As this page is outdated, please refer to Bevy's official migration guides while reading, to cover the differences: 0.9 to 0.10, 0.10 to 0.11, 0.11 to 0.12, 0.12 to 0.13, 0.13 to 0.14.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I will update the page as soon as I find the time.

Handles

Handles are lightweight IDs that refer to a specific asset. You need them to use your assets, for example to spawn entities like 2D sprites or 3D models, or to access the data of the assets.

Handles have the Rust type Handle<T>, where T is the asset type.

You can store handles in your entity components or resources.

Handles can refer to not-yet-loaded assets, meaning you can just spawn your entities anyway, using the handles, and the assets will just "pop in" when they become ready.

Obtaining Handles

If you are loading an asset from a file, the asset_server.load(…) call will give you the handle. The loading of the data happens in the background, meaning that the handle will initially refer to an unavailable asset, and the actual data will become available later.

If you are creating your own asset data from code, the assets.add(…) call will give you the handle.

Reference Counting; Strong and Weak Handles

Bevy keeps track of how many handles to a given asset exist at any time. Bevy will automatically unload unused assets, after the last handle is dropped.

For this reason, creating additional handles to the same asset requires you to call handle.clone(). This makes the operation explicit, to ensure you are aware of all the places in your code where you create additional handles. The .clone() operation is cheap, so don't worry about performance (in most cases).

There are two kinds of handles: "strong" and "weak". Strong assets are counted, weak handles are not. By default, handles are strong. If you want to create a weak handle, use .clone_weak() (instead of .clone()) on an existing handle. Bevy can unload the asset after all strong handles are gone, even if you are still holding some weak handles.

Untyped Handles

Bevy also has a HandleUntyped type. Use this type of handle if you need to be able to refer to any asset, regardless of the asset type.

This allows you to store a collection (such as Vec or HashMap) containing assets of mixed types.

You can create an untyped handle using .clone_untyped() on an existing handle.

Just like regular handles, untyped handles can be strong or weak.

You need to do this to access the asset data.

You can convert an untyped handle into a typed handle with .typed::<T>(), specifying the type to use. You need to do this to access the asset data.