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

Funcom shipped Conan Exiles Enhanced, the free Unreal Engine 5 upgrade of the base game, on Tuesday 5 May 2026, the game's eighth anniversary. Anyone who already owned Conan on Steam got it at no cost. There's a real amount in this update that affects server owners, so this is the run-down on what changed, what you might still need to do, and what we handle on our side. If you're new here, our Conan Exiles dedicated server hosting runs the Enhanced build by default.

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 weren't preserved through the upgrade
Existing mods need UE5 updates from their authors before they work
The dedicated-server folder was renamed (it doesn't touch your saves with us)
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'd rather skip the upgrade entirely, you can. Funcom is keeping the UE4 build available indefinitely on Steam as "Conan Exiles Legacy", and you can switch your server onto it yourself. More on that lower down.

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

What we're doing on our side

A few things you don't need to worry about:

New servers start on Enhanced. It's the default branch, so any new order installs the UE5 build without you picking anything.
Every game update is a clean install. Unreal Engine games don't take kindly to an in-place update over an older build, because Steam's file check doesn't remove files the new build no longer ships. So when you update a Conan server with us, we clear out the game files and install the current build fresh. Your world, configs and installed mods are kept through it.
The folder rename doesn't touch your saves. Funcom renamed Conan Exiles Dedicated Server to Conan Exiles Enhanced Dedicated Server on the underlying Steam install. Your server's ConanSandbox/Saved/ folder is stored outside the game files, in config/conan-saved on the Files tab, so the rename and any reinstall leave it alone.

On the dual-map setup

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

Conan Exiles Enhanced merged the Exiled Lands and the Isle of Siptah into one physical map. There's 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 don't need to do anything to "enable" both maps. They're 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 hasn't 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, thanks for the patience. There was nothing for us to switch on: you already had it.

If you were running an Isle of Siptah server

This is the rough one. Because there's 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 don't.

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 didn't, 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'll help walk through the recovery steps and see what we can do.

Bases on the Exiled Lands itself were unaffected.

What we saw on launch day (and the recovery path)

Funcom's UE4-to-UE5 in-place upgrade was bumpy. Steam's incremental update path sometimes failed to fully reconcile the old install with the new one, so the install ended up internally inconsistent and the server didn't start cleanly. When that happened it was silent: no log, no error, just a process that exited.

That's exactly why updates on our Conan servers now wipe the game files and install fresh every time. If your server still isn't booting after an update, here's the order I'd try things in:

Run the update again. On the Overview tab, the Game updates card has an Update button. Because every update is a clean install, a second run rebuilds the game files from scratch. It only runs on a server that's switched on, and the server stops and restarts by itself while it works.
Reinstall. On the Settings tab, the Reinstall card wipes and reinstalls the game files. The dialog offers to take a backup first, ticked by default, and I'd leave it ticked.

Your config/conan-saved folder, which holds your world database, your game-written settings and your logs, sits outside the game files, so both options leave it in place.

If your players can't connect after the update

Different symptom from the one above: your server's up, showing in the browser, the Console tab looks healthy, but players hit Pending Connection Failure when they try to join. On self-hosted servers the usual cause was a stale UE4 build identifier left over in 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. The lines in question are:

[OnlineSubsystem]
bUseBuildIdOverride=True
BuildIdOverride=460304166

On our servers this one mostly takes care of itself. The control panel writes Engine.ini from your options every time the server starts, and the file it writes doesn't contain these lines, so an old override can't hang around. The one way they can come back is if someone added them by hand. To check, turn on Advanced mode on the Manage tab, open Engine.ini, and look under Your additions. If the lines are there, delete them, save, and restart.

If the file's clean, the next thing I'd look at is a version mismatch: a player still on the Legacy beta joining an Enhanced server (or the other way round) gets the same error, and so does a player missing a mod your server runs.

If you'd rather we just looked at it for you, drop us a ticket.

What you should still do

1. Take a manual backup

The Backups tab takes a backup in one click. It gives you a known-good restore point that sits before whatever you're about to do, takes seconds, and gives you a hard rollback option if anything weird happens. If you'd like this to happen on a timetable, you can add a scheduled Backup task on the Settings tab.

