set up default NewProject location + folders

Sorry to resurrect an old question, but I've found the answer, it's a simple registry entry that needs to be changed. See here: http://www.dociletree.co.za/adventures-in-unity-how-to-change-the-default-new-unity-project-path-in-windows/ for more information. This works for Windows installations only though...

In Unity 5, when creating a new project, select whatever path you want. That location will be used for future new projects.

For Windows, Unity uses the personal documents folder as the default save-to location. As of Unity 4.6 this is not alterable nor does Unity save the last-used folder (unfortunately). I know this is a small feature but would be a nice time-saver for me.

If you're running Unity on Windows then you can try launching Unity from a script which sets temporarily updates the personal documents folder and reverts the value when Unity is closed. Details can be found here http://blog.electrongoo.com/how-to-update-unity3ds-default-project-location/

Good luck!

As we are running Unity in a school lab where the computers are heavily restricted, we needed a way that wasnt involved in the home folder as this is redirected to a network share for students, and the speed in reading/writing the Unity data to the share was very slow

Also we have the run command disabled so browsing UNC paths doesnt work so we were getting errors here as well.

The following registry keys are what control the path for the project and workspace path

Computer\HKEY_USERS*User*\SOFTWARE\Unity Technologies\Unity Editor 5.x

kProjectBasePath_h4113231939

kWorkspacePath_h3086459462

The data is stored in hexadecimal values in the above locations as a REG_BINARY string

Convert your desired path from a text string to hex https://codebeautify.org/string-hex-converter

The binary values set in the registry are represented as hexadecimal values but the method used here requires to pass regular decimal vales so we need to convert that as well We can use the scientific mode on calc.exe to convert the hex into seperate decimal values I got most of the info from this page https://devblogs.microsoft.com/scripting/how-can-i-write-binary-data-to-the-registry/

We used ActiveSetup to push the setting into the default user hive, so any new users logging in will have this set on first login Here is my code to set the paths to the local D Drive. It works for what we want.

     'Setup Unity3D Default Project Path to D: Drive'
     Dim uBinary
     uBinary = Array(68,58,00)
     WriteToRegistry HKEY_USERS, sTempHiveRef & "Software\Unity Technologies\Unity Editor 5.x", "kProjectBasePath_h4113231939", uBinary, "REG_BINARY"
     WriteToRegistry HKEY_USERS, sTempHiveRef & "Software\Unity Technologies\Unity Editor 5.x", "kWorkspacePath_h3086459462", uBinary, "REG_BINARY"
     

Apologies if my wording is not correct or if the code could be tidied up, but I havnt seen anywhere that has been able to achive this so am happy to share if it helps.

And sorry this markdown is a bit unruley to try and format my reply in a readable paragraph