The core blueprints that come with the devkit should ALWAYS be your point of reference to come back to when something breaks, we shouldn’t be editing them for making Total Conversions (or editing them period).
A good way to make this possible would be to have a new TotalConversion folder in the devkit folder structure similar to the Mods folder. When cooking a TotalConversion, the cook process would ONLY look in this folder for files, rather than having to search the entire Content folder, or maintain a manifest of changed files. To include files for a total conversion, the blueprints would have to be added in a directory structure that mirrored the ‘Game’ directory within the devkit, like this for example:
Game\TotalConversion\PrimalEarth\CoreBlueprints\PlayerPawnTest
Game\TotalConversion\Maps\TheIslandSubMaps\C5_Far_WIP
Game\TotalConversion\PrimalEarth\Dinos\Mammoth\Mammoth_Character_BP
The process of adding blueprints to the TotalConversion could be alleviated by a right click interaction on a blueprint like “Add to Total Conversion” which would copy the blueprint to the TotalConversion directory, along with the required directory structure.
This method for storing total conversion files would save incredible amounts of time when an update comes out, as currently when an update comes out it overwrites all total conversion files and punts them to a backup folder. We then have to grab everything from that backup folder, and figure out which blueprints have been updated with new values and if there are fixes in those blueprints we then have to backport them to our modified TC files. When I did that for applying the 201.5 content to my total conversion I had about 433ish blueprints to deal with. It would also make it a LOT easier for people to work on multiple total conversion projects at a time. As of right now, unless a person keeps VERY good track/record of which files they modify for a TC, or are using a VCS, they have to essentially swap around and keep backups of the entire content folder. With my proposed method, you would only have to swap out the TotalConversion folder, rather than 30+ gigabytes worth of data.
If this isn’t feasible, then it would at least be nice to be able to specify in the cook process if we want the compiler to automatically poke around and find modified blueprints, or to accept a list of folders to check modified content, not bothering with other folders unless referenced by the BPs in the included folder list.