Configuring Bevy

Bevy is very modular and configurable. It is implemented as many separate cargo crates, allowing you to remove the parts you don't need. Higher-level functionality is built on top of lower-level foundational crates, and can be disabled or replaced with alternatives.

The lower-level core crates (like the Bevy ECS) can also be used completely standalone, or integrated into otherwise non-Bevy projects.

Bevy Cargo Features

In Bevy projects, you can enable/disable various parts of Bevy using cargo features.

Many common features are enabled by default. If you want to disable some of them, you need to disable all of them and re-enable the ones you need. Unfortunately, Cargo does not let you just disable individual default features.

Here is how you might configure your Bevy:

[dependencies.bevy]
version = "0.11"
# Disable the default features if there are any that you do not want
default-features = false
features = [
  # These are the default features:
  # (re-enable whichever you like)

  # Bevy functionality:
  "multi-threaded",     # Run with multithreading
  "bevy_asset",         # Assets management
  "bevy_audio",         # Builtin audio
  "bevy_gilrs",         # Gamepad input support
  "bevy_scene",         # Scenes management
  "bevy_winit",         # Window management
  "bevy_render",        # Rendering framework core
  "bevy_core_pipeline", # Common rendering abstractions
  "bevy_gizmos",        # Support drawing debug lines and shapes
  "bevy_sprite",        # 2D (sprites) rendering
  "bevy_pbr",           # 3D (physically-based) rendering
  "bevy_gltf",          # GLTF 3D assets format support
  "bevy_text",          # Text/font rendering
  "bevy_ui",            # UI toolkit
  "animation",          # Animation support
  "tonemapping_luts",   # Support different camera Tonemapping modes (embeds extra data)
  "filesystem_watcher", # Asset hot-reloading
  "default_font",       # Embed a minimal default font for text/UI

  # File formats:
  "png",    # PNG image format for simple 2D images
  "hdr",    # HDR images
  "ktx2",   # Preferred format for GPU textures
  "zstd",   # ZSTD compression support in KTX2 files
  "vorbis", # Audio: OGG Vorbis

  # Platform-specific:
  "x11",                   # Linux: Support X11 windowing system
  "android_shared_stdcxx", # Android: use shared C++ library
  "webgl2",                # Web: use WebGL2 instead of WebGPU

  # These are other features that may be of interest:
  # (add any of these that you need)

  # Bevy functionality:
  "subpixel_glyph_atlas", # Subpixel antialiasing for text/fonts
  "serialize",            # Support for `serde` Serialize/Deserialize

  # File formats:
  "dds",  # Alternative DirectX format for GPU textures, instead of KTX2
  "jpeg", # JPEG lossy format for 2D photos
  "webp", # WebP image format
  "bmp",  # Uncompressed BMP image format
  "tga",  # Truevision Targa image format
  "exr",  # OpenEXR advanced image format
  "pnm",  # PNM (pam, pbm, pgm, ppm) image format
  "basis-universal", # Basis Universal GPU texture compression format
  "zlib", # zlib compression support in KTX2 files
  "flac", # Audio: FLAC lossless format
  "mp3",  # Audio: MP3 format (not recommended)
  "wav",  # Audio: Uncompressed WAV
  "symphonia-all", # All Audio formats supported by the Symphonia library
  "shader_format_glsl", # GLSL shader support
  "shader_format_spirv", # SPIR-V shader support

  # Platform-specific:
  "wayland",              # (Linux) Support Wayland windowing system
  "accesskit_unix",       # (Unix-like) AccessKit integration for UI Accessibility
  "bevy_dynamic_plugin",  # (Desktop) support for loading of `DynamicPlugin`s

  # Development/Debug features:
  "dynamic_linking", # Dynamic linking for faster compile-times
  "trace",           # Enable tracing for performance measurement
  "detailed_trace",  # Make traces more verbose
  "trace_tracy",     # Tracing using `tracy`
  "trace_tracy_memory", # + memory profiling
  "trace_chrome",    # Tracing using the Chrome format
  "wgpu_trace",      # WGPU/rendering tracing
]

(See here for a full list of Bevy's cargo features.)

Graphics / Rendering

For a graphical application or game (most Bevy projects), you can include bevy_winit and your selection of Rendering features. For Linux support, you need at least one of x11 or wayland.

bevy_render and bevy_core_pipeline are required for any application using Bevy rendering.

If you only need 2D and no 3D, add bevy_sprite.

If you only need 3D and no 2D, add bevy_pbr. If you are loading 3D models from GLTF files, add bevy_gltf.

If you are using Bevy UI, you need bevy_text and bevy_ui.

If you want to draw debug lines and shapes on-screen, add bevy_gizmos.

If you don't need any graphics (like for a dedicated game server, scientific simulation, etc.), you may remove all of these features.

File Formats

You can use the relevant cargo features to enable/disable support for loading assets with various different file formats.

See here for more information.

Input Devices

If you do not care about gamepad (controller/joystick) support, you can disable bevy_gilrs.

Linux Windowing Backend

On Linux, you can choose to support X11, Wayland, or both. Only x11 is enabled by default, as it is the legacy system that should be compatible with most/all distributions, to make your builds smaller and compile faster. You might want to additionally enable wayland, to fully and natively support modern Linux environments. This will add a few extra transitive dependencies to your project.

Development Features

While you are developing your project, these features might be useful:

Asset hot-reloading

The filesystem_watcher feature controls support for hot-reloading of assets, supported on desktop platforms.

Dynamic Linking

dynamic_linking causes Bevy to be built and linked as a shared/dynamic library. This will make incremental builds much faster.

This is only supported on desktop platforms. Known to work very well on Linux. Windows and macOS are also supported, but are less tested and have had issues in the past.

Do not enable this for release builds you intend to publish to other people, unless you have a very good special reason to and you know what you are doing. It introduces unneeded complexity (you need to bundle extra files) and potential for things to not work correctly. Use this only during development.

For this reason, it may be convenient to specify the feature as a commandline option to cargo, instead of putting it in your Cargo.toml. Simply run your project like this:

cargo run --features bevy/dynamic_linking

You could also add this to your IDE/editor configuration.

Tracing

The features trace and wgpu_trace may be useful for profiling and diagnosing performance issues.

trace_chrome and trace_tracy choose the backend you want to use to visualize the traces.

See Bevy's official docs on profiling to learn more.