Eight years in, and Conan Exiles just got its biggest update ever. On May 5, Funcom dropped Conan Exiles Enhanced — a free Unreal Engine 5 upgrade that reworks the visuals from the ground up, merges the two main maps into one world, and packs in a list of quality-of-life changes long enough to make returning players do a double take.
It is out now. The numbers are in. A hotfix already dropped. And Funcom quietly walked back their console stance after the internet made its feelings clear.
Here is where everything stands.
The Game That Refused to Die
Conan Exiles launched on May 8, 2018. You crashed into a harsh, cursed desert with nothing and a simple premise: survive, build, dominate. No quest markers, no hand-holding. Just the brutal world of Conan the Barbarian doing its best to kill you.
It found its audience fast. Over 15 million players have come through the Exiled Lands since launch.
The Isle of Siptah expansion arrived in 2020 with a separate map, new biomes, and a different starting experience. The catch: you picked one at character creation. Exiled Lands or Isle of Siptah. The community asked for years when that would change.
May 5 is when it changed.
What Conan Exiles Enhanced Actually Is
Enhanced is a free update built with Inflexion Games, the studio behind Nightingale. The whole game moved from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 — new materials, new shaders, new rendering tech. Target is 60+ FPS across Low through Ultra on most PCs. Steam Deck support is in from day one.
The visual difference is real. The same desert that has been in the game for eight years looks different now. Lumen handles global illumination, so torches actually bounce off cave walls, sunlight cuts through jungle canopy properly, and firelight moves across armor as it should. Nanite manages the geometry, letting Funcom push higher-detail assets without the usual performance hit.
DLSS 4.5, FSR 3, and XeSS are all supported. Frame generation is on the table if your GPU supports it.
Funcom CCO Joel Bylos was direct about it: they could have sold this as a paid Enhanced Edition. Other studios have. They did not. He called it an anniversary gift. The update is free for every owner of Conan Exiles on Steam.The game is also now listed on Steam as Conan Exiles Enhanced, not just Conan Exiles. That is a small thing that signals how Funcom sees this — not a patch, a relaunch.
The Merged Maps Are the Actual Big Deal
For the first time, players who own the Isle of Siptah DLC can access both regions with one character, in one session. No character selection screen forces you to pick a side. You teleport between them freely. Multiplayer servers now host both maps at the same time.
Two new Journey steps landed with this: “Travel to the Isle of Siptah” and “Travel to the Exiled Lands.” It is a small touch, but it shows the team actually thought through how the merge changes the flow of a normal playthrough.
Worth being clear: Siptah still requires owning the DLC. The merge does not make the expansion free. If you only have the base game, you stay in the Exiled Lands. If you own Siptah, you can move between both.
One thing that did not survive the merge: bases built on Isle of Siptah servers. The island’s physical coordinates had to change to fit the merge, which made preserving Siptah structures technically impossible. Funcom gave players a transfer window and a character migration tool, but the bases are gone. Anyone who did not prep before May 4 at 15:00 UTC lost their structures.
What Else Changed
The engine and the map merge headline everything, but the patch is long.
Crafting from nearby storage is in. You can now craft, build, repair, and dye directly from your own inventory, follower inventories, active Thralls on stations, and any nearby clan-owned chests or crafting stations. The game pulls ingredients automatically. It excludes fuel items and display racks, and the build-from-storage radius is restricted on PVP servers with building damage enabled, which makes sense, since remote-repairing a wall mid-raid from the next room should not be possible.
Multiple characters per account in single-player, finally. No more overwriting a save to start fresh.
The UI got rebuilt. Compass on the HUD by default. Numerical values on health, stamina, and status bars. T4 NPCs are marked on their health gauges so you can spot them in a crowd. Buffs moved near the hotbar.
Legendary chests now survive until you have looted everything out of them. Previously, they could despawn before you were done. That is fixed.
Sandstorms no longer appear inside dungeons, and diving through water prevents sandstorm damage. Neither of these was intentional behavior.
Stack sizes doubled across a range of items. Scout Reports and Sorcerous Spell Pages went from 1 to 10 per stack. Workbench inventory sizes were rounded to multiples of 6 for cleaner organization.
Fatalities grant experience now. Before this patch, executions were purely cosmetic in terms of progression.
The Journey system was reworked so that the next step in any inactive journey progresses in the background if you meet the conditions, not just the one you have active.
Water runs on the FluidFlux simulation. Every body of water in the game was rebuilt for UE5. The ocean moves like water now, not like a water-colored floor.
Foliage has new models, wind animations, and reacts when you move through it or harvest it. Mining rocks now kicks up a burst of dust and debris. Picking up stones causes a small puff. It sounds trivial until you are standing in the desert watching the world react around you.
