How to change to instance of a scene?

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1

Godot Version

v.4.3.stable.official

Question

Hello! I’m very new to Godot, and I’m trying to make a pretty linear game that has Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc, obviously with each one having a different content but sharing similarities (e.g. that each chapter has a chapter title). I want these chapters to happen one after another (for now, they should just show the chapter title and then start the next chapter).

What’s the best way to go about this?

What I have so far:

I’ve created a Chapter scene (chapter.tscn) (class name Chapter) with exported variables such as chapter_name (of type String) and next_chapter (of type Chapter).
Then I added several of those Chapter scenes to my main game scene (Chapter1, Chapter2, …), giving them names and assigning the next chapters.
I also added an exported variable first_chapter in my main game node so I can refer to the first chapter in the code.

What I want to do (but don’t know how):

In the script of my main game scene (which is my main menu), I want to switch to the scene of the first_chapter (which is of type Chapter) when the “New Game” button is pressed. (Then that scene would do some stuff like show the chapter title and switch to the next chapter.)

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to switch to that first_chapter scene.

I know how to switch to a scene file (get_tree().change_scene_to_file(“res://chapter.tscn”)) but that is not what I want to do here; I don’t want to switch to the Chapter scene in general, but specifically the instance Chapter1 in my tree (in my first_chapter variable)

I hope this makes sense… I couldn’t find anything on this topic at all, so I assume I severely misunderstood how to use scenes and scene instances. I would really appreciate any tips!

2

The SceneTree changing functions are meant for swapping out all the nodes in the tree that aren’t globals or the root. It seems you want custom scene changing, so you can’t use those functions.

So the way I understand it is that the main scene already has the first_chapter scene as a child of it, inside the scene tree? In that case, you want to hide the main menu nodes and show the first_chapter nodes.