Conan Exiles Enhanced (UE5) launched on May 5 2026, and the engine swap has produced a fairly predictable wave of "won't launch" reports. Most of them fall into one of three buckets and have specific fixes that Funcom and Inflexion have already published. This is the short, ordered version of what to try.
This is a client-side guide. If your dedicated server isn't booting after pulling Enhanced, that's a different thing and the Enhanced update guide has the recovery path for it. The fixes below are for the game itself failing to start on your own PC.
Bucket 1: Black screen on the loading screen
This is the most-reported launch-week issue. Symptom: you click Play, the game window opens, and you sit on a black screen indefinitely. No menu, no Funcom logo cycle.
Funcom's official workaround is to press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager, end the Conan task, then start the game again. That sounds dumb. It works often enough that Funcom called it out specifically. Try it twice before assuming it's something else.
A couple of related things worth knowing:
- Hardware close to UE5 minimum specs is the most common cause. UE5 leans harder on the GPU and on system RAM than UE4 did, so the same machine that ran Conan fine yesterday can hang at boot today. If you're on an older laptop or a low-end build and the workaround above doesn't take, it may genuinely be a spec issue and there's no software fix.
- Some players report Alt+Tab fixes it. Switching out of the game window and back in can wake the renderer. Cheap to try. If it works for you, it's the same underlying issue as the Ctrl+Shift+Esc workaround above.
Bucket 2: Crash or instant exit at startup
Symptom: the game launches, you see the Funcom splash for a second, then it closes with no error message.
Funcom's official Enhanced workarounds page gives this fix in order:
Verify integrity of game files in Steam. Right-click Conan Exiles, then Properties, Installed Files, Verify integrity. The Steam manifest checks every file and re-pulls anything that doesn't match. The UE4-to-UE5 update is a big depot swap and Steam's incremental update path occasionally leaves the install in an inconsistent state. Validating fixes that.
Rename
modlist.txt. If verifying integrity didn't resolve it, navigate to\steamapps\common\Conan Exiles\ConanSandbox\Mods\and renamemodlist.txttomodlist.txt.bak. Funcom flagged that incompatible UE4-era mods can prevent Enhanced from loading on the client, even when you're not actively playing modded. They mentioned a hotfix is coming to handle this more gracefully, so by the time you read this it may already be in.
If you've got mods you actually want to keep, the path forward is to clean out the UE4-only ones and re-subscribe to Enhanced-compatible versions. The Steam Workshop now has a Legacy / Enhanced filter on each mod's page for figuring out which is which.
Bucket 3: Missing runtime DLLs
UE5 pulls a couple of redistributable runtimes that UE4 was tolerant about. If you see a popup naming a missing DLL on launch (typically VCRUNTIME140_1.dll, MSVCP140_1.dll, or D3DCOMPILER_47.dll), install:
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x64) from
aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe. Run, accept, restart your PC. The 2022 version is what UE5 needs. Older versions of this redist won't cover it. - DirectX End-User Runtime (June 2010) from Microsoft download ID
8109. Provides the legacyD3DCOMPILER_47.dllandXINPUT_*.dllfiles that UE5 expects. Even on Windows 10/11 these aren't always present.
Both are quick installs and idempotent. Running them when they're already up to date is a no-op.
Things that don't help (and the internet will tell you they do)
- Reinstalling Conan from scratch before trying validate-integrity. Verify is faster, less destructive, and fixes the same class of problem. Save a full reinstall for after both buckets above have failed.
- Updating GPU drivers as the first move. It's worth doing eventually, but the Enhanced launch issues we've seen are not GPU-driver-shaped. If validate-integrity and the modlist rename don't fix it, sure, update drivers and try again.
- Disabling Steam overlay. Doesn't seem to be related. The black screen happens before Steam overlay would even be doing anything.
If none of that works
Funcom's Enhanced common issues thread is the live, official, updated-by-Funcom-staff source. New workarounds are added there as they're found. Worth checking before opening a ticket anywhere.
If the issue is on the server side rather than the client (your dedicated server isn't coming back up after the upgrade, players bouncing at the connection screen with "Pending Connection Failure", performance dropped through the floor), the Conan Exiles troubleshooting guide and the Enhanced update guide cover those paths. We're a server host, so that's the bit we can actually fix for you. Open a ticket from the LOW.MS Control Panel and we'll take a look.