Modding

Modding

Welcome to the Conan Exiles Enhanced Dev Kit

The devkit is based off of the UE4 devkit so many things will be familiar, but also there will be plenty of new things.

The official documents for the UE4 devkit are here, and are worth getting familiar with.

As a modder, you will run across various differences.

  • UE4 -> UE5. The engine has been updated from UE4.16 to UE5.6.1. This is a significant upgrade and has some pretty wide ranging impacts. This will have the biggest impact on art with the move to Lumen/Nanite, but also physics systems (Apex -> Chaos), and general unreal engine changes (private variables are actually private now.)
  • Our changes to the game. Through optimization and reorganization, we’ve made changes to the game. Where possible we will try to maintain the capability, although the process may change a bit.
    • This includes reorganization of a number of asset files that your mod may be referencing. We’ve included a set of redirectors in the engine INI files which will help relink files that have been moved, but there will still likely be a number of compile errors during migration.
  • Bugs/TODO. There is still more work to be done with the devkit, and we’ll continue to update it and get it to a good spot.

Getting Started

  1. Get the devkit installed.
  2. Copy your mod into the InstalledPath/UE4/Content/Mods folder.
  3. Launch the devkit.
  4. Select your mod(if you only have one mod, it will be automatically selected).
  5. Hit Play In Editor.

This should get you to the point where you’ve got blueprint errors to fix. The vast majority of the blueprints are structured similarly to as they were in UE4, so most of the changes are minor updates and casts. That being said, there are some amazingly creative mods out there that may take more work to port.

Unreal 5

Epic publishes a Unreal 5 Migration Guide which may be of interest. This is informational and a good reference for some major things that have changed in the engine. You won’t need the migration steps listed for porting mods.

DDC

Unreal 5 moves to the Zen Server for it’s derived data cache. This is suitable for local mod development, but is also capable of running over a network to support larger teams.

By default Zen stores it’s cached data in your user AppData folder. See Can I move the Local DDC elsewhere if I am short on disk space? if you want to move this to a different drive.

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