an asset. Understanding what…

• The filesystem (VFS)

  The engine's state is exposed as a filesystem under /zero. This is a genuine superpower for understanding what exists — you navigate entities, components, assets, and live runtime state with the same…

• The tool system

  Tools are how the engine's capabilities become named, discoverable workflow operations. A tool composes a multi-step job (resolve an asset, spawn an entity, add a Model, add a collider, position it)…

• Multiplayer

  Zero is multiplayer by default — in both edit mode and play mode. A world is a live, shared session: other people and agents may be connected to the same world at the same time, editing alongside you…

• Discovering the engine

  You don't need to memorise this engine. Its surface is discoverable in layers, and the order matters: the jobs it already knows how to do, the kinds of thing it can make, the operations it already…

• Development & versioning

  A world is a shared, multi-user editor session. Everyone connected sees your edits live and you see theirs — like a shared document, in both edit and play (the multiplayer guide). That shapes how…

• Performance: run each job where it belongs

  Zero executes your logic in two very different worlds. Luau is flexible, per-object, and serial. The engine core and the GPU are bulk and parallel. Almost all performance work comes down to running…

• Authoring content other people can use

  Everything you write here is read by somebody else — another creator, another agent, or you in a month with none of today's context. This guide is the set of rules that make what you write usable by…

• The resource model: asset, CPU, and GPU

  Read this before working with any mesh, texture, material, or shader.

• Scenes, authored as code

  A scene can say what it holds in code. build.luau inside the scene's folder is where the scene's content is written — all of it — and what that code creates is what the scene is made of: the entities…

• Troubleshooting

  Something you built doesn't behave — a component never runs, a weapon never equips, a value comes back nil, a mesh isn't where it should be. The engine almost always already knows why: errors land in…

• Version control

  A world's history, branches and reviews are handled by ZeroMind — Zero's own version control system. If you have used git, the model will feel familiar: the verbs carry the same names and mean the…