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Put a workbench in your level

The workbench is where the player spends Parts to upgrade the guns they own. You drag one actor into the level, tick the upgrades it sells, and the rest is already wired: the view blends to the bench, the selected gun lands on the table, and every upgrade the player buys is applied to that weapon class from then on.

The actor is Content/TheLastTemplate/Blueprints/Environments/Interactable/Workbench/BP_Interactable_Workbench.

It is a child of BP_InteractableOverlapBase, so it uses the same prompt and the same two ranges as every other interactable. See How interaction works if you have not met that base yet. The guns it works on are covered in How guns work in this template.

Place one

  1. Drag BP_Interactable_Workbench into your level.
  2. Put it against a wall, at the height a real bench would be. The mesh already sits on the floor at the actor's origin.
  3. Play, walk up to it, and press the interact key.

That is enough to have a working bench. Everything below is dressing.

Choose the upgrades it offers

Available Upgrades is an array of upgrade Data Assets, on the placed actor. Only the upgrades in this array can ever be bought at this bench.

All five that ship are in the array, from …/DataAssets/Weapons/Upgrades/Childs/:

  • DA_Upgrade_Pistol_FireRate
  • DA_Upgrade_Pistol_Recoil
  • DA_Upgrade_Pistol_Capacity, two levels, +4 then +6 rounds
  • DA_Upgrade_Silencer, one level, -65% noise range and a silencer mesh on the barrel
  • DA_Upgrade_Shotgun_Choke

The bench does not filter by weapon. The screen does that for you: each upgrade lists its own Compatible Weapons, and a tile that does not match the gun the player selected refuses the purchase. So you can leave the full list on every bench, or cut it down if you want one bench in your level that only sells silencers.

Frame the shot

The workbench carries its own camera. This is the one place in the template where a camera other than the player's takes over, and it is meant to be moved.

  1. Select the placed workbench.
  2. In the components list, pick Workbench Camera.
  3. Move and rotate it in the viewport until the framing is what you want. What you see through it in the editor is what the player will see.

The gun is placed the same way, with Preview Pivot:

  1. Pick Preview Pivot in the components list.
  2. Move it to the spot on the table where the gun should lie, and rotate it so the barrel points where you want.

Leave Preview Weapon alone. It is an empty skeletal mesh component that the bench fills with whichever gun the player selected on the screen.

Field What it does Ships as
Transition Time Seconds the view takes to blend into the bench, and back out again 0.6
Preview Drop Height Height of the small drop the gun makes onto the table when the preview changes, in centimetres 9

While the screen is open the player character is hidden and their movement and look input are locked, so you do not need to hide anything yourself or build a blocking volume.

The prompt

The prompt comes from the interactable base, and the workbench overrides three of its fields.

Field What it does Ships as
Interact Text The word on the prompt Workbench
Interact Zone Range How close the player must be for the key to work 180
Show Interact Zone Range How close the player must be for the prompt to appear at all 300
Use Icon / Interact Icon Show a picture instead of the text. They are alternatives, not both false / empty

180 is much larger than the 60 most interactables use, because you want the bench to be usable from a step back rather than nose against the table.

To move the prompt up or down, select the Interact Widget component and move it. It is a normal widget component on the actor.

Where Parts come from

Parts are not a special currency. They are an ordinary inventory item, Content/TheLastTemplate/Blueprints/DataAssets/Inventory/Childs/DA_Item_Parts, in the CraftingMaterial category with Max Carry at 999.

The link between the item and the bench is one field: Parts Item on BP_WeaponUpgradeComponent, at Content/TheLastTemplate/Blueprints/ActorComponents/BP_WeaponUpgradeComponent. It ships pointing at DA_Item_Parts. Point it at another item and that item becomes the currency, everywhere, with no other change.

To put Parts in your level, drag in BP_Interactable_Pickup_Item_Parts, from …/Interactable/Pickup/Items/Childs/. It gives 8 per pickup. Change Amount on the placed actor for a bigger or smaller pile. Every other pickup works the same way, see Place other pickups.

Buying an upgrade

The player picks a gun in the top row, then picks a tile. The tile is a hold, not a click: it fills over the level's Craft Duration and cancels if the button is released early. Capacity I holds for 2 seconds, the silencer for 4, so the cost of a big upgrade is felt as time as well as Parts.

A tile refuses the purchase for one of four reasons, and says so:

Reason When
Not enough Parts Parts Cost on the next level is more than the player carries
Not compatible with this weapon The selected gun is not in the upgrade's Compatible Weapons
Fully upgraded Every level of that upgrade is already bought
No inventory on this owner The actor holding the gun has no inventory manager to pay from

Three sounds are involved. Nav Sound and Select Sound are fields on BP_WorkbenchWidget, in Content/TheLastTemplate/Blueprints/Widgets/Workbench/, and they use the shared UI sounds from Content/TheLastTemplate/Audios/Widgets/. The third is Craft Sound on the upgrade Data Asset itself, played when the purchase lands. It is empty on all five upgrades that ship, so fill it in if you want each upgrade to sound different.

What a purchase changes

The purchase is stored against the weapon class, not against the gun actor the player is holding. So it survives the gun being holstered, dropped and picked up again.

Two things happen the moment the hold completes:

  • the stat changes on that level are applied to the gun, so the next shot already fires with the new numbers
  • the attachment meshes are rebuilt on both the gun in the player's hands and the gun on their back

Which of the two shows the attachment is up to the upgrade. Each attachment carries Visible when Equipped and Visible when Holstered, and the silencer that ships has both ticked, so it is on the pistol whether it is held or slung.

If you want a character to start with upgrades already bought, that is Initial Loadouts on BP_WeaponUpgradeComponent. It is the same field on the player and on an NPC, see Give an AI a gun and upgrades.

Use a different bench mesh

  1. Select the placed workbench.
  2. Pick the Workbench Mesh component.
  3. Set its Static Mesh to yours. The one that ships is Content/TheLastTemplate/Meshes/Environments/Props/SM_Workbench.
  4. Move Preview Pivot and Workbench Camera to match the new table height.

Nothing else reads the mesh, so any prop works. A crate, a car bonnet, a kitchen counter.

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