Every control on the main screen.

Apply Simple Setup

Copies your Simple Setup choices into the Advanced settings and saves Project Settings. The quality preset becomes concrete numbers — items per step, frame-time budget, memory cleanup, dependency depth — and your content folders, destination level and loading screen are merged into the Advanced fields.

The merge is additive: existing Advanced entries are preserved rather than replaced, so this is safe to press on a project that has already been tuned by hand.

The same additiveness has one consequence worth knowing. If you change your Level To Open After Warmup or a content folder and press this again, the previous entry stays in the Advanced lists alongside the new one. It only adds a harmless extra warmup entry, but if you want the old one gone, remove it in Advanced mode by hand.

Validate PSO Autopilot Setup

Runs the preflight validator and rebuilds the Preflight Results list below. It reads your project — levels on disk, cook settings, the loader actor, the asset registry — and changes nothing. Press it freely.

Fix Safe Items

Runs every automatic fix that does not require a choice from you. Anything ambiguous stays as an inline Fix button on its own result row, so you decide it deliberately.

Two fixes are deliberately excluded and never run from this button:

Generate Demo Content

Writes over a thousand assets and takes several seconds. Nobody should get that as a side effect of pressing a fix-everything button, so it stays opt-in on its own row.

Clear Risky Ignored Types

Removes entries from Content Types to Ignore. Those were added on purpose, so removing them is your call, not the wizard's.

Create/Update Startup Flow

The one button that changes your project's content. In a single press it:

Creates or opens

the loading level — the one named in Loading Level, or a new lightweight level at /Game/PSOAutopilot/PSOAutopilot_Loading if that field is empty.

Sets

that level as the project's startup level, so a packaged build boots into it.

Creates or updates

the PSO Autopilot Loader actor inside it, configured from your current Simple Setup.

Press it again after changing your destination level, loading screen or content folders. The loader holds its own copy of those choices, so a loader created before your last edit is stale until you re-run this.

Setup Mode Simple / Advanced

Simple shows the common startup setup: a quality preset and the handful of choices most projects need. Advanced shows the full technical controls — batch size, frame budget, dependency expansion, class filters, per-platform overrides, pipeline-cache waits.

Start in Simple. Move to Advanced when a preset is close but not right, and press Apply Simple Setup first so the Advanced fields start from your Simple choices rather than from defaults.

Allow Custom Startup Level Escape hatch

By default the wizard reports an error when the project's startup level is not the PSO Autopilot loading level, and offers a Set Startup Level fix. Ticking this replaces that error with an informational warning and leaves your startup level alone.

Tick it when

you deliberately boot into something else first — a language picker, a legal or age-gate screen, a platform entitlement check, a publisher splash — and open the PSO Autopilot loading level afterwards.

What you give up

Nothing shown before the loading level opens is protected. Whatever your custom startup map loads, compiles and renders happens outside the warmup, at whatever cost it happens to have. Keep that map genuinely lightweight.

Leave it off when

you are not sure. The error it silences is one of the most common reasons a packaged build shows no loading screen at all: if the startup level is still your main menu, the loader never runs.

Skip Packaging Validation Escape hatch

Bypasses the cook and packaging checks the wizard performs. Two result rows change from a real check to a line stating the check was skipped:

Destination cooking

Normally verifies your Level To Open After Warmup is reachable by the cook — listed under Maps to Cook, or inside an Additional Asset Directories to Cook entry — and offers an Add to Cook fix. A destination that is not cooked produces a packaged build that warms up and then cannot open the level.

Recommended content folders

Normally checks that the folders you are warming are actually staged, and offers Add to Packaging. Folders that are not cooked contain nothing at runtime, so warmup finds nothing in them.

Tick it when your cook is driven by something the wizard cannot read: a custom BuildCookRun invocation, wildcard or generated cook lists, chunked or DLC packaging, a build server that assembles the map list, or asset-manager rules that decide what ships. In those projects the checks produce false alarms, and silencing them is the correct answer.

Quality Preset

Chooses how aggressively preparation runs. The preset is not a vague quality slider — it sets four concrete values, which Apply Simple Setup writes into the Advanced fields:

Safe Startup

Smallest batches, tightest frame budget, memory cleaned between every step. For large or memory-sensitive projects, and for consoles and mobile.

Balanced

The recommended default, and the only preset that expands package dependencies two levels deep — so it discovers more content from the same folders.

Fast Warmup

Largest batches, most frame time, no cleanup between steps. Finishes soonest and peaks highest in memory. Best for smaller projects.

Dependency expansion, soft references and management references are enabled in every preset; only the four values above differ.

Loading Level

The lightweight level the game boots into. It holds the PSO Autopilot Loader actor and your loading screen, runs the warmup, then opens the destination. Leave it empty and Create/Update Startup Flow will create one at /Game/PSOAutopilot/PSOAutopilot_Loading.

Keep it close to empty. Anything in this level loads before the warmup starts, which is the one part of startup the warmup cannot cover.

Level To Open After Warmup

Where players land when preparation finishes — usually a main menu, sometimes a hub or the first playable map.

It must also be different from the loading level, and reachable by your cook. Both are checked below.

Loading Screen

The widget shown while preparation runs. Leave it empty to use the built-in screen, or point it at your own UserWidget. The wizard can generate an editable template for you from the loading-screen result row.

To drive your own progress bar and status text, implement the PSO Autopilot Loading Screen Receiver interface on the widget; the loader pushes progress, a friendly summary and a technical status string into it as the warmup advances.

Content to Prepare

The folders whose assets get discovered and warmed. This is where the actual PSO coverage comes from, and it is the row most worth spending time on.

Add folders that contain things which use materials — maps, meshes, character and weapon Blueprints, widgets, VFX — not just the material folders themselves. A material on its own does not tell the engine which mesh, vertex factory and render pass it will be drawn with, and those combinations are what a PSO actually is. The validator warns when your selection is material-heavy for exactly this reason.

Skip When Already Prepared

Fingerprints the content set after a successful warmup. On later launches, if the fingerprint still matches, preparation is skipped and the game goes straight to the destination.

Leave it on for shipping: it is what makes second and later boots fast. Turn it off when you are measuring warmup behaviour and want every launch to do the full work, otherwise your second test run measures nothing.

Prepare Textures Early

Pulls texture data in during the loading screen so the first frames of gameplay are less likely to show streamed-in pop. Costs loading time and memory during warmup in exchange for a cleaner first impression.

Editor Iteration Mode

Decides what happens when you press Play in the editor. Packaged builds ignore this setting entirely.

Use Unreal Editor Compilation

The default, and the right choice while working. PIE bypasses PSO Autopilot and uses Unreal's normal editor shader compilation, so you are not waiting through a warmup on every Play.

Run PSO Autopilot Warmup

Runs the full startup flow in PIE so you can watch it. Use it to check your loading screen and progress reporting, then switch back.

Min PSO Queue To Wait Advanced, shown in Simple

How large the engine's pipeline-cache backlog must be before PSO Autopilot waits for it to drain at the end of warmup. That wait is what the final progress band from 0.95 to 1.00 represents.

Lower it to make that phase appear for smaller backlogs while validating. Raise it so already-warm boots skip a tiny tail of work and stay snappy. The default is 50.