Weird CharacterAdded:Wait() behaviour

[VixYzs (Vix)]

While coding I came across an interesting behaviour

It’s common practice to use the following to get the character of a player:

local Player = P.LocalPlayer
local Character = Player.Character or Player.CharacterAdded:Wait()

I thought to myself “Why even use Player.Character when it is near always nil and then immediately jumps to Player.CharacterAdded:Wait()” and wrote this:

local Player = P.LocalPlayer
local Character = Player.CharacterAdded:Wait()

This forever yields and never returns the character. Why does the first option work and not the second?

[ItzBloxyDev]

Simply because the character has already been added. That’s the only reason keeping it waiting.

[Exarpo]

Player.CharacterAdded runs once when the character is added. If your code is executed after the character has been added, it will wait forever, or until the player respawns and gets a new character.

[VixYzs (Vix)]

Man, so obvious yet so simple.

I played around a little more and figured it out:

When the script is in StarterCharacterScripts, of course the character is always going to be already loaded in so the following code works:

local Player = P.LocalPlayer
local Character = Player.Character

print("StarterCharacter: "..Character.Name)

Because it’s no different than accessing the character with:

local Character = script.Parent

However when the script is in StarterPlayerScripts, naturally the character isn’t already going to be loaded in so the following works:

local Player = P.LocalPlayer
local Character = Player.CharacterAdded:Wait()

print("StarterPlayer: "..Character.Name)

So in summary:

StarterPlayerScripts: local Character = Player.CharacterAdded:Wait()
StarterCharacterScripts: local Character = Player.Character or local Character = script.Parent
StarterPlayerScripts & StarterCharacterScripts: local Character = Player.Character or Player.CharacterAdded:Wait()