Preparing your Conan Exiles server for the Enhanced (UE5) update on May 5

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

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

The base game is moving from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5
One server can now host both Exiled Lands and Isle of Siptah at the same time
Isle of Siptah bases will not be preserved through the upgrade
Existing mods are going to need UE5 updates from their authors before they work
The dedicated-server folder is being renamed (we handle this transparently)

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

The full Steam announcement is here if you want to read it from the source.

Key dates

May 4, 2026 – 15:00 UTC. Funcom is taking their official servers down in preparation for the migration. Private servers (yours included) are not directly affected by this downtime, but it is the deadline for any prep work below.
May 5, 2026. Conan Exiles Enhanced launches on Steam.

What we are doing on our side

A few things you do not need to worry about:

The Steam update is automatic. Once Funcom pushes Enhanced to the dedicated-server depot, Steam Update in the panel will pull it down. We will roll the new server template out alongside it so any new orders provision on UE5 by default.
The folder rename is handled. Funcom is renaming 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.

What we cannot do for you is pull saves out of UE5 and back into UE4 once your server has crossed over. Funcom's database migration is one-way, so any prep that involves "I want to keep this UE4-style" needs to happen before you click Steam Update on May 5.

What you should do before May 5

1. Take a manual backup

Go to Cloud Backup in the panel sidebar and grab one. This is independent of the automatic backups – it gives you a known-good restore point that sits before the update ever touched your server. Takes about 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) down to your machine. Standard advice from the save location guide.

2. If you run Isle of Siptah, warn your players

This is the one that is going to sting for some clans. The Isle of Siptah is being physically merged into the Exiled Lands map, which required Funcom to change the world coordinates of the island. Player progress, characters, thralls and inventories all carry across – but anything built on Siptah will not transfer.

Funcom's recommendation, and ours: get your players to dismantle their Siptah bases before May 4 and store the materials in their followers' inventories. Followers and their carried inventory are preserved through the migration; placed structures are not. After the update they can run back to Siptah (now reachable from the Exiled Lands without restart) and rebuild.

Bases on the Exiled Lands itself are unaffected.

3. Have a think about mods

Existing UE4 mods are not guaranteed to work on UE5. Funcom is shipping a refreshed Mod Dev Kit and they say "several popular mods" will be 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 will continue to work the same way – Steam Workshop is still where mods come from. The only thing that is changing is which versions of those mods are UE5-compatible.

4. If your players have Crom Coins, give them the heads-up

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 after May 5, their Crom Coin balance will not be valid on that branch and the Bazaar gets disabled there. Funcom recommends spending the balance before May 5 in that case. 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 are all migrating 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 will give the usual "pending connection failure" if they forget.

After the update lands

Assuming you are staying on Enhanced (UE5), here is the order of things on May 5 once Funcom's depot goes live:

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 will be 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 you need to roll back to your UE4 save, that is what the manual backup from earlier is for. Stop the server, Cloud Restore the backup, switch your service to the Legacy beta branch via support ticket, and you are back where you were.

On the new dual-map setup

Conan Exiles Enhanced lets a single server host both Exiled Lands and Isle of Siptah at the same time, with players free to teleport between them. We will write up the exact configuration steps once we have validated them on our end – but if you want both maps live on day one, open a ticket and we will get you set up. As before, every player connecting to the Siptah side still needs to own the Siptah DLC.

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.