UE Niagara Effects

Target engine: UE 5.8. APIs below are verified against the 5.8 headers; older forms are listed under "Deprecated — do not use".

Niagara ships as the Niagara plugin (Engine/Plugins/FX/Niagara, enabled by default). Game code spawns and drives systems through UNiagaraFunctionLibrary and UNiagaraComponent, feeds them structured data through data interfaces and Niagara Data Channels, and controls cost through component pooling and UNiagaraEffectType scalability. Add "Niagara" to your module's PublicDependencyModuleNames, plus "NiagaraCore" when you subclass UNiagaraDataInterface.

Context

Read .agents/ue-project-context.md if it exists (module names, conventions, enabled plugins, GAS/networking setup). Do not stop if it is missing.

Identify the area from the request and the codebase. Ask only when two plausible readings would produce different code.