Point Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP client at your Unreal project and let it loose — Blueprints, materials, animation, Niagara, audio, game AI, all of it, through 1,750+ editor actions. Tell your AI what you want, then watch it build the thing and prove it works in PIE.
Most MCP integrations dump hundreds of tools into your AI's context and call it a day. Shovel doesn't — each domain is one query tool with namespace dispatch doing the work underneath, so the tool list stays small while the capability stays massive. Pure C++, an embedded HTTP server, nothing else to install. No metering either — bring your own AI and use all the tokens you want. And when the 1,750+ actions don't cover something, your AI writes the missing tool itself — a Python function that registers as a live, schema-validated MCP tool in the same session. No rebuild, no editor restart.
Shovel comes with domain-specific playbooks that teach your AI how to actually work each part of the engine — gotchas, budgets and verification steps included, so it isn't learning the hard way.
12 skills
C++ smarts, builds, debugging, verification, editor automation and project-wide search — the whole toolbox.
5 skills
Meshes, level design, landscapes, mesh terrain, foliage, and character placement that's actually been checked for floating feet.
5 skills
Material graphs, Niagara VFX, scene lighting, and the reference knowledge that keeps all three shippable, not just pretty.
3 skills
Sequences, montages, AnimBP graph writing, IK, Control Rig, and cinematic rendering — the whole performance.
6 skills
Behavior trees, GAS abilities, Logic Driver state machines, combos, Enhanced Input, and PIE input simulation — everything an enemy needs to fight back.
4 skills
Widget Blueprints, MVVM binding, pixel-perfect HUD calibration, and the full audio pipeline, top to bottom.
3 skills
Text-to-image, rigged 3D characters, video, SFX, voice and music — all imported straight in as project assets.
Drag Shovel into your project's Plugins folder, restart the editor, and that's it. Pure C++ with its own embedded MCP server baked in — no Python to wrangle, no extra services to babysit. Runs happily on Windows and macOS.
Drop a one-file .mcp.json into your project root and Claude Code, Cursor, or whatever MCP client you're using will find it. The auto-reconnect proxy keeps your sessions alive even when the editor restarts.
.mcp.json → localhost:9417/mcp
One call and your AI knows everything it can do. From there it builds assets from JSON specs, compiles your code, and actually plays the game in PIE to prove the change works — not just that it compiled.
shovel_discover()
Unreal Engine 5.7+ editor plugin.
Copy to C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.x\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\Shovel\
Alternatively unzip into your project’s Plugins folder — Blueprint-only projects; see the README in the zip.
Unreal Engine 5.7+ editor plugin.
Copy to /Users/Shared/Epic Games/UE_5.x/Engine/Plugins/Marketplace/Shovel/
Alternatively unzip into your project’s Plugins folder — Blueprint-only projects; see the README in the zip.
Free 7-day trial — create a free account to activate it. Buy a license to keep digging after the trial.
Beyond in-engine content, Shovel's newest skill spins up whole families of presentation media from a single prompt — hero videos, card grids, OG/social cards, slide backgrounds, icon sets, you name it (audio's covered too, via its sibling skill). It sizes up your target format first, keeps one style spec consistent across the set, fans out across multiple AI models, and lets ffmpeg handle the finishing work — exact size, aspect and safe-zone, whatever your CSS or slide deck expects.
Behavior trees, GAS combat, cinematic sequences — production scale, no shortcuts.
One dev, one AI co-pilot, every discipline covered.
Performance budgets, scalability settings and lean UI, sorted from the start.
Custom materials, HLSL and Niagara looks, hand-built graph by graph.
Landscapes, foliage and whole procedural towns — just prompt for it.
Install it, connect an MCP client, make your first AI-driven edit. That's the whole ramp-up.
Hand your AI a JSON spec, get back a compiled graph that's already laid out nicely.
Search assets, trace references, map a whole codebase without the archaeology.
PBR graphs with the reference rules and budgets already baked in — no guesswork.
Animation Blueprints, IK, retargeting — the whole pipeline, start to finish.
Shovel plays nice with any MCP-compatible client. Grab the plugin, hook up your AI, and start building.
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