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Node

In the Godot game engine, a node is an essential building block for creating and organizing your game's content. They are objects (bundles of data and functions) with extra features: you can create and arrange nodes in a tree hierarchy.
You can think of nodes as little Lego pieces that each have a unique purpose, like displaying graphics, playing sound, or handling game logic.
Each kind of node provides its own set of functions. For example, the Sprite2D node displays 2D graphics, and the Camera2D node makes the game view follow it (it creates a virtual camera).
An example of a Sprite2D node, which displays an image in the central viewport in the editor
When creating a Godot game, you arrange nodes in a tree structure called the Scene Tree, where one node can be the parent of one or multiple child nodes, creating a tree hierarchy. This helps organize your game and control how nodes interact. For example, if you add a Camera2D node as a child of a Sprite2D, the camera will move along with its parent Sprite2D node.
In Godot, you can use nodes for most of the pieces the player interacts with when playing. This includes visible game elements and invisible ones like timers, sound players, or pathfinding (algorithms for characters to find walkable paths to a specific location).
You can optionally bypass nodes
While nodes are a powerful and accessible way to organize your game, if you're an experienced developer looking for more control, you can bypass them and work directly with Godot's low-level API (Application Programming Interface). You can search for server in the Godot documentation to learn more about this.
Servers in Godot provide an interface to the engine's core systems (like the physics engine, audio, or rendering) and allow you to interact with them directly using efficient imperative code.
This is a more advanced topic, and it takes more time to write code this way, so we recommend starting with nodes to get familiar with Godot's features. Servers mostly help you to write custom systems or optimize performance in specific cases.

Nodes in the editor

In the Godot editor, nodes are stored and displayed as part of a scene file.
You can see and edit them in the Scene dock at the top left of the editor, where you can add, move, and delete nodes.
The Scene dock in the Godot editor, showing a tree of nodes
You can click a node to select it and see its properties in the Inspector dock, like its position, rotation, or scale.
The Inspector dock in the Godot editor, showing the transform properties of a selected node

Controlling nodes with scripts

By themselves, nodes don't do much. To give them behavior and make the most of them, Godot allows you to attach scripts to nodes. In these scripts, you can write code to manipulate the node's properties, respond to signals, and interact with other nodes in the scene tree.
You can find many examples of scripts in our courses and free tutorials. Here's a script from Learn 2D Gamedev From Zero with Godot 4 that moves a ship in eight directions when the player presses the arrow keys:
extends Sprite2D

var max_speed := 600.0
var velocity := Vector2(0, 0)


func _process(delta: float) -> void:
    var direction := Vector2(0, 0)
    direction.x = Input.get_axis("move_left", "move_right")
    direction.y = Input.get_axis("move_up", "move_down")

    if direction.length() > 1.0:
        direction = direction.normalized()

    velocity = direction * max_speed
    position += velocity * delta

See Also

Related terms in the Glossary