well I have 2 kind of inventory prefabs. One is a spawner, which is in essence a page of the inventory. Once instantiated, it spawns a lot of Item prefabs. It uses a loop to do so, which counts up to 64, waiting for .2 seconds after each newly spawned prefab so you can see it nice and clear how each item is created one after another, and since it's only planes it doesn't cause any performance issues even on a mobile device. Then it sets the parent of each child to the page GameObject.
Now that's all fine and dandy. But!.. when I press the button to create another page, and this button really does nothing more than instantiate the very same prefab, unity starts to lag for half a second or so and then the entire page + items is there, and not only did it jump all the wait actions, it's even identical with the previous page, each item has the same values (like weapons which I just picked up) and there's one additional inventory item because when the spawn FSM for the items starts, it first creates a new item, then checks if the total index of items is more or equal than 64. Since the Index was 64 to begin with, it creates a 65th item and only then notices that that's quite too much
So my conclusion: Even though I'm creating this new page from a prefab, it actually copies the already instantiated version of it.
It's not a pressing issue, but it's come up multiple times and I have to use an initializing state to reset every attribute on spawn of a prefab to avoid it, which is obviously bad for the performance.
