Here is a little trick that is hidden away and I didn’t find out about until recently!

Did you know you can disable blueprint nodes without having to disconnect them?

If you would prefer to watch the video version, check it out here

To be able to access this functionality we first need to turn on some settings in our Editor Preferences. On the left-hand side, we need to head down to the Blueprint Editor settings, then we are looking for the Experimental section. Here we need to use the drop-down to expose the setting we are looking for.

The setting that we need to turn on is called Allow Explicit Impure Node Disabling.

There is no need to restart your editor it takes effect straight away. With that turned on we now get extra options (under the Compile Options category) when we right-click on blueprint nodes.

If we click on Disable (Do Not Compile), the selected node will go grey and will no longer be considered when being compiled. You can see in the GIF below that when we disable the print string and play in editor, the print no longer happens. This is useful for trying to find problems as you can quickly turn on/off nodes without having to detach/reattach them from the chain of nodes.

To re-enable a node we need to right-click on the node and go down to Enable Compile. Here we are given two separate options.

Always - This will make the node always happen
Development Only - This node will only fire in development versions of the game (so in editor and non shipping cooked versions)

Below you can see the left print string is set to always play and the right print string is using its default setting of development only.

This whole process is exactly the same in the Early Access version of Unreal Engine 5, the only differences are the overall UI revamp!

A side benefit of finding out about this trick is that I now understand how to make things development only. This is a super useful thing to be aware of as in theory you can now be extra safe with any debug/ dev only stuff by setting the nodes themselves to be development only, that way they will never be able to be used in a live shipping build of your game.

If you want more quick tips & tricks FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @cbGameDev

Also, check out the parkour game I'm solo developing called Freerunners. Give it a wishlist if you like the way it looks!: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1430330/Freerunners/