Use Gates to Bake Only What Matters

Baking is one of the simplest ways to keep large projects fast and memory-friendly - especially when you’re working with Regions, tiled builds, or heavy simulations.

But baking manually, node by node, gets old fast.

That’s where Gates come in.

What Gates Are For

A Gate is a simple "checkpoint" node you place at the end of a chain you want to treat as static.

Then, instead of baking dozens of nodes individually, you can bake only the gated checkpoints using one command.

The Gate Workflow

1. Identify the parts of your graph that are stable (base shapes, imports, foundational masks).
2. Place a Gate node at the end of each of those chains.
3. Use Bake → Bake Required Nodes to bake all Gates in one go.
4. If you need to revise the base work later, use Bake → Unbake All, make changes, then bake again.

Why This Saves Memory (A Lot)

When baked caches are loaded, Gaea keeps only the "linchpin" baked nodes required by any unbaked downstream work - older ancestors can be unloaded. This reduces live memory consumption dramatically.

In practice, that means:

• fewer rebuilds,
• smaller working set in RAM,
• faster iteration on the parts you’re actively changing.

Where Gates Shine

Regions

Regions often require initial generators to be baked before preview/build. Gates make that painless.

Tiled and Huge Builds

Bake stable foundations once, then iterate on erosion, surface, and lookdev downstream without reprocessing everything upstream.

Team Graphs

Gates also make handoffs cleaner: "Everything before this Gate is locked".