My understanding of packedscenes is in order to create one you instance nodes within it and set its owner to the main PackedScene but what if you want to add an instance of another scene. I tried this but all it does is copy the nodes but I don't want to duplicate the scene into another PackedScene, I just want a straight scene instance. I'm sure I could do this by editing the tscn text file or attaching a script that loads and adds other scenes to it but does PackedScene not have this as a built-in feature?

I am working with Godot 3.5 but I am still interested in if Godot has a different solution.

Best regards,
Oliver

I have difficulty understanding what you want to do.

A PackedScene is basically just a .tscn file that's loaded into memory.

Here's an partial example (using Godot 3.5.2) of how I'm using it. In this case, the root node of the scene is an Area2D.

# Instanced to spawn a bullet.
const Bullet: PackedScene = preload("bullet.tscn")

func fire_bullet() -> void:
        # Instantiate a bullet.
        var bullet: Area2D = Bullet.instance()

	# Add bullet to the scene.
	add_child(bullet)

	# Fire the bullet.
	bullet.fire()