SendMessage is running before Start

Awake and OnEnable are called from the internal constructor. When Instantiate returns Awake has already been called so it's like the constructor of your class ;)

Hmmmm... I don't think they are called from a constructor. Looking at the stack trace from Awake() invoked from Instantiate() (the real stack trace, not the Unity-scrubbed one), it looks like Awake() is directly invoked by UnityEngine.Object.INTERNAL_CALL_Internal_InstantiateSingle, without an intervening constructor call.

Of course, by "the internal constructor" you probably meant the function that does the constructing. I apologize for being pedantic. :)

Thanks! Confirmation means I can move on! If you are a Pool$$anonymous$$anager user, please see this post for our work-around if this is a problem: http://poolmanager.freeforums.org/post23.html#p23 We basically added another event that can be used for init after Awake if needed, but is guaranteed to run right after Awake. I'm hoping this won't be necessary with the next release of Unity - I read it will allow us to explicitly set an order during Awake() if needed.