Script does not recognise gameObjects

Greetings & thanks for your time.

I have looked over the forums, but not seen/recognised another problem quite like mine; the issue I am having is that I have a number of public script functions, which I am connecting to UI elements and gameObjects in a relatively simple scene - this was working well enough as I was building the game, but now when I load the scene, I find that there are no objects linked to any of the scripts; when I try to re-establish the links the selector cannot identify the objects in the scene.

I had a similar problem before on an earlier project, which I solved by copy&pasting the scripts to new script objects and deleting the old ones, though since I am having the same problem again I would like to understand what is wrong and if there is a more convenient solution - especially if I end up working on larger projects where it would not be practical to redesign a scene from scratch.

You mention is a comment that it’s an issue when saving an object as a prefab, and that’s the reason right there. Prefabs are just sitting in the assets and can be brought in at any time in any scene. They cannot hold references to objects in a live scene since there’s no guarantee that those objects will be there when the prefab is used.