Unity - FREE Starter Asset - First Person Controller

In this Unity tutorial, I'll show how to use the FREE Unity - Starter Asset - First Person Controller. ► Unity First Person Controller - https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/starter-assets-first-person-character-controller-196525 ► Art Assets - Synty - POLYGON Dungeon - https://assetsto

Unity's Starter Assets First Person Character Controller is a free package from Unity that drops a fully functioning first-person player into your scene — movement, sprint, look, and jump, already bound to both keyboard and gamepad. If you're prototyping and don't want to spend a day writing a controller, this gets you walking around your level in a couple of minutes.

Step 1 — Grab the package Find Starter Assets First Person Character Controller on the Unity Asset Store and add it to your assets while logged in. Back in Unity, open Window then Package Manager, switch the source to My Assets, and search for "starter assets." You'll see both the first person and third person controllers listed — download whichever you need (grabbing both is fine, they coexist) and import into the project.

Step 2 — Fix the materials if you're on URP Open the Starter Assets folder, go into the First Person Character Controller folder, and open the playground scene under Scenes. If the whole environment renders bright magenta, that's the built-in render pipeline's shaders failing in a URP project — nothing is broken, the materials just point at shaders that don't exist here. Select the materials under the environment art folder, then go to Edit, Rendering, Materials, Convert To URP and hit Proceed. It takes a second and the scene comes back looking correct.

Step 3 — Try the demo scene The playground scene already has lighting, a main camera, and two prefabs: the player capsule and a camera follow object. Press play and you can move with WASD or the arrow keys, look with the mouse, and jump with space. That's the whole controller working out of the box, which is useful as a reference for what the settings should feel like before you start changing them.

Step 4 — Tune the movement settings Select the player capsule and look at the First Person Controller component. Move speed, sprint speed, and rotation speed are the three you'll touch first. In the video these get set to a move speed of 8, sprint speed of 10, and rotation speed of 2 — the defaults are on the slow side for anything larger than a demo room. There are additional settings below for jump and gravity behavior if you need finer control.

Step 5 — Check the input bindings The controller uses Unity's new Input System. Double-click the StarterAssetsInputs asset to open the input actions, and you'll find a Player map with Move, Look, Jump, and Sprint already defined. Move is bound to WASD, the arrow keys, and the gamepad left stick. Look uses mouse delta and the right stick. Jump is space and the south button. Sprint is left shift or the left trigger. Keyboard and controller support are both there without you configuring anything, but knowing where the bindings live matters the moment you want to add a new action.

Step 6 — Drop it into your own scene Open the scene you actually want to play in and go to Tools, Starter Assets, Reset First Person Controller. That adds the capsule with the camera parented at eye height and the input actions already assigned. Adjust move and sprint speed to fit the scale of your level — for a dungeon environment, a move speed of 8, sprint of 12, and rotation of 2 works well. Press play and you're walking through your own level with a working first-person camera.