AsyncLoad Toolkit

AsyncLoad Toolkit is an Unreal Engine plugin that gives Blueprint full control over asynchronous and synchronous asset loading — the kind of control FStreamableManager offers in C++ but that vanilla Blueprint nodes do not expose.

Why AsyncLoad Toolkit?

Unreal's built-in Async Load Asset node covers the most basic case. The moment you need anything beyond a single soft reference, you hit a wall.

Feature	Vanilla BP	AsyncLoad Toolkit
Load 1 soft reference	✅	✅
Load an array of assets	❌ (pre-5.7)	✅ all versions
Callable in a function / macro	❌	✅ via delegate
0–1 progress	❌	✅
Cancellation	❌	✅
Priority	❌	✅
Deduplication (already in-flight)	❌	✅
Keep-alive (anti-GC)	❌	✅ ref-counted
Throttling / chunks (anti-OOM)	❌	✅
Handle storable as a variable	❌	✅

The main differentiator

AsyncLoad Toolkit's library functions are non-latent: they return immediately and fire a delegate when done. This means they compile and run inside Blueprint function graphs, macros, and interfaces — not just Event Graphs. This is the feature vanilla async nodes can never offer.

Key concepts

• Function vs. Node — when to use the library function vs. the async node.
• Handle — a storable UAsyncKitHandle object with progress, cancel, and status.
• Keep-alive — ref-counted hard references that prevent GC from evicting assets.
• Deduplication — identical in-flight requests are merged automatically.
• Chunking — load thousands of assets in batches to keep RAM usage flat.

Supported engine versions

Plugin version	UE versions
v1.0	5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7

Architecture overview

Blueprint / C++
      │
      ▼
UAsyncKitLibrary          ← non-latent, usable anywhere
UAsyncKitNodes            ← async action nodes, Event Graph only
      │
      ▼
UAsyncKitSubsystem        ← single source of truth (GameInstance lifetime)
  ├── dedup map
  ├── retain map
  ├── active handle list (anti-GC)
  └── progress ticker
      │
      ▼
FStreamableManager        ← Unreal's native streaming backend