Set up multiple scenes

You can add multiple scenes, edit how you view them, and change the sceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary settings.

To create a new scene, see Creating, loading, and saving Scenes.

Add scenes

To add a new scene to your project, do one of the following:

• Right click to open the menu of a scene asset in the Project windowA window that shows the contents of your Assets folder (Project tab) More info
  See in Glossary and select Open Scene Additive.
• Drag one or more scenes from the Project window into the Hierarchy window.

View scenes

The Hierarchy window displays all the scenes that are part of your project:

A: Scenes with unsaved changes have an asterisk by the scene name.
B: The scene More menu allows you to perform actions on the scene.
C: The scene divider (an inverted triangle) lets you collapse a scene and hide its contents from the Hierarchy to better manage multiple scenes.

Tip: To add a scene to the Hierarchy window without loading it, press Alt (macOS: press Option) and drag the scene into the Hierarchy window. This lets you load the scene when it’s convenient for you.

Loaded scene More menu (⋮)

You can interact with and edit a loaded scene in several ways.

Unloaded scene More menu (⋮)

You can interact with and edit an unloaded scene in fewer ways than you can a loaded scene.

Multiple scenes in Play mode

When you are in Play mode and have multiple scenes in the Hierarchy window, the Editor displays an additional scene called DontDestroyOnLoad. You can’t access the DontDestroyOnLoad scene and it’s also not available at runtime.

Scene-specific settings

The following settings are specific to each scene:

• RenderSettings and LightmapSettings (both found in the Lighting window).
• NavMeshA mesh that Unity generates to approximate the walkable areas and obstacles in your environment for path finding and AI-controlled navigation. More info
  See in Glossary settings.
• Scene settings in the Occlusion CullingA that disables rendering of objects when they are not currently seen by the camera because they are obscured (occluded) by other objects. More info
  See in Glossary window.

Each scene manages its own settings, so only settings associated with that scene save to the scene file.

To change the settings of a specific scene, either open that specific scene and change the settings, or set the scene as the active scene then change the settings. Otherwise, if you have multiple scenes open, Unity uses the rendering and NavMesh settings from the active scene.

When you switch to a new active scene in the Editor or at runtime, Unity replaces all previous settings with the settings from the new active scene.

Additional resources

• Creating, loading, and saving Scenes
• Bake data in multiple scenes
• Use scripts to edit multiple scenes