If you'd rather have the raw .db file off-server entirely, open config/conan-saved on the Files tab, or connect over SFTP (your login is on the Overview tab, in the Connection details card under SFTP), and download the world database. On our Enhanced servers it's game_0.db; older UE4 worlds used game.db (Exiled Lands) and dlc_siptah.db (Siptah). The numbered _backup_ files beside it are the game's own rolling backups. Standard advice from the save location guide.

2. Have a think about mods

Existing UE4 mods aren't guaranteed to work on UE5. Funcom shipped a refreshed Mod Dev Kit and several popular mods were ready at launch, but anything outside that handful needed its original author to publish a UE5-compatible version. In practice, mod lists spent a stretch of days to weeks partly broken while authors caught up, and some older mods may never have made the jump.

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 until every mod you rely on has a UE5 build. 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 Mods tab works the same way on either build: Steam Workshop is still where mods come from, and you can search and install from there. The only thing that changed is which versions of those mods are UE5-compatible, so check each mod's last-updated date on the Workshop before you rely on it.

3. If your players have Crom Coins

If they're staying on Steam Enhanced, balances carry over, so there's nothing to do.

If anyone plans to switch to Conan Exiles Legacy (UE4) on Steam, their Crom Coin balance won't 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 it's worth flagging in your Discord or community channels.

How to stay on UE4 (Conan Exiles Legacy)

You don't 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 continues to get critical bug fixes from Funcom but no new content updates.
The Bazaar is disabled on Legacy. Crom Coins aren't usable there.
Funcom's official PC servers aren't available on Legacy: they all migrated to Enhanced. Your private server is unaffected by that, because you decide which build it runs.

You can switch branch yourself. On the Settings tab, the Version row has a branch dropdown: pick conan-exiles-legacy, then press Switch branch and confirm. The game files are downloaded again and the server stops and restarts. Switching back to Enhanced is the same steps with public, the default branch. Take a backup on the Backups tab before you switch either way, so you've got your world exactly as it was if the other build doesn't get on with it. If you'd rather we did it, open a ticket and we'll handle it.

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 suggested somewhere between 2x and 4x on a populated world, depending on mods and what's 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's one server-side tuning lever worth knowing about. Funcom shipped an Engine.ini option to stop a region from loading on a dedicated server, which saves memory. You don't need to edit anything for it: on the Manage tab, the Excluded Regions option lets you exclude the Isle of Siptah (or the Exiled Lands) from the merged map. It takes effect on the next restart. Players or bases already in an excluded region may be affected, so I'd only reach for it if your community genuinely has no interest in that region.

If your server's sitting close to its memory limit and you're not sure what to do about it, drop us a ticket and we'll take a look.

After the update lands

If you're moving an existing world over to Enhanced, here's the order of things on your end:

Take a backup. One click on the Backups tab.
Make sure the server's running, then press Update. It's on the Overview tab, in the Game updates card. The update won't run on a stopped server, and it stops and restarts the server by itself, so you don't need to stop it first.
Give the first boot time. It's slower than usual because the database has to be migrated to the UE5 schema in place. Give it a few minutes.
Watch the Console tab. The server output will tell you if anything went sideways. If a mod's broken on UE5 it usually shows up straight away as a load failure. The Logs tab keeps the server's log files if you want to look back further.
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 doesn't come back up cleanly, that's the re-run update or reinstall path described above. Open a ticket if you'd rather we drove it.

If you get stuck

We've got 24/7 support and we'd much rather hear from you on the day than find out a week later. Open a ticket from the control panel with what you've tried and what the Console tab says, and we'll pick it up.

For anything outside this update, the existing Conan getting started, server settings and troubleshooting guides still apply. Enhanced changed the engine underneath, not how you manage your server with us.

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're tinkering with your own box (the configuration concepts are shared with any Conan server)
Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Launcher 1.9.0 thread: the release thread for Funcom's official launcher tool, where their devs responded to launch-day reports

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