Conan Exiles Enhanced (UE5) is live: what changed for your server

Funcom shipped Conan Exiles Enhanced – the free Unreal Engine 5 upgrade of the base game – on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, the game's eighth anniversary. Anyone who already owns Conan on Steam gets it at no cost. There is a real amount of stuff in this update that affects server owners, so this is the run-down on what changed, what you may need to do, and what we are handling on our side.

The server-impacting bits, in order of how much you should care:

The base game moved from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5
One server now hosts both Exiled Lands and Isle of Siptah at the same time, on a single merged map
Isle of Siptah-only private servers no longer exist – everything runs on the Exiled Lands map now
Isle of Siptah bases were not preserved through the upgrade
Existing mods need UE5 updates from their authors before they work
The dedicated-server folder has been renamed (we handle this transparently)
Disk and memory profile changed: the install dropped from 105 GB to 61 GB, but per-server RAM use is meaningfully higher under UE5

If you would rather skip the upgrade entirely, you can – Funcom is keeping the UE4 build available indefinitely on Steam as "Conan Exiles Legacy". More on that lower down.

The full launch announcement from Funcom is here and the patch notes are here.

What we are doing on our side

A few things you do not need to worry about:

The Steam update is automatic. Steam Update in the panel pulls Enhanced. We have rolled the new server template out alongside it so any new orders provision on UE5 by default.
The folder rename is handled. Funcom renamed Conan Exiles Dedicated Server to Conan Exiles Enhanced Dedicated Server on the underlying Steam install. From inside the panel – File Manager, Configuration Files, Cloud Backup – this is invisible. Your ConanSandbox/Saved/ paths do not change, so anything you have set up against those paths still works.
Cloud Backups keep running. Whatever schedule you have already got carries on. We are not pausing the backup system over the update.
Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable is being installed automatically alongside the Conan update on every service. UE5 is stricter about the runtime version than UE4 was, and we noticed during the rollout that some hosts were missing the right minor version. We are pushing the bundled redist transparently so this should not be something you ever see, but if you do hit a "Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x64) is required" error, let us know and we will sort it.

On the dual-map setup

This was the section we promised to write up properly once we had validated it on launch day. Here is the actual answer.

Conan Exiles Enhanced merged the Exiled Lands and the Isle of Siptah into one physical map. There is no longer a separate Siptah server type – every Enhanced server is an Exiled Lands server, and the Isle of Siptah is a region inside it that you and your players can travel to without restarting.

What that means for you:

You do not need to do anything to "enable" both maps. They are both available by default on every Enhanced server.
Your players still need to own the Isle of Siptah DLC on their Steam account to access the Siptah region. That has not changed.
If you were previously running an Isle of Siptah-only server, the migration is more involved – see the next section.

If you opened a ticket asking us to enable both maps for you on day one, thank you for the patience. There is nothing for us to switch on – you already have it.

If you were running an Isle of Siptah server

This is the rough one. Because there is no separate Siptah server type on Enhanced, Funcom moved Siptah-only customers via a one-way Server Transfer Tool migration. Characters, levels, follower inventories and progress carry across; bases and placed structures do not.

Funcom's recommended pre-update path was:

Spin up a fresh Exiled Lands server on UE4 (Conan Exiles Legacy)
Use the Server Transfer Tool to move your Siptah characters onto it
Upgrade that fresh Exiled Lands server to Enhanced

If you did this in advance, you should be in good shape. If you did not, your players' characters can still be transferred forward via the Server Transfer Tool, but their bases on Siptah are gone. Open a ticket and we will help walk through the recovery steps and see what we can do.

Bases on the Exiled Lands itself were unaffected.

What we have seen on launch day (and the recovery path)

Funcom's UE4-to-UE5 in-place upgrade has been bumpy. Steam's incremental update path occasionally fails to fully reconcile the old install with the new one – the install ends up internally inconsistent and the server does not start cleanly. When this happens it is silent: no log, no error, just a process that exits.

If your server is not booting after pulling Enhanced, the fix is one of:

A validating Steam update. Open a ticket and ask us to run a validate pass, or do it yourself if you have steamcmd access. This rehashes every file against the manifest and re-pulls anything inconsistent. Usually 5-10 minutes of work and clears most launch-day cases.
A clean reinstall. Full delete of the install root followed by a fresh app_update. Slower and consumes more bandwidth, but reliably gets you to a known-good state if validate is not enough.

Your ConanSandbox/Saved/ folder – which contains your game.db, configs and saved logs – is preserved through both options as long as we drive the operation through the panel.

If your players cannot connect after the update

Different symptom from the one above: your server is up, showing in the browser, the Web Console looks healthy – but players hit Pending Connection Failure when they try to join. The cause is almost always a stale UE4 build identifier left over in your Engine.ini. Clients on Enhanced refuse to connect to a server reporting a UE4-era build ID.

Inflexion (Funcom's co-developer on Enhanced) documents this fix specifically. Open ConanSandbox/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/Engine.ini (via Configuration Files in the panel sidebar, or over SFTP) and remove these two lines if they are present:

[OnlineSubsystem]
bUseBuildIdOverride=True
BuildIdOverride=460304166

Save, restart the server, and clients should connect cleanly. The lines are only meaningful if a tool or a previous configuration set them up under UE4 – removing them lets the server use the matching Enhanced build ID by default. Harmless on a fresh install where the lines never existed.

