Articles Plugin development Walkthrough: writing a basic plugin

How to: create a BepInEx plugin

The main purpose of BepInEx is to load user-made code into Unity. This is done by writing plugins -- classes that inherit from BaseUnityPlugin. In addition to being loaded by BepInEx and being able to use Unity's and game's APIs, plugins have access to various BepInEx functionalities, such as logging, dependency management and configuration file management. Plugins are compiled into .NET DLL files and put into BepInEx/plugins folder for BepInEx to load.

In this guide, we will create a simple BepInEx plugin that uses most important features provided by BepInEx.

Note

This guide assumes basic knowledge of programming in C#. In addition, the APIs provided by Unity will not be covered in this guide.
For more information on how to use Unity's scripting API, refer to Unity User Manual.

Making a BepInEx plugin consists of the following steps:

  1. Setting up the development environment
  2. Creating plugin base
  3. (Optional) Reading and writing configuration files
  4. (Optional) Using loggers to simplify debugging
  5. WIP: Packaging and distributing the plugin