Player torches now cast shadows. That sentence does a lot in cave areas.
The install size dropped from 105GB to 61GB. Better compression, better asset optimization.
Linux dedicated server support is now official.
Single-player offline mode works without an internet connection. Base game and DLC content are available offline; the Bazaar still needs a connection.If you want to see the full patch note, you can visit this link to see it and read it yourself.
The Console Situation (It Got Messier After Launch)
Enhanced is Steam PC only. Xbox, PlayStation, Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft Store did not get it on May 5.
When the update launched, Funcom’s original position was blunt: no plans for console. That lasted about a day before the backlash came in. In a post-launch memo, Community Manager Dana wrote that Funcom is “listening to your feedback” and acknowledged that migrating from UE4 to UE5 was “the biggest technical undertaking in the game’s eight-year history.” The wording shifted from “no plans” to something closer to “we want to, it’s just hard.”
That is not a commitment. Console players are still on UE4, still getting critical bug fixes only, and still waiting on a timeline that does not exist yet. The Bazaar works on console. Crom Coins do not work on the PC Legacy build. Official PC servers all moved to Enhanced and are no longer accessible from the UE4 version on Steam.
If you are on console, the honest summary is: Funcom heard you, and they have not told you when anything changes.
What Actually Happened
The numbers came in fast.
Steam concurrency peaked at nearly 27,000 players on launch night — almost triple the April peak. The game has not seen concurrent player counts that high since September 2022, when Age of Sorcery launched alongside its battle pass system. Daily active player estimates hit 415,541 on May 7. The player base is up around 355% compared to 30 days ago.
Steam reviews for the last 30 days sit at 77% positive across 1,050 reviews. The all-time rating is 79% positive across nearly 38,000 reviews. Both are “Mostly Positive.” That is not a perfect launch, but it is a solid one.
A hotfix landed on May 6 — one day after release. It fixed an intermittent server crash and a mod loading issue. The mod ecosystem is the main thing people are watching right now. Funcom shipped a refreshed Mod Dev Kit and confirmed several popular mods were ready at launch, but the UE5 transition always costs the community some adaptation time. Some mods are updated. Some are in progress. A few may not come back.
Server RAM requirements went up with the new engine. Early testing from hosting providers puts the increase at roughly 15–25% over UE4 under similar player loads. If you run a dedicated server on tight hardware, that is worth knowing before you update.
The reaction from returning players has been mostly positive. The visual upgrade is the thing people are talking about most — specifically the lighting in underground areas and the way the ocean looks now. The merged maps landed well for anyone who owns Siptah. Being able to teleport between zones without committing to one changes how sessions feel in a way that is hard to describe until you try it.
Should You Jump In?
If you played years ago and stopped, this is a reasonable moment to come back. The core loop has not changed — you still spawn with nothing, punch trees, build something, and slowly carve out a life in a world that does not want you there. What is different is that the technical foundation around that loop finally matches the ambition of what the game was always going for.
If you are new, you are getting the best version of Conan Exiles that has ever shipped, with eight years of content sitting behind it.
If you are on console, nothing changed for you on May 5. Watch the news. Funcom’s tone softened after launch, but softened is not the same as scheduled.
If you are a mod-heavy player, give the ecosystem a few weeks to settle. Most major mods will come back. Some are already back. The first week after a UE5 transition is always a bit rough for the modding layer.
Summary
Conan Exiles Enhanced launched on May 5, 2026, free on Steam for all owners. A hotfix followed on May 6, fixing a server crash and a mod loading issue.
The full game moved from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. Lumen, Nanite, DLSS 4.5, FSR 3, and XeSS are in. The game targets 60+ FPS across all quality settings on most PCs. Steam Deck is supported. The install size dropped from 105GB to 61GB.
The Exiled Lands and Isle of Siptah are now one merged world. Players with the Siptah DLC can teleport between both maps freely with one character. Multiplayer servers host both regions at the same time. Siptah bases did not survive the merge.
Major additions: crafting from nearby storage and follower inventories, multiple single-player characters per account, a full UI rebuild with compass and numerical stat values, FluidFlux water simulation, reactive foliage, player torch shadows, offline single-player mode, and official Linux dedicated server support.
Notable fixes: legendary chests surviving until looted, sandstorms removed from dungeons, fatalities granting experience, stack sizes doubled across many items, and Thrall’s pathfinding improved throughout.
Console players remain on UE4. Funcom shifted from “no plans” to “we’re listening” after launch-day pushback. No timeline exists yet.
Steam concurrency nearly tripled on launch night. The game has not been this active since 2022.
Eight years old, and it just got a new engine.
Happy surviving!
