unity-ecs-patterns

Name: unity-ecs-patterns - Agent Skill
Rating: 5.0 (26449 reviews)
Author: wshobson

26,449

Master Unity ECS (Entity Component System) with DOTS, Jobs, and Burst for high-performance game development. Use when building data-oriented games, optimizing performance, or working with large entity counts.

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CLI Install

Recommended

Use the skills CLI to install this skill with one command. Auto-detects all installed AI assistants.

Method 1 - skills CLI

npx skills i wshobson/agents/plugins/game-development/skills/unity-ecs-patterns

Method 2 - openskills (supports sync & update)

npx openskills install wshobson/agents

Auto-detects Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, and more. One install, works everywhere.

Installation Path

Download and extract to one of the following locations:

~/.claude/skills/unity-ecs-patterns/

SKILL.md

references

Skill Instructions

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Claude Sonnet 4.5

$0.20/task

Best for coding tasks

Environment setup included

Unity ECS Patterns

Production patterns for Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) including Entity Component System, Job System, and Burst Compiler.

When to Use This Skill

Building high-performance Unity games
Managing thousands of entities efficiently
Implementing data-oriented game systems
Optimizing CPU-bound game logic
Converting OOP game code to ECS
Using Jobs and Burst for parallelization

Core Concepts

1. ECS vs OOP

Aspect	Traditional OOP	ECS/DOTS
Data layout	Object-oriented	Data-oriented
Memory	Scattered	Contiguous
Processing	Per-object	Batched
Scaling	Poor with count	Linear scaling
Best for	Complex behaviors	Mass simulation

2. DOTS Components

Entity: Lightweight ID (no data)
Component: Pure data (no behavior)
System: Logic that processes components
World: Container for entities
Archetype: Unique combination of components
Chunk: Memory block for same-archetype entities

Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.

Best Practices

Do's

Use ISystem over SystemBase - Better performance
Burst compile everything - Massive speedup
Batch structural changes - Use ECB
Profile with Profiler - Identify bottlenecks
Use Aspects - Clean component grouping

Don'ts

Don't use managed types - Breaks Burst
Don't structural change in jobs - Use ECB
Don't over-architect - Start simple
Don't ignore chunk utilization - Group similar entities
Don't forget disposal - Native collections leak