A prefab I made suddenly turned into a piece of paper

I had a prefab of a PlayerTank…then it would no longer let me drag the prefab into the Scene view. Then it updated and now looks like this. What does it mean when it turns into this paper looking icon?

I think the paper icon means it doesn’t have a file type, or Unity doesn’t know what type it is. Did you rename it? Maybe you deleted the .asset part of the name. What’s it look like in Windows Explorer?

Unity did not recognize the asset. It may happens sometimes for unknown reasons (i often encounter this problem with scripts. In the console I get “Unity was not able to read the file”).

To fix this, I see two solutions :

First one, right click on the asset and click on “Reimport”

Second solution:

  1. Close Unity
  2. In your file explorer, find the Unity project and delete the Library (and Temp forlder if it exist)
  3. Open Unity and let it reimport all your assets