Authoring & Publishing UEFN Packages

Verse only compiles inside a UEFN project, so you author a Forest package in place, inside the same ForestPackages mount consumers install into. This makes your development environment bit-identical to every consumer’s install.

Scaffolding a package

Run forest init inside a Content/ForestPackages/<Scope>/<Name>/ folder and Forest scaffolds a package there: a forest.json, a README.md, and a starter .verse file.

Scaffolding a package is login-gated: Forest asks you to sign in and pick a scope you can publish under (your username or a Studio you’re an admin or owner of). The scope you pick becomes the folder your package lives in, so the folder always matches a scope you can actually publish to.

The package is the folder

A UEFN package has no single entry module and no root field. The folder is the package: every .verse file in it shares the folder’s module namespace, and subfolders are nested modules. To expose a nested module to consumers, ship your own <public> marker for that subfolder inside the package. Forest only generates the scope-level and name-level markers.

• navmesh (your package)
  • forest.json
  • README.md
  • LICENSE
  • NavMesh.verse
  • Internal

Depending on other packages

Install dependencies from inside your package as usual:

forest i another-studio/pathing

Running install from inside an authored package declares the dependency in that package’s forest.json, but resolves and installs it at the project level (one lockfile, one shared mount). The single-version rule spans the whole project, so all authored packages and the project agree on one version of each dependency.

Publishing

Run forest publish from inside the package folder (ForestPackages/<Scope>/<Name>):

forest publish

Publishing packs the package folder verbatim. A few rules are specific to UEFN:

• Publish from a package, not the project. Running forest publish at Content/ or the project root is refused, since that would upload the entire project. Scaffold or move into a package folder first.
• The scope folder must match the author. You publish under the scope whose mapped folder your package lives in. If the folder is cool_studio/ you publish as cool-studio, not some other scope.
• Verse code only. The registry rejects binary UE assets (.uasset, .umap) and Epic-generated digest files (.digest.verse). Forest warns about these before uploading; add them to .forestignore or remove them.
• compatibilityVersion is attached automatically. Forest reads it from your .uefnproject and records it with the published version, so consumers know which UEFN release the package was built against. There’s no field for it in forest.json.
• The generated markers are siblings of your package folder, not inside it, so they’re naturally excluded. The install receipt is excluded too.

For the shared publish flow (versioning, visibility, dependencies), see Publishing a Package.