999+ errors, all of them are my scripts that got messed up.

The type or namespace could not be found. error CS0246 and CS0115 others like that. Tried deleting the library folder, and other things that were suggested for this problem cant figure it out. NEED HELP!!!

The journey of 999+ errors begins with the first error.

The complete error message contains everything you need to know to fix the error yourself.

The important parts of the error message are:

  • the description of the error itself (google this; you are NEVER the first one!)
  • the file it occurred in (critical!)
  • the line number and character position (the two numbers in parentheses)
  • also possibly useful is the stack trace (all the lines of text in the lower console window)

Always start with the FIRST error in the console window, as sometimes that error causes or compounds some or all of the subsequent errors. Often the error will be immediately prior to the indicated line, so make sure to check there as well.

All of that information is in the actual error message and you must pay attention to it. Learn how to identify it instantly so you don’t have to stop your progress and fiddle around with the forum.

Remember: NOBODY here memorizes error codes. That’s not a thing. The error code is absolutely the least useful part of the error. It serves no purpose at all. Forget the error code. Put it out of your mind.

Also, ensure this isn’t happening:

Extra unwanted packages in new projects (collab, testing, rider and other junk):

About the fastest way I have found to make a project and avoid all this noise is to create the project, then as soon as you see the files appear, FORCE-STOP (hard-kill) Unity (with the Activity Manager or Task Manager), then go hand-edit the Packages/manifest.json file as outlined in the above post, then reopen Unity.

Sometimes the package system gets borked from all this unnecessary churn and requires the package cache to be cleared:

If you’re monkey-hammer-banging this in from a tutorial, make sure you do 100% of EVERYTHING in the tutorial, and that you do it perfectly. Here’s how:

Tutorials and example code are great, but keep this in mind to maximize your success and minimize your frustration:

How to do tutorials properly, two (2) simple steps to success:

Step 1. Follow the tutorial and do every single step of the tutorial 100% precisely the way it is shown. Even the slightest deviation (even a single character!) generally ends in disaster. That’s how software engineering works. Every step must be taken, every single letter must be spelled, capitalized, punctuated and spaced (or not spaced) properly, literally NOTHING can be omitted or skipped.

Fortunately this is the easiest part to get right: Be a robot. Don’t make any mistakes.
BE PERFECT IN EVERYTHING YOU DO HERE!!

If you get any errors, learn how to read the error code and fix your error. Google is your friend here. Do NOT continue until you fix your error. Your error will probably be somewhere near the parenthesis numbers (line and character position) in the file. It is almost CERTAINLY your typo causing the error, so look again and fix it.

Step 2. Go back and work through every part of the tutorial again, and this time explain it to your doggie. See how I am doing that in my avatar picture? If you have no dog, explain it to your house plant. If you are unable to explain any part of it, STOP. DO NOT PROCEED. Now go learn how that part works. Read the documentation on the functions involved. Go back to the tutorial and try to figure out WHY they did that. This is the part that takes a LOT of time when you are new. It might take days or weeks to work through a single 5-minute tutorial. Stick with it. You will learn.

Step 2 is the part everybody seems to miss. Without Step 2 you are simply a code-typing monkey and outside of the specific tutorial you did, you will be completely lost. If you want to learn, you MUST do Step 2.

Of course, all this presupposes no errors in the tutorial. For certain tutorial makers (like Unity, Brackeys, Imphenzia, Sebastian Lague) this is usually the case. For some other less-well-known content creators, this is less true. Read the comments on the video: did anyone have issues like you did? If there’s an error, you will NEVER be the first guy to find it.

Beyond that, Step 3, 4, 5 and 6 become easy because you already understand!

Finally, when you have errors… see the top of this post!

Everything was working fine and i went to change a shader keyword and changed it back because it didnt fix the problem i was having with polyfew. While it was compiling something messed up and caused 999 plus errors. It was working perfectly fine before this. There is no typos and all the namespaces are there. Just for some reason its not connecting to those namespaces. This is something that unity did. This is a project we have been working on for 6 years, with nothing like this ever happening. We have backups but that goes back like 2 weeks and we did alot since then. Don’t want to redo it all if we can fix this problem.

First back it all up RIGHT NOW… good lord, how can you survive six years without source control?!

After you back it up, try reimporting all.

If that doesn’t work, make a new project and start copying stuff over one thing at a time.

I’m sorry you’ve had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade enterprise-qualified source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Here’s how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place. Digital storage is so unbelievably cheap today that you can buy gigabytes of flash drive storage for about the price of a cup of coffee. It’s simply ridiculous not to back up.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

Ok i backed it up and reimport all didnt fix it and copy into a new project didnt fix it. It seems to be something with visual studio. Im not sure if this is info related to it but when i click check for updates in the software it gives me an error for visual studio installer. ill attach a picture for that.

Visual studio is actually irrelevant to Unity. As far as Unity cares, you could just use Notepad. If Unity shows the errors then something about Unity, your code, or your project is borked.

You might need to start a fresh project and try copying stuff over one folder at a time… or check your Pun and/or VR installations.