What determines the character that you play from?

I created a new blank project from the blueprint third person template as a test. When you click play, you control the blue man character that has been placed into the level, even though there is a player start also placed into the level. Why is that? What is determining that you should play with the character that has been manually placed into the level rather than spawning a character at the player start.

If I delete the character that is placed in the level and hit play, then a character is spawned at the player start for you to control. However if I manually place a character back into the level and hit play again it still spawns a character to control from the player start. It ignores the character that I place into the level. So why does it use the character that was placed in the level as part of the template, but ignore the one I place in? There must be a setting somewhere to specify this but I have no clue where it is.

Did you place the character or the character blueprint?

Typically these settings are in the Game Mode Blueprint …

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… from my understanding, if you have a player start and a character blueprint … it will use the character blueprint. If you only have a player start it will spawn the character blueprint on the player start (for simplicity sake). If you have neither it will spawn as a spectator.

There is an auto-posses option on the player … you select a player index. This might be what you are looking for.

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Thank you… the auto-possess player option is what was controlling it.

Thank you!!! That’s the solution.