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Welcome to Node Essentials

Thank you for the support you're showing by choosing to get Node Essentials in Early Access. With your trust, we can work toward creating the extensive knowledge base we missed when we started learning Godot.
This is only the start of a journey. Node Essentials is a living and dense cookbook we aim to flesh out and refine over the coming years. It's a resource you can revisit again and again as you create new projects with Godot, and you'll get more out of it each time.
Throughout early access, you can expect many improvements. This is not only in the form of new content; we also have updates planned for the web platform. You can check out the Early Access Syllabus here.
As you can imagine, polishing all of this is a lot of work for our small team. Node Essentials comes with over 200 demos already!
We will keep refining everything until we've achieved our vision for this project, and your feedback is essential to us in this process. By sharing your thoughts, experiments, questions, and more, you help improve this knowledge base and other courses for everyone. So please get in touch as often as you need: Use the contact form to write an email, join our Discord server, post questions... whichever works best for you.
Enjoy Node Essentials: Godot 4 Edition. I'm looking forward to seeing what you create thanks to it!
Nathan
Founder and teacher at GDQuest
I learned many technologies over the years and found there's almost always a gap between tutorials and documentation. Tutorials can be great for getting off the right foot, but they too often focus on precise and tiny steps to achieve a given result: clicking this and that button, writing code along bit by bit...
If you have experience, tutorials are often too slow and don't explain the big picture. The documentation, on the other hand, tends to be too technical. It teaches you what is available but not why or how to use it in a real project.
Node Essentials aims to fill this gap. It's a knowledge base for intermediate-level Godot users that assumes you have a solid foundation in programming. It's a hybrid between study guides, cheat sheets, and reference material where you can find the information you need to make the most of Godot without digging through the documentation or watching hours of tutorials.
So it's not a course. It's a resource that you'll browse to get an overview of what's possible with Godot and learn many tips and tricks along the way. You can keep referring back to it while working on your projects to find the information you need quickly.

How to download the demos

Node Essentials comes with a large Godot project loaded with over 200 demo scenes. You can download it from the user guides or by clicking the button corresponding to your system below.
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You need Godot 4.3 to open Node Essentials demos
Important: Godot Node Essentials is built with Godot 4.3, which is not out yet at the time of the first early access release.
The download includes a build of Godot 4.3-RC1 on Windows and Linux. Extract the ZIP archive and double-click the executable in the extracted folder to open Godot 4.3. The Godot project manager will automatically display Node Essentials.
On macOS, you need to download Godot 4.3-RC1 from the official website and then import the project files manually.
Node essentials comes with a preloaded Godot editor
We provide our courses with a standalone copy of Godot on Windows and Linux. This way, you can be sure to have the correct version of the editor to work with the course content.
After downloading it, you can unzip the file, enter the folder, and double-click the Godot executable to start the editor.
Can I import the project files in my own copy of Godot?
Yes, sure! You can import the project files in your copy of Godot.
Node Essentials uses Godot 4.3. Please import it into this version of the editor. If you try importing it in version 4.2, it will not work.
And that's all there is to introduce, really!
The next page explains how to make the most of Node Essentials. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. We're here to help.
Which nodes are you planning to cover?
For the first complete release, at the end of early access, we aim to have a over 40 nodes covered. You can find the list in this outline: Node Essentials Outline. In the future, we hope to refine and expand the content to make it even more useful to you.
NOTE:
Some of the listed entries in the outline are about multiple nodes. For example, we will group all the types of lights in one guide as they have a lot in common.
What other improvements do you have planned?
For now, we can guarantee that we will cover all the nodes listed in our outline: Node Essentials Outline.
As budget allows we hope to flesh out the content more and more and connect Node Essentials with other courses.
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