PCG Basics

World Building

Procedural Content Generation framework with graph-based rule-driven generation, point generation, filtering, mesh spawning, and landscape-aware generation.

Version: 5.2.0 – 5.7.3 | Invoke: /skill pcg-basics

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What this skill does

PCG Basics gives you expert guidance on UE5's Procedural Content Generation framework, a powerful graph-based system for generating world content through visual rules. Instead of hand-placing every rock, tree, and prop, you define generation logic in a PCG Graph that samples points on surfaces, filters them by slope, height, density, and distance, then spawns meshes or actors at the surviving locations. This skill covers the full workflow from creating your first PCG Graph to building reusable subgraphs for complex, landscape-aware generation.

Covers

  • PCG Graph creation and workflow
  • Point generation (surface sampling, grid, volume, spline)
  • Point filtering (density, bounds, distance, slope, height)
  • Point transformation
  • Static mesh spawning
  • Spline-driven generation
  • Landscape-aware generation
  • Subgraph composition
  • Deterministic seeding

Does not cover

  • Procedural Foliage Spawner (legacy) → foliage-placement
  • Runtime procedural generation → future skill
  • Procedural mesh generation → future skill
  • Houdini Engine integration → external tool

How to use

Invoke directly in Claude Code:

/skill pcg-basics

This skill is also auto-detected when your prompt mentions procedural, PCG, scatter, procedural-generation, random-placement, or rule-based-generation intent. AgentUX will automatically activate PCG Basics when it recognizes relevant procedural generation context in your request.

Key Unreal Engine concepts

Concept Description
UPCGComponent The component added to an actor that drives procedural generation by executing its assigned PCG Graph and managing the generated output.
UPCGGraph A visual node graph where you define the generation pipeline: connecting point sources, filters, transformations, and output nodes into a data-flow network.
PCG Nodes Individual operations in the graph (Surface Sampler, Grid, Distance Filter, Mesh Spawner, etc.) that process point data through the generation pipeline.
Point Generation The first stage of a PCG pipeline that creates candidate points on surfaces, within volumes, along splines, or in grid patterns for downstream processing.
Point Filtering Nodes that remove candidate points based on rules (slope angle, height range, density, minimum distance, bounding volume) to control where content appears.
Subgraph A reusable PCG Graph that can be embedded as a single node within other graphs, enabling modular and composable generation logic.
Deterministic Seeding A seed-based randomization system that ensures procedural generation produces identical results every time for the same seed value, critical for reproducible worlds.

Related skills

landscape-management

Create and edit Landscapes and terrain

foliage-placement

Populate environments with vegetation

blueprint-basics

Create and modify Blueprints

What you'll learn

  • How to create PCG Graphs and build point-based generation pipelines
  • Sampling surfaces, volumes, and splines to generate candidate placement points
  • Filtering points by slope, height, density, and distance for natural-looking distributions
  • Spawning meshes and building reusable subgraphs for modular generation
  • Using deterministic seeding for reproducible procedural worlds