Warning: this page has not been updated for Bevy 0.10 yet!

Community Plugins Ecosystem

There is a growing ecosystem of unofficial community-made plugins for Bevy. They provide a lot of functionality that is not officially included with the engine. You might greatly benefit from using some of these in your projects.

To find such plugins, you should search the Bevy Assets page on the official Bevy website. This is the official registry of known community-made things for Bevy. If you publish your own plugins for Bevy, you should contribute a link to be added to that page.

Beware that some 3rd-party plugins may use unusual licenses! Be sure to check the license before using a plugin in your project.

Other pages in this book with valuable information when using 3rd-party plugins:

Plugin Recommendations

This here is my personal, curated, opinionated list of recommendations, featuring the most important plugins (in my opinion) in the Bevy ecosystem.

My goal here is to help direct new Bevy users to some known-good resources, so you can start working on the kinds of games you want to make. :)

The plugins listed here use permissive licenses (like Bevy itself).

This page is limited. I can only recommend plugins I know enough about. Please also check the Bevy Assets page to find even more things. :)

Development Tools and Editors

These are listed on a separate page.

Code Helpers

bevy_asset_loader is a more flexible and opinionated helper for managing and loading assets. Uses custom syntax to let you declare your assets more conveniently. It can track loading progress and perform a state transition for you.

bevy_debug_lines allows you to quickly draw lines on the screen, to help you visualize things during development.

iyes_loopless provides alternative improved implementations of states, run criteria, and fixed timestep, that do not suffer from the major usability limitations of the ones provided with Bevy.

iyes_progress is a general helper for tracking progress and performing a state transition when everything is ready. A common use case are loading screens, where you might want to do more than just load assets, like world generation, connecting to a server, …

Input Mappings

To help with your game's input handling needs, try the Input Manager plugin by Leafwing Studios. It is a very flexible way to handle your game's bindings / mappings.

Audio

Use bevy_kira_audio instead of the built-in bevy_audio.

The built-in audio is very limited in features, and you are likely going to need this plugin for pretty much any game with audio needs beyond simply playing sounds with volume control. Kira provides advanced mixing, playback controls, some simple effects, streaming functionality…

See this page for help on how to set it up.

Camera

smooth-bevy-cameras is a nice plugin for easily adding camera controls to your Bevy 3D project.

Cameras are something that can be very game-specific. As you progress with your project, you would probably want to implement your own custom camera control logic for your game. However, this plugin can be useful when you are starting out on a new project.

Graphics

If you need particle effects, try bevy_hanabi.

Experimental 3D Path Traced Global Illumination: bevy_hikari.

Tilemap

If you are making a 2D game based on a tile-map, there are plugins to help do it efficiently with high performance. It is much better than just spawning lots of individual Bevy sprites for each tile.

bevy_ecs_tilemap:

  • Uses one ECS Entity per tile, lets you work with the tilemap in an ECS-idiomatic way.
  • Efficient rendering, using techniques like texture arrays, chunks, morton encoding, …
  • Lots of features: Square/Hexagon/Isometric grids, animation, layers, chunks, …

2D Maps / Levels

bevy_ecs_ldtk implements loading of entire maps/levels created with the LDTK editor, into Bevy. Based on bevy_ecs_tilemap internally, for efficient performance.

Shapes / Vector Graphics / Canvas

If you want to draw 2D shapes, use the bevy_prototype_lyon plugin.

For SDFs (signed-distance-functions), see bevy_smud.

Game AI

big-brain is a plugin for game AI behaviors (Utility AI).

GUI

There are a few alternatives to Bevy UI available.

bevy_egui integrates the egui toolkit into Bevy. It is a mature immediate-mode GUI library (like the popular Dear Imgui, but in Rust). It is very feature-rich and provides lots of widgets. It was not really designed for making flashy gamey UIs (though it may very well be fine for your game). It's great for editor-like UIs, debug UIs, or non-game applications.

kayak_ui is a new experimental game-centric UI library for Bevy, which uses a XML-like declarative syntax for constructing UIs.

UI Navigation

If you are using the builtin Bevy UI, there is a nice plugin available for navigation (moving between buttons and other focusable UI elements): bevy-ui-navigation.

Physics

Bevy can integrate with the Rapier physics engine.

Use the bevy_rapier plugin. It provides a nice API to bridge between Bevy and Rapier.

Animation

Starting from Bevy 0.7, there is built-in support for playing predefined asset-driven animations, including 3D skeletal animation.

However, for "programmatic" / code-driven animation, you may need something else. Try bevy_tweening. This might be good enough for moving objects around, moving the camera, smoothly changing colors, or other such transitions.

For animated 2D sprites, try benimator. This is for using sprite-sheet assets with many frames of animation.

Selecting 3D Objects

bevy_mod_picking is a plugin for selecting 3D meshes using pointer inputs like the mouse. Use this if you need to let the user click on things in your 3D world.

File Formats

Additional asset loaders, for loading assets from file formats other than those that Bevy officially supports.

bevy_common_assets allows you to easily create custom asset types to be loaded from general structured data formats like RON, JSON, YAML, TOML, and MessagePack. Useful for representing data specific to your game (like item/weapon/enemy/etc parameters") as asset files.

Distribution

Plugins to help with releasing your game.

bevy_embedded_assets allows bundling your asset files inside of the game executable, instead of having a separate assets folder.

bevy_steamworks allows you to integrate with the Steam SDK by Valve Software, if you intend to publish on that platform.

bevy_discord_presence allows you to integrate with the Discord social platform.