Parcels

Everything Ferryman moves travels as a parcel: the assets you picked, everything they use, and a table of contents the receiver reads before anything is written.

What travels

What you picked: assets, or folders with everything in them.
Everything it uses: hard references and, by default, soft references, like Migrate. Turn off Include Soft References in the settings to follow hard references only.
Level actors: levels that keep their actors in separate files (World Partition, One File Per Actor) travel with those actor files.
Thumbnails, so the receiver sees what arrives (Include Thumbnails setting).

What doesn’t travel:

Engine content (/Engine) and code: C++ classes and plugins are not sent. The plugins and code modules the assets need are listed in the parcel, and the review tells the receiver which ones its project is missing.
Plugin content you didn’t pick: when an asset uses content from a plugin, that plugin is listed as a requirement instead. Pick the plugin’s assets yourself to send them along.
Assets that have never been saved: they are left out with a warning.

Unsaved changes are saved first, so the parcel holds what you see. If saving fails, the last saved state is sent and the parcel says so.

Parcel files

A parcel can also be a single .ferry file to share any way you like: chat, mail, a USB stick, a shared drive.

Save: right-click assets or folders and choose ta Ferryman > Save as parcel file…, or press Save selection as parcel file… on the Transfers page.
Land: drag the .ferry file into a Content Browser, right-click a folder and choose Land a parcel file here…, or press Open parcel file… on the Transfers page. The review opens first.

Tick Also for older engines on the Transfers page before saving to add recipes, so that an editor with an older engine version can rebuild textures, static meshes and material instances. The file gets bigger. See Older engine versions.

Inside a parcel

A parcel is the original package files of every asset (.uasset, .umap, .ubulk…), compressed, plus a table of contents in JSON:

who sent it: device, project and engine version;
every package with its class, size, dependencies and a SHA-1 hash of its bytes, used to tell Same from Differs;
which packages were picked and which came along;
the plugins and code modules it needs, and warnings;
the recipes for older engines, when included.

The table of contents is plain JSON so that every engine version can read it, including older ones that can’t load the packages themselves.

Where parcels are kept

Each project keeps its working files in Saved/Ferryman: outgoing and incoming parcels, backups of replaced assets (Saved/Ferryman/Backups) and the state of live links and the dock. You can delete the folder when the editor is closed; you lose the backups and the links.