Conan Exiles Enhanced mods: what works, what's broken, and how to tell which is which

Conan Exiles Enhanced (UE5) shipped on May 5 2026, and the engine swap broke the mod catalogue overnight. That sounds dramatic and in a sense it is, but it's also the entirely predictable consequence of an engine version change, and the same thing happens every time a UE-based game makes a major engine jump. The good news is the path forward is well-understood. The less good news is the timeline.

This post is a working snapshot of where the Conan mod scene actually is the week after launch, what's working, what's not, how to figure out which is which without trial and error, and a realistic answer for "when does my favourite mod come back". I'm being deliberately careful not to publish a "definitive list" of compatible mods, because that list changes daily and any list you see in a blog post is out of date by the time it's indexed. Instead, this is the methodology, plus a few specific mods I can speak to with confidence.

Why mods broke at launch in the first place

UE4-compiled mod paks don't load in a UE5 game binary. It's not a configuration issue, it's an engine fundamental. Every mod author needs to rebuild their mod against the refreshed Conan Exiles Mod Dev Kit Funcom shipped alongside Enhanced, and re-publish the new pak to Steam Workshop.

For an actively-maintained mod, that's a few hours of the author's time at most: open the new Dev Kit, fix any deprecated API calls, recompile, upload. For an abandoned mod or one whose author moved on years ago, it's never. Hosav's Custom UI Mod and Stacksize Plus, for example, have both been flagged incompatible on Workshop for some time and the Enhanced launch is unlikely to revive them.

The launch-day baseline

Funcom partnered with several popular mod authors to ensure their mods were ready on day one. The actual list shifts as more authors ship updates, but as a general rule the most active, most subscribed-to mods got priority Dev Kit access and were ready or near-ready at launch. Pippi, the de-facto admin tool every Conan server uses, is the kind of mod you'd expect in this group.

For everyone else, the rough hierarchy I'd expect to play out:

1. Within the first week: the most-subscribed mods that are still actively maintained will ship Enhanced builds. Author has motivation, Dev Kit is fresh, the work is already done in the Funcom partnership pre-launch.
2. Within the first month: the second tier of popular-but-smaller mods catches up. Authors who are paying attention but didn't get partnership access have time to do their own builds.
3. Within three months: most of what was going to come back has come back. Whatever's still on UE4-only after that has probably stalled.
4. Beyond three months: anything that hasn't shipped an Enhanced build by then is functionally abandoned. The author either lost interest, hasn't realised, or is dealing with something else. Those mods are not coming back.

Custom maps are the slowest of the lot because they touch the most engine internals. Savage Wilds and other community map mods will take longer than the QoL stack to be back.

How to actually check if a specific mod works

The reliable way is the Steam Workshop page itself:

1. Open the mod's Workshop page.
2. Look at the "Last updated" date in the right-hand sidebar. Anything updated on or after early May 2026 is Enhanced-ready. Anything older than that is at best uncertain, more likely UE4-only.
3. Look at the version tag. Funcom added a Legacy / Enhanced filter to Workshop pages, which makes this explicit. If the page shows an Enhanced badge, you're fine.
4. Read the most recent comments. If players are reporting "doesn't load on Enhanced", believe them.

Sorting your existing Workshop subscriptions by "Last updated" descending in the Steam client is the fastest way to triage a stack of mods. Anything dated post-May-5 is good, anything older is suspect.

Specific mods I can speak to

Within the constraints of this post not being a definitive list (it's already going to age), a few specific notes that should hold:

• Pippi. Active maintenance for years, partnership-tier. Expect this to be among the first wave back, if it isn't already. Server admins should not panic.
• Fashionist. Testerle has been quietly recompiling against new Conan builds for years. Will almost certainly come back.
• Age of Calamitous and EEWA. Big content overhauls with active communities. Expect them within the first month.
• Hosav's Custom UI Mod and Stacksize Plus. Already flagged incompatible pre-Enhanced. The launch doesn't change their trajectory, they're not coming back unless someone else picks them up.
• Savage Wilds and other custom maps. Slowest tier. Expect a longer wait than the QoL mods.

I'm deliberately not naming specific "this mod is currently Enhanced-compatible" calls because that information is stale within a day. Check the Workshop page yourself for any specific mod, the "Last updated" date is the answer.

What server admins should do during the transition

A few practical bits, especially for the next few weeks:

• Run a leaner mod list than usual. Anything that doesn't ship an Enhanced build is dead weight on your server until it does. Trim aggressively, add things back as their updates land.
• Don't rename mod pak files. Inflexion's server troubleshooting page flags this specifically. A renamed pak silently fails to load on Enhanced even when modlist.txt looks correct. Keep filenames as Workshop ships them.
• Bundle your active mods into a Steam Workshop Collection. This was always good advice. It's especially important now, when the cost of a player having one out-of-date mod is that they can't connect at all.
• If your mod stack is genuinely stuck, consider Legacy. Pinning your server to the Conan Exiles Legacy (UE4) Steam beta branch means every mod you had still works. The trade-off is no new content updates and no Bazaar. Our Legacy KB walks through how to flip your service.

What players should do

If you're playing rather than hosting, the same logic applies to your own subscriptions:

• Sort your Workshop subs by "Last updated" descending and unsubscribe from anything UE4-era that's known to be dead (CharEditLite, Hosav's UI, Stacksize Plus).
• Re-subscribe selectively as Enhanced builds appear.
• If your server admin pinned the server to Legacy, opt your Steam install into the same beta branch (right-click Conan Exiles, Properties, Betas, pick conan-exiles-legacy).

The next-step read for that flow is the black screen / won't launch guide, which covers the modlist-related crash bucket Funcom called out as a known issue.

TL;DR

The mod scene is mid-rebuild. Most of what you cared about is coming back, big mods first, custom maps last. Check the Steam Workshop "Last updated" date for anything specific. Run a leaner stack than usual for the next few weeks while authors catch up, and if your stack genuinely doesn't work without one specific mod that's stalled, Conan Exiles Legacy is the off-ramp.

Our existing top mods post is the canonical list of which mods are worth running once the catalogue settles. Pin it for re-checking in a month.