Getting Started

This page introduces the Unreal Engine Core Plugin getting started guides and how they’re organized. It highlights the main concepts each guide covers and suggests an order if you’d like to read them linearly.

These guides cover:

• How to install and enable the plugin (including any platform-specific configuration)
• How initialization, the event loop, and shutdown fit together in Unreal Engine
• How the public API is structured and how errors are reported
• How authentication and user sessions work in practice
• How to browse, subscribe to, and manage UGC from within your project

To get set up first, start with the installation guide. Each guide focuses on one area and includes concrete examples, and you can jump to the section you need.

Guides in this series

• Installation
• Initialization
• Structure & Error Handling
• User Authentication
• Searching for UGC
• Subscribing to UGC
• Adding UGC
• UGC Best Practices

The plugin flow

This is the typical Unreal Engine plugin flow:

1. Install and configure the plugin in your project. This typically includes setting your game credentials from the mod.io dashboard and confirming platform requirements.
2. Set up the plugin event loop so asynchronous work can complete (either by enabling the background thread option or calling RunPendingHandlers consistently).
3. Initialize the plugin with your game configuration (Game ID, API key, environment, and portal).
4. Authenticate a user and establish a local session.
5. Perform core operations such as searching, subscribing, and managing local UGC.
6. Shut down cleanly when your session ends or your application exits.

If you want a complete function reference while working through these guides, see the Reference Docs.