We need to associate different pieces of data, like a size and name, to each Forest object. In C#, these pieces of data are called fields. Fields are one type of class member, which is the general term for the building blocks of a class.

Create fields like this:

class Forest {
  public string name;
  public int trees;
}

This might look similar to defining a variable. It is! Each field is a variable and it will have a different value for each object.

With the code above, we haven’t set the value of either field, so each has a default value. In this case strings default to null, ints to 0, and bools to false. You can find the default values for more types in Microsoft’s default values table.

It is common practice to name fields using all lowercase (name instead of Name). This makes fields easy to recognize later on!

Don’t worry about public yet: it’s explained later in this lesson.

Once we create a Forest instance, we can access and edit each field with dot notation:

Forest f = new Forest();
f.name = "Amazon";
Console.WriteLine(f.name); // Prints "Amazon"

Forest f2 = new Forest();
f2.name = "Congo";
Console.WriteLine(f2.name); // Prints "Congo"

Each instance has a name field, but the value may differ across instances.