In Episode 01 of this UE5.6 building system series, I’m setting up the boring-but-necessary foundation for a scalable, modular “Valheim-type” building system that you can reuse across projects. Before we touch the fun stuff, I walk through what the system needs to support: a preview mesh with different materials, rotation and location offsets, snapping (toggleable), a grid (toggleable), a deconstruction mode, and build cost checks on the character. Later in the series we’ll even tackle building integrity so structures can fall if they’re not supported properly—and I also plan to switch placed actors over to instanced static meshes for performance. In this video I jump into a clean Third Person Template in Unreal Engine 5.6, import free assets (meshes + UI icons), and start formalizing the data layer. I create gameplay tags for buildables (foundation, wall variants, doors, windows), add custom trace channels for placement logic, and build a data structure + data table that defines each buildable (tag, mesh, trace channel, cost, attributes map, and optional custom data via an instance struct). Then I set up a parent BP_Buildable_Base and a set of child blueprints for wood/stone/metal variants, wire them to pull their mesh from the data table, and add a simple BPI_Buildable interface so everything can be treated consistently later. Episode 2 is where we actually start moving with the Buildable Manager Component.