> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.aliengh.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Ready-made components

> A suite of architectural components that works on day one, from an address to a drawing set.

Alien comes with a suite of ready-made components. Each is a plain script file, just like the ones you describe, so you can open it, learn from it, change it, or describe a change to it.

Place them from the panel's library (the **Nodes** tab). In the next beta, each one also gets its own button on Grasshopper's **Alien** tab, in the panels Create, Site, Building, Views, Entourage and Data.

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Create" icon="wand-magic-sparkles" href="/components/create">
    3D objects and materials from a sentence or a picture. 2D objects, symbols and display modes arrive in the next beta.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Site" icon="map-location-dot" href="/components/site">
    A Victorian address becomes the lot, neighbours, roads, terrain, streets, trees and massing.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Building" icon="building" href="/components/building/overview">
    Levels, grids, walls, doors, windows, curtain walls and structure. Slabs, roofs, stairs and balustrades in the next beta.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Views and drawings" icon="compass-drafting" href="/components/views">
    Site views today. Named views of any geometry, layout sheets and exploded axos in the next beta.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Entourage" icon="person-walking" href="/components/entourage">
    People and trees at true size for elevations, sections and plans.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Data" icon="sitemap" href="/components/data">
    Helpers for working with Grasshopper data trees.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## They work the same way

* **Sizes are in metres** and scaled to your model's units, so a 3.2 m storey is 3,200 in a millimetre model.
* **They work alone.** Unwired, each shows sample geometry, so you see what it does before you wire anything.
* **Paid and slow steps wait for a button.** Anything that calls a model, fetches data again or writes to the Rhino document sits behind a button like **Generate**, **run** or **make**, so re-solving never repeats it.
* **Results are cached.** A design, texture or site fetched before comes back free.
* **They're yours.** Edit any of them and Alien leaves your copy alone when it updates the rest.

## Each component page shows

* what the component is for, and what it costs to run
* every **input**: its type, the control you get on the component, its default and what it does
* every **output**, and what it gives you
* **How it works**, for when you want the detail

<Note>Inputs and outputs on these pages are taken straight from each component's script header, so they match what you see on the canvas.</Note>


This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.