How to inspect a running scene in Godot

I'm currently learning to use the game engine and editor Godot, and I just realized today that you can see and inspect the complete scene tree of a running Godot project.

It's easy to do, but somehow I didn't know about it, the button to click has an unexpected name ("Remote") that doesn't really communicate what it does!

  1. Start your scene (with F5 or by clicking on the Play button on the top right corner)

  1. Now that the scene is running, notice that at the top of the "Scene" section you now have two labels, Local and Remote

  1. Local shows you the tree as it is in your scene file, while Remote shows you the tree as it is on a "remote running process"! Click on it and you can now inspect any node as they are in your game. As an example, in the following screenshot Tile is a node added dynamically from a script.

It's really simple once you know about it, but otherwise that's not that obvious to find out! And it makes debugging WAY EASIER and more interactive 😊.

Bonus update: Inspect the active scene tree from Visual Studio Code

If you are using the Visual Studio Code plugin and start the scene from there, you will notice that the Godot editor doesn't have the "Local"/"Remote" buttons. Instead the active scene tree and inspector are directly embedded in Visual Studio Code!