If you would rather we just did this for you, drop us a ticket and we will run the edit on your service.

What you should still do

1. Take a manual backup

Cloud Backup in the panel sidebar gives you a known-good restore point that sits before whatever you are about to do. Costs ten seconds and gives you a hard rollback option if anything weird happens.

If you would rather have the raw .db file off-server entirely, use File Manager or SFTP (port 8822) to get into ConanSandbox/Saved/ and pull game.db (Exiled Lands) and dlc_siptah.db (Siptah, if you had it) down to your machine. Standard advice from the save location guide.

2. Have a think about mods

Existing UE4 mods are not guaranteed to work on UE5. Funcom shipped a refreshed Mod Dev Kit and several popular mods are ready at launch, but anything outside that handful needs the original mod author to publish a UE5-compatible version. Realistically there will be a window of a few days to a few weeks where parts of your mod list are broken while authors catch up.

Two practical takes on this:

If your server runs a heavy mod stack and your players genuinely care about it, consider staying on UE4 Legacy for a few weeks until the catalogue catches up. Switching to Enhanced later is straightforward.
If you run vanilla or near-vanilla, the upgrade is the easy choice. Take the backup, update, done.

The Mod Manager sidebar item works the same way – Steam Workshop is still where mods come from. The only thing that changed is which versions of those mods are UE5-compatible.

3. If your players have Crom Coins

If they are staying on Steam Enhanced, balances carry over – nothing to do.

If anyone plans to switch to Conan Exiles Legacy (UE4) on Steam, their Crom Coin balance will not be valid on that branch and the Bazaar gets disabled there. Funcom recommends spending the balance before switching. This is a player-side concern, not a server-side one, but worth flagging in your Discord or community channels.

How to stay on UE4 (Conan Exiles Legacy)

You do not have to upgrade. The UE4 build remains available indefinitely on Steam as a beta branch called "Conan Exiles Legacy", and your server can sit on it for as long as you want. Worth knowing:

Conan Exiles Legacy on PC will continue to receive critical bug fixes from Funcom but no new content updates.
The Bazaar is disabled on Legacy. Crom Coins are not usable there.
Funcom's official PC servers are not available on Legacy – they all migrated to Enhanced. Your private server is unaffected by that; you decide which build it runs.

To pin your server on the Legacy branch, open a ticket from the panel and ask us to switch your service. We will handle it on our side – it is a TCAdmin update-branch flip plus a one-off pull of the UE4 build. We can leave you on it for as long as you want and switch back later if you change your mind.

Players joining your Legacy server need to opt into the same beta branch on their own Steam install: right-click Conan Exiles in their Steam library, Properties, Betas tab, pick "Conan Exiles Legacy". A game-version mismatch between client and server gives the usual "pending connection failure" if they forget.

Memory and resource use under UE5

UE5 servers use meaningfully more RAM than UE4 servers. Early reads on launch day suggest somewhere between 2x and 4x on a populated world, depending on mods and what is in active memory. The headline is that your existing Conan plan may sit closer to its memory ceiling under Enhanced than it did on Legacy.

There is one server-side tuning lever worth knowing about. Funcom shipped an Engine.ini option to prevent the Isle of Siptah region from loading on a dedicated server for memory savings. If you are running a community that has no interest in the Siptah region and you are seeing memory pressure, drop us a line and we can wire that into your server's Engine.ini.

We will keep an eye on per-service memory use over the next few days and reach out proactively if we see a service running close to its plan limits.

After the update lands

If you are upgrading to Enhanced today, here is the order of things on your end:

Stop the server. Do not update over a running instance.
Run Steam Update from the panel sidebar. This pulls the Enhanced build.
Start the server. First boot is slower than usual – the database has to be migrated to the UE5 schema in-place. Give it a few minutes and watch the Web Console.
Watch Web Console. The server logs will tell you if anything went sideways. If a mod is broken on UE5 it usually shows up immediately as a load failure.
Test from a client. Have one player connect and walk around their base before you bring everyone in.

If something goes wrong and the server does not come back up cleanly, that is the validating Steam update or the clean reinstall path described above. Open a ticket if you would rather we drove it.

If you get stuck

We have got 24/7 support and we would much rather hear from you on the day than find out a week later. Open a ticket from the LOW.MS Control Panel with what you have tried and what the Web Console says, and we will pick it up.

For anything outside this update, the existing Conan getting started, server settings and troubleshooting guides still apply – the panel and the config files are not changing, only the engine underneath.

Funcom and Inflexion's own resources

If you want to go deeper, the developers have published their own server documentation alongside Enhanced:

Server troubleshooting – Inflexion's official troubleshooting page
UE4 to UE5 migration guide – the upstream migration walk-through
Server INI settings reference – the canonical list of what every server config knob does
Linux dedicated server guide – for if you are tinkering with your own box (we host Windows-side, but the configuration concepts are shared)
Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Launcher 1.9.0 thread – release thread for Funcom's official launcher tool, where their devs respond to launch-day reports