⚠ NOTE ⚠
This template is not actively maintained anymore.
Instead, consider installing and using our dotnet templates: BepInEx.Templates.

BepInEx basic plugin template

This is a basic template for writing BepInEx 5.4 plugins.
The template comes preconfigured with the following components:

• BepInEx.Core 5.4.8 - The core BepInEx library that contains all important core API.
• HarmonyX 2.3.2 - Harmony fork that is used in BepInEx. With this you can patch game functions at runtime.
• BepInEx.Analyzers 1.0.4 - Helper Roslyn analyzers for BepInEx.
• UnityEngine.Core 5.6.0 - Stubbed UnityEngine 5.6 core library. This is usable for game-independent BepInEx plugins. For game plugin development, you should replace this with UnityEngine.dll of the game you're modding.
• Microsoft.Unity.Analyzers 1.8.2 - A collection of Roslyn analyzers for generic Unity programming.

The template targets .NET Framework 3.5 which is usable for game-independent plugin development. For game-specific development, target a more specific version

Getting started

To get started, copy this repository as a template. You can do one of the following:

• Use this repository as GitHub repo template
• Clone or download this repository
• Install dotnet template from releases

After downloading, open BepInExPlugin.sln in your IDE of choice and build. The generated plugin DLL will be placed into src/bin/(Debug|Releate)/net35 folder. You can place the generate plugin into BepInEx/plugins folder and use it.

Repository structure

Some notable parts of the repository are

• .template.config - used only for dotnet template generation, can be removed.
• BepInExPlugin.sln - the solution file of the project. Can be opened in an IDE like Visual Studio or Rider.
• nuget.config - configuration for NuGet. Used to specify a link for a custom NuGet feed that contains BepInEx packages.
• src - the folder with the plugin source code.
  • *.cs - the source code files of the plugin.
  • BepInExPlugin.csproj - the project file that contains configuration for building the code.

Change .NET API version

By default this repo uses .NET Framework 3.5 and references UnityEngine from Unity 5.6. While usable for general plugin development, game-specific plugins need to reference the correct .NET API version.

To change the version, simply open BepInExPlugin.csproj in a text editor and change

<TargetFramework>net35</TargetFramework>

To a different version. Currently, the following targets are usable with Unity:

• net35
• net46
• netstandard2.0

Check the Creating solution section of BepInEx plugin development guide for information on which version to choose.

In addition, you may need to reference the correct UnityEngine library from the game. To do that, remove UnityEngine.Core NuGet package and instead add reference to UnityEngine.dll (and UnityEngine.CoreModule.dll if needed) to the project. You can find such DLLs in the game's Managed folder.

Documentation, guides and more

For more guides, refer to BepInEx wiki.
If you're writing a BepInEx plugin for the first time, check out the plugin development walkthrough.