Data Assets and Tables

Ownership boundary

This skill owns definition schemas, stable asset IDs, discovery, Asset Manager rules, bundles, and content-to-cook/chunk ownership. Route runtime residency, reference-chain hitches, and unload policy to unreal-memory-streaming, artifact construction and packaged-only failure isolation to unreal-packaging-deployment, and mutable player/world persistence to unreal-save-load.

Select the representation

Read references/selector-model.md before creating a schema.

• Use a Data Asset for one inspectable authored definition with heterogeneous fields.
• Use a Primary Data Asset when the definition needs a stable FPrimaryAssetId, Asset Manager discovery, bundles, explicit loading, or cook rules.
• Use a Data-Only Blueprint when authored definitions require inheritance.
• Use a Data Table for many homogeneous rows sharing one FTableRowBase schema.
• Use a Curve Table for keyed numeric progression and interpolation.
• Use a Data Registry when multiple read-only sources, override/fallback ordering, asynchronous acquisition, or managed caching justify its plugin and indirection.
• Use SaveGame/runtime objects, not authored assets, for mutable player or session state.

Execute

1. State the definition/state boundary, stable identifier, ownership, load lifetime, and cook requirements.
2. Choose the smallest representation that satisfies those requirements.
3. Define the schema in C++ when type stability, validation, or broad reuse matters.
4. Choose hard references only for assets that must load with the owner. Use soft references when the dependency should load on demand.
5. If using the Asset Manager, configure the Primary Asset Type and scan path before relying on discovery. Keep each type in deliberate folders.
6. Load asynchronously before the asset is needed; retain the returned asset or handle for the required lifetime and define failure behavior.
7. Validate identifiers, ranges, references, duplicate rows, cross-row relationships, and cook inclusion before runtime.
8. Test in a cooked build. Editor discovery and successful PIE loading do not prove that an indirectly referenced asset was cooked.

Read the reference matching the task:

• authored definitions: references/data-assets-primary.md
• tabular schemas/import: references/data-tables-curves.md
• stable identity and state: references/identifiers-state-versioning.md
• reference and loading choice: references/references-loading.md
• Asset Manager/bundles: references/asset-manager-bundles.md
• unloaded discovery: references/asset-registry-discovery.md
• cooking/chunking: references/cooking-chunking-audit.md
• validation and failures: references/validation-debugging.md
• concrete layouts: references/patterns.md

Hard rules

• Treat Data Assets, Data Tables, and Data Registries as read-only definitions at runtime.
• Never use an asset object or table-row pointer as persistent mutable game state.
• Never cache a Data Table row pointer beyond local use when the table may reimport.
• Never assume a soft reference loads or cooks its target merely because the path exists.
• Never replace every hard reference with a soft reference; loading boundaries must be explicit and worth their complexity.
• Never rename shipped Primary Asset IDs or row identifiers without redirects or migration.
• Query unloaded assets through metadata before calling an API that materializes UObjects.
• Validate the cooked artifact, not only the editor database.

See references/sources.md for the UE 5.8 source trail.